Rich Brown

Portfolio for art director and digital UX/UI designer Rich Brown
by via Awwwards - Sites of the day

The Best Times to Post to the Top 8 Social Networks [Infographic]

Do you want to maximise engagement on your social media posts? Looking for the ideal times to post to each network? Brafton share their social posting tips in this infographic.

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by Web Desk via Digital Information World

Web Design Weekly #289

Headlines

Gain Motion Superpowers with requestAnimationFrame

Benjamin De Cock, User Interface Designer at Stripe dives into the power of `requestAnimationFrame` by sharing some first hand experience and great examples. (medium.com)

Serve web fonts without JavaScript (blog.typekit.com)

Articles

Managing CSS & JS in an HTTP/2 World

Delivering CSS & JS on your websites is completely different with HTTP/2. In this article Trevor Davis shares how his team approached it. (viget.com)

Offline-Friendly Forms

Max Böck offers some great advice and tips to help make your forms handle bad internet connections. (mxb.at)

Solve Your Specificity Headaches With CSS Modules

In this tutorial Louie Rootfield looks into “CSS Modules” and how it can help us minimise various CSS problems. (tutsplus.com)

How to Run a Front-End Infrastructure Team

Jyri Tuulos talks about the human aspects of front-end projects that are shared between multiple engineering teams. (tech.adroll.com)

Building UX Teams at Scale

A look inside Atlassian’s bespoke hiring process and how they’ve built a thriving design culture. (uxpin.com)

Why documentation matters

Having a hard time getting motivated to write some documentation for your project? Well hopefully this post will reinforce why you should and give you some handy tips to make it happen. (medium.com)

JavaScript Scope and Closures

Zell Liew explains the ins and outs of scopes and closures to help you understand what they are. (css-tricks.com)

Dropbox Paper’s newest features cater to designers (engadget.com)

Explaining React’s license(code.facebook.com)

Tools / Resources

A Super Quick Way to Try out CSS Grid

Jen Simmons gives a 5 minute taste of CSS Grid with a few handy CodePen examples to make things a little easier to understand. If you haven’t had time to dig into CSS Grid this is for you. (jensimmons.com)

Jetpack Professional – the only WordPress plugin you really need

Includes premium themes, business class security, and priority, expert support. (jetpack.com)

Font Review Journal

A site aimed at designers who want to discover new typefaces to add to their arsenal, or those who want to learn to appreciate old favorites on a deeper level. (fontreviewjournal.com)

Jest In Case

A Jest utility for creating variations of the same test developed by the talented James Kyle. (thejameskyle.com)

Syntax

A web developer focused podcast by Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski. So far every episode has been worth it. (syntax.fm)

Capture screenshots of specific HTML nodes (twitter.com)

The State of the Web (speakerdeck.com)

Inspiration

Software development 450 words per minute (vincit.fi)

Our redesign of Medium’s Claps(medium.com)

Jobs

Senior Product Designer at TripAdvisor

We are looking for a talented Senior UX/UI designer to design engaging experiences on TripAdvisor’s web and mobile platforms for travelers worldwide. (tripadvisor.com)

Product Designer at Trello

We’re looking for a savvy product designer to join the Product Team at Trello. Your work will have an impact on how millions of people all over the world collaborate and organize their lives. (trello.com)

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

Last but not least…

How I replicated an $86 million project in 57 lines of code (freecodecamp.org)

The post Web Design Weekly #289 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.

by Jake Bresnehan via Web Design Weekly

Basic Stepper – Lightweight jQuery Input Stepper

Basic Stepper is a jQuery plugin to change a common input text to a friendly user component.

You can use the mouse to increase or decrease the value. Just slide on the X-Axis to interact with the input value. 

by via jQuery-Plugins.net RSS Feed

How to Tell if React is the Best Fit for Your Next Project

Nowadays, users expect sleek, performant web applications that behave more and more like native apps. Techniques have been devised to decrease the waiting time for a website to load on a user's first visit. However, in web applications that expose a lot of interactivity, the time elapsing between a user action taking place and the app's response is also important. Native apps feel snappy, and web apps are expected to behave the same, even on less than ideal internet connections.

A number of modern JavaScript frameworks have sprung up that can be very effective at tackling this problem. React can be safely considered among the most popular and robust JavaScript libraries you can use to create fast, interactive user interfaces for web apps.

In this article, I'm going to talk about what React is good at and what makes it work, which should provide you with some context to help you decide if this library could be a good fit for your next project.

What Is React?

