Fun interactive One Pager where you have to try guess if a name belongs to a digital agency or an adult film title. Read more about the launch with stats here.
by Rob Hope via One Page Love
Monday, September 28, 2015
The 4 Biggest Content Marketing Trends Of 2015 - #infographic
"Forget trying to keep up with all the changes that occurred in Internet marketing this past year. It would take you until this time next year just to list them. So instead of taking up a lot of unnecessary and valuable time, the latest infographic from MDG Advertising quickly details the content marketing trends you most need to know about."
by Irfan Ahmad via Digital Information World
Web Design Weekly #205
Headlines
Ad Blocking and the Future of the Web
So much “#HotDrama” around this topic over that last couple of weeks. Jeffrey Zeldman sums things up quite well but if you are looking for more then Sam Snelling’s and Seth Godin’s articles are also worth reading. (zeldman.com)
NGINX Open Source 1.9.5 Released with HTTP/2 Support (nginx.com)
Reissue of the 1975 NASA Graphics Standards Manual, now on Kickstarter
The NASA Graphics Standards Manual reissue is available on Kickstarter. Designed by Richard Danne and Bruce Blackburn in 1974, and rescinded by NASA in 1992, the reissue celebrates Danne & Blackburn’s work, 23 years after it was lost. The Kickstarter will run until Oct 5. Books start at $79. (kickstarter.com)
Articles
Mobile Navigation For Smashing Magazine – Case Study
Marco Hengstenberg looks at the evolution of Smashing Magazines navigation over the years in detail. (smashingmagazine.com)
How to display threaded discussions on the web
Rian Van Der Merwe has some really interesting research on threaded discussions and comments. An often neglected component from a design and development point of view that is extremely important on large sites like Hacker News and Reddit. (elezea.com)
Back to the :roots
An article that looks into a few ways of how you can make the CSS cascade be your friend and hopefully reduce the pain in fighting the specificity game when your write your CSS. (simurai.com)
Styling & Customizing File Inputs the Smart Way
A tutorial on how to style and customise <input type=”file”> in a semantic, accessible way using the <label> element and some JavaScript. (tympanus.net)
Evaluating Ideas
Eileen Webb explains how she uses a framework during feature requirement meetings so all new ideas are evaluated in a relatively emotion-free setting making it easier to decide which solutions are the best ones to pursue. (alistapart.com)
Creating Cel Animations With SVG
Heydon Pickering explains how you can animate various parts of an SVG and animate them separately to create a GIF like effect. (smashingmagazine.com)
Deprecating Powerful Features on Insecure Origins (google.com)
Use Cases For CSS Calc(vincentp.me)
Tools / Resources
Stylesheets
A nice new site that is a community-generated collection of some handy CSS resources. (stylesheets.co)
Mastering the filesystem in Node.js
Yoshua Wuyts shares some insightful tips and tricks to become at one with the Node.js filesystem. (medium.com)
CSS for Software Engineers for CSS Developers
A little bit of a tongue twister of a title but this slide deck from Harry Roberts has some really great takeaways to help explain and write better CSS. (speakerdeck.com)
Write SVG
A PostCSS plugin created by Jonathan Neal to write SVGs directly in CSS. (github.com)
A comprehensive list of what forces layout/reflow by Paul Irish (github.com)
A list of creative exercises for creative teams (medium.com)
Flexbox Cheatsheet Cheatsheet (jonibologna.com)
Classroom for GitHub (github.com)
Inspiration
Design at Facebook
Amandah Wood and Matt Quinn stepped into the Facebook design world for a day and have created a beautiful story that looks at the challenges they face on a day-to-day basis. (wayswework.io)
How we lost (and found) millions by not A/B testing (signalvnoise.com)
Jobs
Product Design Director at Xero
This role leads the product design team that works on the heart of Xero, the small business accounting software. You’ll be involved in everything from product strategy and research to improving the user experience and design patterns of Xero. (xero.com)
Marketing Web Designer at GitHub
Marketing at GitHub has a history of delighting its audience. We appreciate complex topics made friendly, and favor value over fluff. We don’t just want to create customers, we want to rally fans. We’re looking for a talented front-end designer ready to hit the ground running to support GitHub’s creative team. (github.com)
Need to find passionate developers? Why not advertise in the next newsletter
Last but not least…
The Link That Can Crash Chrome: http://a/%%30%30 (youtube.com)
The Strange Appeal of Watching Coders Code (medium.com)
The post Web Design Weekly #205 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.
by Jake Bresnehan via Web Design Weekly
Six Simple Mind Tricks to Help You Learn JavaScript Faster
When people try to learn JavaScript, or any coding skill really, they often run into the same challenges:
- Some concepts can be confusing, especially if you’re coming from another language.
