Designing things well can often be a tricky task, so to help make things easier for you, here are 10 things that graphic designers get stuck with and 10 books that can help. Focusing a little closer, Matthew takes a good look at what he's learned so far about line icon design and it seems that the old adage of "less is more" has never been truer, and has a free continuous line icon pack. Looking closer still Joshua takes a detailed look at Square’s email receipt and feedback flow. 
Continue reading %On Our Radar This Week: 2014 review and 2015 resolutions%
JavaScript will be 20 years old next year (counting from when it first debuted in the Netscape browser). It's a language with a chequered history and carries a lot of baggage from its early years, but as it leaves its teenage years behind it, I think it's a language that has now finally grown up.
JavaScript revolutionized the web by allowing scripts to run in a browser. But after its initial popularity it soon started to get a bad reputation and was often associated with poorly written, cut-and-pasted code that was used to create annoying pop-ups and cheesy 'effects'. The phrase DHTML became a dirty word in web development. JavaScript also had some annoying shortcomings as a programming language.
But, despite all of its problems, JavaScript has something that other languages don't have - reach and ubiquity. It only requires a browser to run, which means that anybody with a computer or smartphone is capable of running a JavaScript application. JavaScript has achieved the dream that Java had of being available on all platforms by using the browser as its virtual machine. And it can now run without a browser thanks to the development of engines such as Node.js.
JavaScript also has a low barrier to entry when it comes to development; since all you need to write a program is a simple text editor. It is the most popular language on GitHub by a number of measures. This means that there is a lot of JavaScript code out there and many problems have already been solved, often in many different ways. It also means that help is often easy to come by and libraries of code are very well tested.
After an awkward first decade, JavaScript spent its teenage years growing up. The revolution started with the advent of Ajax, when people started to sit up and take JavaScript seriously. jQuery then got people using JavaScript to build some serious applications and Node has taken it all to a whole new level. People have started to recognize that JavaScript is a powerful and flexible language with some cool features such as:
Continue reading %JavaScript Comes of Age%
PHP has had many reputations over the years, but being insecure as a language never really was one of them.
The core team, all its faults notwithstanding, is rather quick in pouncing on all security matters, and updating PHP to the latest version will often allay all worries. But the end users, such as we are, tend to mess things up. We don’t update, we use outdated packages or packages with holes in them we’re not aware of, we use ancient extensions… we expose ourselves to risk in some truly creative ways.
Let’s start 2015 off right, shall we? This post will list important resources you should have in your brain/toolbelt before building anything with PHP in 2015. I’ll do my best to keep this post up to date, so it stays relevant indefinitely, but, like I said, I’ll need your help.
When I wrote about the cancer that is legacy code, I focused on application code. I still firmly believe that you should never develop for the lowest common denominator, else you risk becoming the very thing that’s holding your language’s progress back. That’s not the focus of this section, though. Recently, a new version related discussion ensued.
Continue reading %PHP Tips, Resources and Best Practices for 2015%
A tutorial about creating rotating menu on right click using CSS3 transitions and jQuery.
