Chatbot: When A Man's Assistant Is Not Made Of Plastic

Want to know if your child’s flight is on time, ask a bot You want to order a pizza, ask a bot You want to book a parking lot, ask a bot You want to check a price of a product on Amazon, ask a bot You want to set a reminder, ask a BOT There is big news in the Internet of People, and it is not...

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by Guest Author via Digital Information World

Web Design Weekly #277

Headlines

Getting Started With Headless Chrome

Headless Chrome is shipping in Chrome 59. It’s a way to run the Chrome browser in a headless environment. Essentially, running Chrome without chrome! It brings all modern web platform features provided by Chromium and the Blink rendering engine to the command line. (developers.google.com)

We’ve Mastered the Screen, What’s Next? (medium.com)

Snag the hottest new domain name for designers

.design domains were just released and some of the best ones are still available. Normally cost $35 but Web Design Weekly subscribers get them now for only $5. (we.design)

Articles

Infrastructure evolution at BuzzFeed

Matt Reiferson shares some inside knowledge on how and why BuzzFeeds infrastructure has evolved into a service-oriented architecture. (tech.buzzfeed.com)

CSS Custom Properties and Theming

Chris Coyier looks into some of the use cases for theming a site or component using CSS Custom Properties. (css-tricks.com)

TypeScript at Slack

Given how quickly static type checking is gaining traction in the JavaScript landscape, Felix Rieseberg wanted to share his teams experiences and practices for all of us to gain a little more insight. (slack.engineering)

Putting WordPress into Hyperdrive

Josh Habdas shares some tips on how to setup a $5 Vultr box and Redis with Load Impact to support up to 7000 concurrent WordPress users. (hackernoon.com)

How Facebook Live Scales (designingforscale.com)

Tools / Resources

Some tips for getting started with Redux

Dave Draper shares some rock solid advice for those that are getting their teeth into Redux. (medium.com)

Online Master’s in Information Design and Strategy

This online, part-time program at Northwestern University is taught by industry leaders and top professors (northwestern.edu)

Winning with CSS Variables

Violet Peña walks through the basics of CSS variables (CSS Custom Properties), how they are different from Sass variables and how to provide legacy support for older browsers. (vgpena.github.io)

What’s happening in CSS?

A list of links to track what is happening in CSS and browsers. (rachelandrew.co.uk)

Sketching a Design System with React-SketchApp (design-nation.icons8.com)

Release Notes for Safari Technology Preview 29 (webkit.org)

How to Setup HTTPS Locally (deliciousbrains.com)

Inspiration

Overtime with Linda Eliasen (dribbble.com)

Atlassian Design (atlassian.design)

Jobs

Product Designer at Base

Join a growing team of designers who are passionate about creating the next game changing experiences in business software. As a full-time Product Designer in our San Francisco office, you’ll be involved in conceptualising, designing and prototyping new cross-platform features inside of our application. (getbase.com)

Senior Developer at Simplecast

We’re seeking a Senior Developer to join the Simplecast team; someone with a passion for actualizing the future of podcasting. They will dedicate themselves to building Simplecast into one of the premiere hosting and syndication solutions for podcasters. (waywardwild.com)

Need to find passionate developers or designers? Why not advertise in the next newsletter

Last but not least…

The Ultimate CSS Survey

SitePoint’s 2nd annual CSS Survey to give us a better idea of the knowledge, experience, habits, and practices of CSS developers from around the world. (sitepoint.com)

NPM 5 will save by default (github.com)

The post Web Design Weekly #277 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.

by Jake Bresnehan via Web Design Weekly

Top 5 IaaS Solutions for Hosting Java Applications

Nowadays, cloud computing is everywhere. In the simplest terms, cloud computing is storing and accessing different data and programs over the internet and the fundamental building block for that is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). IaaS provides support natural development, testing, and usage of the application within the cloud environment. In this article I will give you a quick intro to IaaS and then compare five providers: Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, IBM's SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure and Digital Ocean.

IaaS helps us to avoid the complexity of buying and operating our own servers. Moreover, maintenance and upgrading of softwares is not required. With these benefits, it is obvious that it has lower infrastructure costs in many scenarios, thus helping new organizations who do not have time and capital to invest in their own hardware.

Some of the other benefits of IaaS include:

• services are distributed as a vast array of resources
• being flexible, IaaS provides dynamic scaling
• cost is variable as per usage
• multiple users can use a single piece of hardware
• location independence: the service can usually be accessed from anywhere as long as there is an internet connection and the security protocol of the cloud allows it

Now that you are aware of the benefits of IaaS for building your web app, all you have to do is decide which solution to pick. The only problem is that there are so many choices today. As a Java developer, I initially struggled a bit when evaluating various IaaS providers. So in this article, I am going to describe the five best solutions for hosting Java web apps and compare them with each other.