- It’s hard to find the time (and sometimes the motivation) to learn.
- Once you’ve understood something, it’s all too easy to forget it again.
- The tooling landscape is so vast and constantly changing that it’s difficult to know where to begin.
Fortunately, these challenges can be recognized and ultimately conquered. In this article, I’m going to present six mind tricks which will help you learn JavaScript faster and become a happier, more productive coder.
1. Don’t Let Future Decisions Stop You from Progressing Now
For many people learning JavaScript, one of the first questions they ask is which framework to use (and let’s be fair, there’s a lot). But if you haven’t gotten comfortable with raw JavaScript, this is the wrong question to be asking. You’ll spend all of your time researching different frameworks and none of your time actually moving forwards.
One way to help get out of the indecision trap is to have a road map for what you need to learn. For example, to become a front-end developer, your road map might look like this:
Breaking it down further, you can make a functional web page with just HTML and CSS. Seeing the individual steps laid out like this, it becomes easier to see what to focus on now so you don’t waste time worrying about things that should come later.
For those who would find it helpful, I’ve written a more detailed learning road map for becoming a front-end developer.
2. Don’t Let Confidence Trick You into Forgetting Things
Understanding a concept quickly can be one of the most damaging things to your progress in learning JavaScript. Allow me to explain.
When you read something and it makes sense, it can be tempting to move on to the next thing immediately. Maybe you’ll understand the next thing and then move on again. But soon, you’ll arrive at a point where you realize you’ve forgotten some of the previous things you’ve learned, so you need to go back. You give the previous concepts a quick glance to refresh your memory and then move on again. But now you’ve forgotten something else. You keep repeating this back-and-forth dance until you get to a point where you realize you’re completely lost. You get discouraged, take a break, and then when you try to come back, you’ve forgotten everything.
Fortunately there’s a simple two-step cure for this problem:
- Limit the amount of stuff you learn at one time.
- Practice for real — actually write code.
When you learn a new concept, make sure to try it out, play with it, get comfortable with it, and even combine it with other concepts. It’s so important to actually type out the code in any examples you are following, because that’s what helps you absorb it. Also, limiting the amount you learn at one time will help you retain the material, for the simple reason that it’s easier to remember fewer things.
This process feels like it takes longer than just reading through things and moving quickly, but it actually takes much less time because you won’t need to backtrack as much. I learned this the hard way on several occasions.
Continue reading %Six Simple Mind Tricks to Help You Learn JavaScript Faster%
by Yaphi Berhanu via SitePoint
XRegExp – Extended JavaScript Regular Expression Library
XRegExp provides augmented (and extensible) JavaScript regular expressions. You get new modern syntax and flags beyond what browsers support natively.
by via jQuery-Plugins.net RSS Feed
Easy Editorial Workflows with the WordPress EditFlow Plugin
As an editor, I have to collaborate with different writers. For example, sending them comments, feedback and changing the status of articles. Email is a very powerful tool most of us use multiple times per day for exchanging messages and collaboration. However, using email for editing and publishing tasks can be a quite painful, especially when you also have a team of writers.
There should be an alternative to the email way in handling such tasks. Since we are talking WordPress here, I will introduce you to a wonderful plugin that can solve these issues called EditFlow, and share with you how I use it to manage my team of writers.
What Is EditFlow Anyway?
EditFlow is a plugin which enables you to collaborate with your editorial team within the WordPress dashboard. You can for instance assign them tasks, add them to groups and exchange comments. EditFlow comes with many different features, which you can find more information about, here.
Continue reading %Easy Editorial Workflows with the WordPress EditFlow Plugin%
by A. Hasan via SitePoint
What Developers Need to Know about the Pebble Time Round
Back in March, Pebble released news of the Pebble Time and I put together a summary of what that meant for Pebble developers. Last week, they released their latest big news - the Pebble Time Round. Here's what Pebble developers and tinkerers need to know about the new device.
The Form Factor
The new Pebble Time Round is not only round but super thin and light too. It has the same CPU, maximum resource size, number of colors supported, sensors, microphone and smart accessory port as the Pebble Time. The only difference is that the screen resolution is now 180x180 pixels and is (of course) round.
