Do you share your blog posts on social media? Want to know how much traffic comes from those posts? By adding Google UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters to the links you share, you can attribute traffic to page posts, group posts, and ads. In this article, you’ll discover how to analyze your social media traffic [...]
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Muuri creates responsive, sortable, filterable and draggable grid layouts with lots of features in one library. Comparing to what's out there Muuri is a combination of Packery, Masonry, Isotope and jQuery UI sortable.
As we've just closed out 2016, I think it’s always interesting to look back on how your workflow might have evolved over the previous 12 months. It’s often surprising how many of your tools and techniques change over the course of a year.
For me, the stand-out theme of 2016 Design & UX has been the arrival of the Chrome app as a fully-fledged web design option. In fact, I’ve written about three of them in 2016 in this very newsletter.
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Back in April, we talked about Jarek Foksa’s BoxySVG – an excellent little SVG editor . Though the app can run in the Chrome browser, it works best as a downloaded ChromeOS app.
In September, I covered Pingendo, a prototyping tool that delivers Bootstrap-powered prototypes – and another Chrome app. I’ve built two prototypes with this app since then.
However, arguably the biggest change to my own workflow in 2016 only happened in November when I edited Adam Rasheed’s Is Figma a Serious Option for Sketch Designers? – yet another ChromeOS app.
Now, Adam will tell you he’s an unabashed Sketch fanboy – I mean, he teaches courses on Sketch – yet he came to me excited to write about a web-based competitor to Sketch. At the time, I knew nothing about Figma but became intrigued as I read his first draft.
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Six weeks later I now use Figma every day. I didn’t mean to – it just kinda happened. I have Sketch, Adobe XD, Photoshop and even Fireworks, yet I find I spend more time in a (currently) free web app.
It’s not the UI. If Sketch invented what a modern UI Design tool should look like, Figma hasn’t strayed far from that. Layers on the left – properties on the right. If you’re familiar with Sketch, you won’t feel lost in Figma (or XD for that matter).
Also, Sketch files generally import cleanly into Figma with minimal issues.
But obviously, none these aren’t reasons for switching to Figma.
Is it because it’s free? No. Don’t get wrong – I like free, but I’ve already paid for the other apps so I’m technically losing money by not using them.
No, there’s a more surprising reason (to me anyway).
Multi-user collaboration is Figma’s ‘special sauce’ – the only thing that makes it significantly different to use than Sketch, Photoshop or even Adobe XD.
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Figma lets you share design via either URL or username directly from the app. There’s no upload or syncing to secondary cloud service. Figma designs live online – not unlike Google Docs.
This means when two or more users are viewing the same Figma design, you can see the other user’s cursor live – again similar to Google Docs.
And I have to say, when I first saw this, I though ‘Hmm… that's... cute’.
But over time, it gradually it became clear how incredibly useful this live sharing feature is. Here's why.
When you share a Figma document with a developer (view only access), they then have the ability to click on ANY page element and view its properties in the right panel. That includes:
Continue reading %Web Design 2016: Attack of the Chromes!%
Most people start a new year with lots of good resolutions. They want to eat healthier, do more sports, or work on their career. What about you? Did you make any? I made a few resolutions, including one that has become an evergreen for the last few years. Before you start laughing, it’s not one […]
Continue reading %10 Java Blogs to Follow in 2017%
[special]Phew, 2016 is over! It was a crazy year for both the world and JavaScript land. Countless new impressive libraries and frameworks popped up, You Might Not Need JavaScript showed some patterns that made many question their use of JavaScript (a little) and one tweet of a slide from Nolan Lawson’s talk on Fronteers caused some commotion and responses from great names like Jeremy Keith and Christian Heilmann, all summarized in a post by Nolan. I’m starting to think “crazy” is an understatement. 2016 was insane.[/special]
This year also included JavaScript fatigue. In case you missed it, many developers are experiencing fatigue over JavaScript’s ecosystem, as a lot of tooling and configuring is required to set up a “modern” JavaScript project. At one point, so many developers had shared their thoughts that a few more articles surfaced on “JavaScript fatigue fatigue”!
To help both you and me sleep at night, I have a compiled a list of 3 promising generic libraries/frameworks for front-end development.
If you weren’t keeping an eye on Vue.js already, you definitely should. Vue.js is a tiny JavaScript framework.
No, don’t run away!
Vue.js seems to primarily focus on views and give you only a handful of tools to regulate data for those views. Instead of a framework stuffed with programming design patterns and limitations, Vue.js’ minimal approach doesn't get in the way, which is nice for a change.
Vue.js comes in two flavors: a stand-alone version that includes the template compiler and the runtime version that doesn’t. In pretty much all cases, you will want to precompile the templates using Webpack or Browserify, and only load the runtime package client-side. See Vue.js’ installation page for more info.
To demonstrate its simplicity, below is an example of a component that shows a message and adds interactivity to a button to reverse the message.
<div id="app">
<p></p>
<button v-on:click="reverseMessage">Reverse Message</button>
</div>
import Vue from 'vue'
new Vue({
el: '#app',
data: {
message: 'Hello World!',
},
methods: {
reverseMessage: function () {
const reversedMessage = this.message
.split('')
.reverse()
.join('');
this.message = reversedMessage;
},
},
});
Do you miss features you really enjoyed from other libraries? Many plugins for Vue.js are available, and several guides are available to use and write a Vue.js plugin.
You should definitely try this framework if you want to get productive fast. It scales well as the project grows. It is worth mentioning this library is maintained by one person with the help of generous contributors and sponsors.
Regardless whether you choose the stand-alone or runtime flavor, Vue.js supports ES5-compliant browsers by default. Although not documented, I am sure you can increase support by manually adding an ES5 shim.
For more information, check out Vue.js website or its GitHub repository. If you’re interested, be sure to check out Nilson Jacques’ editorial on Vue.js and Jack Franklin’s introduction to Vue.js 2.0.
Having only been released in mid-November 2016, Svelte is really new. It is a JavaScript framework similar to Vue.js but leaves a smaller footprint. “Traditional” frameworks need runtime code to define and execute modules, keeps state, update the views and do whatever frameworks do. Svelte dissolves into clean JavaScript code as if you didn’t use a framework at all. The major benefit of this is file size.
The framework is actually a tool that compiles your source code to plain JavaScript that doesn’t have dependencies. Svelte has plugins so you can compile the source code using Webpack, Browserify, Rollup or Gulp. Check out the compiler’s repository for all available tools.
For comparison, I’ve recreated the Vue.js example with Svelte:
Continue reading %3 JavaScript Libraries to Keep an Eye on in 2017%
Modeling many-to-many relationships between data entities in the ActiveRecord world isn't always a straightforward task. Even if we have a well-defined ER diagram to work with, it's not always clear which ActiveRecord associations we should be using and what the implications of our decision will be. There are two types of many-to-many relationships: transitive and intransitive. In mathematics,
A binary relation R is transitive whenever an element A is related to an element B, and B is in turn related to an element C.
To put this into a data modeling context, a relationship between two entities is transitive if it can be best expressed through the introduction of one or more other entities. So, for instance, it's easy to see that a Buyer buys from many Sellers while a Seller sells to many Buyers. However, the relationship is not fully expressed until we start adding entities such as Product, Payment, Marketplace and so on. Such relationships can be called transitive many-to-many as we rely on the presence of other entities to fully capture the semantics of the relationship. Luckily, ActiveRecord allows us to model such relationships with ease. Let's start by looking at the simplest ActiveRecord many-to-many associations and work our way up.
Continue reading %Master Many-to-Many Associations with ActiveRecord%