Amazon EC2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It helps in launching and managing server instances, thus making it suitable for developers for web-scale computing. You can use server instances for any legal purposes as per your requirement.

Instances are available in different sizes and configurations. EC2 allows AWS to provide different instance types that you can use to meet specific needs. So, you can start different VMs depending on your needs. If you are deploying a Java app, you can install your app server (Tomcat, Web Sphere, etc.) into one VM and use other services like micro-services, databases, etc. on separate VMs with appropriate configurations. More details, specifically on how AWS works with Java, can be found here.

With Amazon EC2, one has the choice of different instance types, operating systems and software packages which makes it flexible. Amazon EC2 has a memory, CPU, and instance storage configuration which helps in storage selection. Also, you can choose the boot partition size that is optimal for your choice of operating system and application.

The only demerit of using EC2 can be the expenses. As my workflows became more complicated and I used more services it was hard to project costs. However, to help estimate the costs, Amazon offers a monthly calculator.

The networking is not as flexible as compared to other service providers. Since a lot of data has to move from one end of LAN to another, the data traveling distance is much longer than it needs to be leading to congestion problems commonly seen on the internet.

Amazon EC2 is an industry standard today. Many leading websites and apps use EC2. Some of the prominent ones are Instagram, Reddit, Netflix, Adobe Systems, Smugmug, and many more. There are many articles on Amazon's collaboration, for example why Netflix chooses Amazon.

Continue reading %Top 5 IaaS Solutions for Hosting Java Applications%

by Ipseeta via SitePoint

10 jQuery HTML5 Audio Players

According to Buzz Angle Music, a total of 83 billion audio streams were consumed in U.S. alone in the first quarter of 2017. This marks a 61.2% increase over the previous quarter. Meanwhile, music sales dropped by 23.8%.

May 8th, 2017: This popular article was updated to reflect the currently available audio players and plugins.

One advantage of streaming is that the audience can enjoy their favorite music and on-line broadcasts without worrying about storage space on their devices. More and more people, especially the younger generation, are discovering this convenience as the availability of affordable Internet reaches more people.

If you would like to get into the streaming business, you could do a lot worse than to check out this list of HTML5 audio players I've compiled.

1. MediaElement.js

Currently one of the best open source media players for websites, MediaElement.js supports both video and audio. MediaElement.js is capable of playing media from local and third-party sources such as SoundCloud, YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, and Twitch. It can be configured with Vanilla JavaScript, jQuery, Node, Meteor, Require.js and React.

The reason I've given this media player the top spot is that it's still under active development. This means issues will be resolved faster and it will likely be kept up-to-date with the latest HTML5 standards and browser support.

• License: Open Source(MIT)
• Website
• Download
• Source (GitHub)
• NPM - 4,697 downloads last month
• Documentation
• CDN links:
  • http://ift.tt/2psEtS3
  • http://ift.tt/2pV2fZx

2. SoundManager 2

SoundManager 2 is built to make it easier to deliver audio to desktop and mobile platforms. It has a powerful API that uses HTML5 audio where supported and optionally falls back to Flash where needed. It has no external dependencies and can be used with other JavaScript frameworks such as jQuery. Documentation is top notch, allowing developers to configure it for their needs. It supports playlists and multiple skins are available out of the box. Some of the websites using it include Last.fm and BeatsMusic.

Development of this audio player has slowed down, but the open-source community is doing a great job resolving issues reported by users. Sound Manager 2 is really well designed and is still compatible with the latest browser standards. It currently supports all major browsers including IE6, Safari, and Android.

• License: Open Source (BSD)
• Website
• NPM - 5,048 downloads last month
• Source (GitHub)

3. React-jPlayer

If you are looking for a jPlayer version that has no dependency on jQuery, then you are in luck (that is, if you are a React developer). React-jPlayer is a very new entry heavily inspired by jPlayer. It currently supports both audio and video. Modern browsers from IE9 and all modern mobile platforms are supported. This means older browsers such as IE6 and IE7 are not supported (not a big deal). It doesn't use Flash as a fallback since iOS and Chrome have officially dropped support for it.

Continue reading %10 jQuery HTML5 Audio Players%

by Michael Wanyoike via SitePoint

Vatobe

Dark-schemed One Pager for Vatobe, a useful MacOS app that reminds you to sit up straight.

by Rob Hope via One Page Love

Clea Forkert

Minimal One Page portfolio with a big image slider that correlates with changing browser background colors for art director, Clea Forkert.

by Rob Hope via One Page Love

How to Use Facebook Camera Effects to Frame Your Facebook Stories

Want to visually brand your Facebook Stories (and enable your fans to, as well)? Have you heard of the Facebook Camera Effects platform and its Frame Studio feature? Now you can design a custom frame that overlays your Facebook Stories and you can share it with your fans. In this article, you’ll discover how to [...]

This post How to Use Facebook Camera Effects to Frame Your Facebook Stories first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

by Ana Gotter via