The circular shape actually allows for a slightly larger watchface:
One downside of the reduced size is a reduction in battery life. The Pebble Time Round has a two day battery life and instead focuses on super fast charging - 15 minutes of charging brings a day of battery life.
Sadly, it is also not quite as water resistant either. It can withstand rain and showers but swimming with a Pebble Time Round won't end well.
The Round Platform Is Called "Chalk"
The previous two platforms were "Aplite" and "Basalt". "Aplite" is the original Pebble platform and "Basalt" is one for the Pebble Time. Developing for the round format requires a third platform type called "Chalk".
An Emulator is Available
CloudPebble already has an emulator ready and waiting for you to experiment with the "Chalk" platform. You can head over right now and try out any of your existing apps to see how they'll look.
You Need To Calculate Coordinates At Runtime
This is the most important tip I found whilst researching on the new changes. Avoid setting and using constant values like SCREEN_WIDTH and SCREEN_HEIGHT - these will be different for different versions of the device! You can inspect the size of your app's window root layer at runtime:
[code language="c"]
Layer *window_layer = window_get_root_layer(s_window);
GRect bounds = layer_get_bounds(window_layer);
[/code]
Avoid this:
[code language="c"]
Layer *layer = layer_create(GRect(0, 0, 144, 168));
[/code]
Instead, do this:
[code language="c"]
GRect bounds = layer_get_bounds(parent_layer);
Layer *layer = layer_create(bounds);
[/code]
One of the main things that prevents existing apps from working on the new device is hardcoded values like this, so if you are porting across an existing app - check for hardcoded screen sizes first and take those away.
Drawing Circles Is Easy
Turns out, when you've got a round watchface, you end up drawing a lot more circular shapes. The Pebble SDK now has some new functions to help with managing a circular interface.
Drawing a Circular Line
graphics_draw_arc() - Draws a line clockwise in an arc shape between two angles in a specific GRect area. This function is better suited to centering circles correctly in the app than the older graphics_draw_circle(). That function makes it hard to center your circle between half-pixels. The new function makes this much easier.
Here is an example of what this would look like in code:
[code language="c"]
graphics_draw_arc(ctx, inset_bounds, GOvalScaleModeFillCircle, start_angle, end_angle);
[/code]
Drawing a Filled Circle
graphics_fill_radial() - Fills a circle clockwise between two angles. You can adjust its inner inset radius to create donut shapes too. This is favorable to the older graphics_fill_circle() for similar reasons to the arc function above but also because of the ability to draw donut style shapes.
Here is an example of this in action from Pebble's Time Dots" example:
[code language="c"]
int minute_angle = get_angle_for_minute(s_minutes);
GRect frame = grect_inset(bounds, GEdgeInsets(10));
graphics_context_set_fill_color(ctx, MINUTES_COLOR);
graphics_fill_radial(ctx, frame, GOvalScaleModeFitCircle, 20, 0, DEG_TO_TRIGANGLE(minute_angle));
[/code]
You can see this in action in the app here:
Placing Elements Around a Circle
gpoint_from_polar() - Returns a GPoint within a specified angle inside a GRect. Basically, provides a single point on a circle rather than a full circle. Great for placing elements an equal distance around a center point. For example, this is how the series of dots representing 12 hours are included in the "Time Dots" example above:
[code language="c"]
for (int i = 0; i < 12; i++) {
int hour_angle = get_angle_for_hour(i);
GPoint pos = gpoint_from_polar(frame, GOvalScaleModeFitCircle, DEG_TO_TRIGANGLE(hour_angle));
graphics_context_set_fill_color(ctx, i <= s_hours ? HOURS_COLOR : HOURS_COLOR_INACTIVE);
graphics_fill_circle(ctx, pos, HOURS_RADIUS);
}
[/code]
Pretty handy!
Enhance Your UI For Each Platform
Just because there's a round design does not mean all of your Pebble app designs should be circular from this point on. It may actually be more beneficial to adapt and adjust your design for the different form factors. Porting your existing apps from the rectangular platforms might really benefit from a shuffle of elements. A great example is Katharine Berry's CalTrain app which adjusts its interface for the round screen in a really nice way:
[caption id="attachment_115746" align="aligncenter" width="1000"]
The app features a lot of curves which looks quite good in action as you can see from Katharine's wrist on her way to work:
[caption id="attachment_115747" align="aligncenter" width="768"]
Continue reading %What Developers Need to Know about the Pebble Time Round%
by Patrick Catanzariti via SitePoint
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