React is a Facebook creation which simply labels itself as being a JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

It's an open-source project which, to date, has raked in over 74,000 stars on GitHub.

React is:

• Declarative: you only need to design simple views for each state in your application, and React will efficiently update and render just the right components when your data changes.
• Component-based: you create your React-powered apps by assembling a number of encapsulated components, each managing its own state.
• Learn Once, Write Anywhere: React is not a full-blown framework; it's just a library for rendering views.

How Does the Virtual DOM Work?

The Virtual DOM is at the core of what makes React fast at rendering user interface elements and their changes. Let's look closer into its mechanism.

The HTML Document Object Model or DOM is a

programming interface for HTML and XML documents. … The DOM provides a representation of the document as a structured group of nodes and objects that have properties and methods. Essentially, it connects web pages to scripts or programming languages. — MDN

Whenever you want to change any part of a web page programmatically, you need to modify the DOM. Depending on the complexity and size of the document, traversing the DOM and updating it could take longer than users might be prepared to accept, especially if you take into account the work browsers need to do when something in the DOM changes. In fact, every time the DOM gets updated, browsers need to recalculate the CSS and carry out layout and repaint operations on the web page.

React enables developers to make changes to the web page without having to deal directly with the DOM. This is done via the Virtual DOM.

The Virtual DOM is a lightweight, abstract model of the DOM. React uses the render method to create a node tree from React components and updates this tree in response to changes in the data model resulting from actions.

Each time there are changes to the underlying data in a React app, React creates a new Virtual DOM representation of the user interface.

Updating UI Changes with the Virtual DOM

When it comes to updating the browser’s DOM, React roughly follows the steps below:

• Whenever something changes, React re-renders the entire UI in a Virtual DOM representation.
• React then calculates the difference between the previous Virtual DOM representation and the new one.
• Finally, React patches up the real DOM with what has actually changed. If nothing has changed, React won't be dealing with the HTML DOM at all.

One would think that such a process, which involves keeping two representations of the Virtual DOM in memory and comparing them, could be slower than dealing directly with the actual DOM. This is where efficient diff algorithms, batching DOM read/write operations, and limiting DOM changes to the bare minimum necessary, make using React and its Virtual DOM a great choice for building performant apps.

Continue reading %How to Tell if React is the Best Fit for Your Next Project%

by Maria Antonietta Perna via SitePoint

Rapid Development of Zend Expressive Modules

I have learned a few tricks when writing Zend Expressive modules that I want to share with you.

Please follow the previous post first to set up a proper working environment. I explained how to install and configure Zend Expressive with Doctrine, Gulp, and an abstract reflection factory - it'll take a total of 10 minutes.

In this tutorial, we'll build a simple read-only blog module (a page listing blog posts from a database) in minutes, demonstrating the kind of rapid development one is capable of with Zend Expressive.

Module Setup

Run this command from your expressive app to get started:

./vendor/bin/expressive module:create Blog

This will generate some base code for a Blog module and will register your module automatically with your application. It will also register your module with the Composer autoloader.

Doctrine Entity and Database Table

Let's make our Blog entity and database tables. First, we need to let our application know that this module provides Doctrine entities.

Open src/Blog/src/ConfigProvider.php and add the following:

public function __invoke()
{
    return [
        'dependencies' => $this->getDependencies(),
        'doctrine'     => $this->getDoctrine(),
        'templates'    => $this->getTemplates(),
    ];
}

/**
 * @return array
 */
public function getDoctrine(): array
{
    return [
        'driver' => [
            'orm_default' => [
                'drivers' => [
                    'Blog\Entity' => 'blog_entity',
                ],
            ],
            'blog_entity' => [
                'class' => \Doctrine\ORM\Mapping\Driver\SimplifiedYamlDriver::class,
                'cache' => 'array',
                'paths' => [
                    dirname(__DIR__) . '/config/doctrine' => 'Blog\Entity',
                ],
            ],
        ],
    ];
}

Create a blog post entity config at src/Blog/config/doctrine/BlogPost.orm.yml:

---
Blog\Entity\BlogPost:
  type: entity
  table: blog_post
  id:
    id:
      type: integer
      generator:
        strategy: AUTO
  fields:
    title:
      type: string
      length: 255
    content:
      type: string
      length: 16777215

Then, run ./vendor/bin/doctrine orm:generate-entities src.

Continue reading %Rapid Development of Zend Expressive Modules%

by Kirk Madera via SitePoint

How to turn off birthday notifications on Facebook [video]

If you are constantly getting bombarded by Facebook's birthday notifications, here's how to turn them off.

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by Web Desk via Digital Information World