Posts Tagged ‘Tools’

Making an application work offline can be a daunting task. In this article, Matthew Andrews, a lead developer behind FT Labs, shares a few insights he had learned along the way while building the FT application. Matthew will also be running a "Making It Work Offline" workshop at our upcoming Smashing Conference in Freiburg in mid-September 2014. – Ed.

We’re going to make a simple offline-first to-do application with HTML5 technology. Here is what the app will do: Store data offline and load without an Internet connection, allow the user to add and delete items in the to-do list, store all data locally, with no back end, and run on the first- and second-most recent versions of all major desktop and mobile browsers. The complete project is ready for forking on GitHub.

Today, WordPress has released the first release candidate (RC) for the upcoming 4.0 version. According to the official version numbering, WordPress 4.0 is no more or less significant than 3.9 was or 4.1 will be. That being said, a new major release is always a cause for excitement! Let's take a look at the new features the team at WordPress has been working on for us.

Since I've always used WordPress in English, it took me a while to realize how important internationalization is. 29% of all WordPress.com installations use a non-English language which is huge and not that far from a quarter of all installations. Version 4.0 makes it much easier to get WordPress to speak your language. In fact, the first installation screen asks you to choose your native tongue. Nice!

Since first hearing of spaced repetition a few years back, I’ve used it for a wide range of things, from learning people’s names to memorizing poetry to increasing my retention of books. Today, I’ll share best practices that I’ve discovered from using spaced repetition to learn and master a programming language.

A few months ago, I ran an experiment to see how much faster I could make one of my websites in less than two hours of work. After installing a handful of WordPress plugins and fixing a few simple errors, I had improved the website’s loading speed from 1.61 seconds to 583 milliseconds. That’s a 70.39% improvement, without having made any visual changes to the website.

According to a 2009 Akamai study, 47% of visitors expect a page to load in under 2 seconds, and 57% of visitors will abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Since this study, no shortage of case studies have confirmed that loading time affects sales.

From a motion design perspective, Facebook.com is phenomenally static. It's purposefully dumbed down for the broadest levels of compatibility and user comfort. Facebook’s iOS apps, on the other hand, are fluid. They prioritize the design of motion; they feel like living, breathing apps.

This article serves to demonstrate that this dichotomy does not need to exist; websites can benefit from the same level of interactive and performant motion design found on mobile apps. Before diving into examples, let's first address why motion design is so beneficial.

Optimizing your website assets and testing your design across different browsers is certainly not the most fun part of the design process. Luckily, it consists of repetitive tasks that can be automated with the right tools to improve your efficiency.

Gulp is a build system that can improve how you develop websites by automating common tasks, such as compiling preprocessed CSS, minifying JavaScript and reloading the browser. In this article, we’ll see how you can use Gulp to change your development workflow, making it faster and more efficient.

I hope that by now, in 2014, there is no need to explain why SVG is a blessing to developers who want to ensure that their graphics look sharp on all devices, especially with their huge diversity of resolutions.

But just like any other technology, SVG has its limitations. And in this article, we’ll talk about how to bypass some of them. Well, what’s the problem? Why would you even need to generate SVG on the server? The technology is entirely client-side, so what would motivate anyone to move it from there?

To prepare for a talk about the changing roles of designers and developers, given at HOW Interactive a few months back, I interviewed 20+ web shops. Validated by my own experience, I found that many of them faced challenges fitting responsive design into their workflow, and the role of most web designers had changed to include coding in some form or another.

At least half of the designers knew HTML and CSS well but wanted a more visual way to get at it. Well, a new generation of visual responsive design tools has arrived. These responsive design tools are for anyone who understands HTML and CSS (or is willing to learn) and wants to visually design a responsive website — and have code to show for it.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: the best writers, be it your favorite authors or those that write for Smashing Magazine, don’t do it alone. Often, they work with an editor (or two), who will help them coalesce their words into something more compelling or easier to understand.

Having worked with several editors — and having been a technical editor myself — I’ve really come to appreciate this aspect of the writing process. Refinement is an essential aspect of any creative process. As refactoring code can make a program more logical and efficient, editing a text can allow an underlying idea to be more clearly stated, or make a piece more enjoyable to read.

People of the world, strap yourself in and hold on tight, for you are about to experience truly hair-raising excitement as you get to grips with the intricacies of the hugely interesting CSS timing function!

OK, so the subject matter of this article probably hasn’t sent your blood racing, but all jokes aside, the timing function is a bit of a hidden gem when it comes to CSS animation, and you could well be surprised by just how much you can do with it.

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Fixing RWD issues can be quite easy — once you understand exactly why they come up. The Mobile Web Handbook will help you understand technical issues on mobile and how to deal with them effectively.

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