Today, Vitaly Friedman reveals the Smashing Book Mystery riddle and announces the winners! (in case you want to figure it out first, close this window since there are spoilers in this post.
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95% of downloaded apps are abandoned within a month and 26% of apps are only used once, and depending on the user, these abandoned apps are deleted or ignored, never to be opened again. Lyndon Cerejo’s app graveyard is the final resting place for apps that he has downloaded but have since left neglected. The following are lessons from his app graveyard that he keeps in mind when designing apps, and they might help you, too.
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To celebrate the long-awaited release of our new Smashing Book (yaaaay!), we’ve prepared a little mystery for you. Below you’ll find an animated GIF that contains a hidden message. Once you resolved the mystery, you’ll see a Twitter hashtag displayed in plain text. Are you ready? Action!
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Many large businesses had a chief electricity officer when electricity first started to power the industrial economy. Companies just couldn’t operate without power, but it wasn’t always that way. Over a decade after introducing electricity, many business leaders were still building factories by water, despite no longer needing it to power their machinery. They needed help integrating the new technology into their thinking and that is where the chief electricity officer came in.
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In this article, Peter Traeg provides an overview of how to build a simple mobile application using each of the following approaches. Few developers have had the opportunity to develop for mobile using a variety of tools, and this series is intended to broaden your scope. Hopefully you will be in a better position to choose the right development tools for your mobile application’s needs!
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You want to be lean and you want to be agile by using technologies that will help you succeed in the short and long term. And those technologies are not always easy to pick out. Full-stack JavaScript hits all the marks. You’ve probably seen it around. With JavaScript, you can create scalable, maintainable applications, unified under a single language. There’s no doubt, it’s a force to be reckoned with. In this article, Alejandro Hernandez will introduce these components piece by piece.
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If Wesley Hales asked you what could have been better at the last conference you attended, you’d probably say that the content or the interaction could have been better in some way. To solve this problem, he created Onslyde: A free service and open-source project that will make public speaking easier and conferences better. It’s been a lot of fun and work, and now you get to see the result!
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The best thing any designer can do is to collect feedback from real users. Recently, Joshua Gross had an opportunity to experience thiswhen iterating on HelloSign. Thanks to testing, the app went from four stars to a solid five stars after a redesign. You’ll look at how the app started, how they ran the tests and how the product ended up with five stars.
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Video on the Web has improved quite a bit since 7th grade. But for the most part, videos are still separate from the Web, cordoned off by iframes and Flash and bottled up in little windows in the center of the page. They’re a missed opportunity for Web designers everywhere. But how do you integrate video into an app or a marketing page? In this article, Sean Fioritto will find inspiration, how-tos and a few technical goodies to get you started with modern video on the Web.
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Many designers and design teams make the mistake of thinking that their work is done once they’ve completed the visual design stage, and this is where Specctr can help. Specctr is a plugin for Adobe applications, which transitions a visual design to production by enabling you to specify form and function. It automatically generates a specification and creates a blueprint for the design, which saves a lot of time!
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