December 8, 2020 — The 2019 Capgemini research institute’s report published after a research on the use of chat assistants showed a drastic 76% increase in customer satisfaction from organizations where chat assistants where built and incorporated into their services. But how does Dialogflow, a product from Google’s ecosystem, aid developers in building chat assistants and contribute to this quota? Read more…

December 7, 2020 — MDX gives you the minimalist ergonomics of Markdown with the flexibility of custom components. By combining MDX with Sanity and Next, you can build robust, team-friendly content editing experiences while keeping the pleasant and efficient developer experience of building Jamstack sites with React. Read more…

December 7, 2020 — Do you like building relationships and exploring creative options? At Smashing, we are looking for a team member who’ll take good care of advertising and sponsorships across the range of everything we do at Smashing — from the magazine to our conferences. Interested? We’d love you to join us. Read more…

December 4, 2020 — Meet our new friendly online meet-up, Smashing Meets, with three wonderful speakers, the entire Smashing family and plenty of truly smashing cats. As always, free for Smashing Members. Read more…

December 4, 2020 — If you’re a designer or developer with intermediate knowledge of HTML and JavaScript, and know your way around GitHub and the command line, this tutorial is for you. Today, Scott Dawson is going to walk step-by-step through converting a WordPress site into a static site generated from Markdown. Read more…

December 3, 2020 — Markdown is a powerful markup language that allows editing and formatting in plain text format that can then be parsed and rendered as HTML. It has a declarative syntax that is both powerful and easy to learn for technical and non-technical folks. However, due to the consequential ambiguities in its original specification, there have been a number of distinct flavors (or custom versions) that aim to erase those ambiguities as well as extend the original syntax support. This has led to a steep divergence from what can be parsed and what is rendered. CommonMark aims to provide a standardized specification of Markdown that reflects its real-world usage. Read more…

December 2, 2020 — Even though the development of a data importer is a complex matter, you don’t want your users’ experience with it to be just as complex or complicated. The second they experience any friction or fault in data onboarding, the chances of them bailing from the software will skyrocket. So, in this post, we’re going to focus on how best to present your data importer to users. Read more…

December 1, 2020 — In this episode, we’re talking about Product Design. What does it mean to be a product owner, and how can you learn the skills required? Drew McLellan talks to expert Chris Murphy to find out. Read more…

November 30, 2020 — You can provide access to people with visual impairments without involving them in the product development lifecycle, by formally adopting web accessibility standards… but does that mean the end product is usable?  In this article, Uri Paz explains how a site complying with accessibility guidelines may still present usability issues when testing with real users. Find out how weaving accessibility best practices with usability testing, can help as many people as possible to fully use your site. Read more…

November 30, 2020 — Let’s welcome December with some new wallpapers! Designed by artists and designers from across the globe, they are available with and without a calendar for the month. All images can be clicked on and lead to the preview of the wallpaper. We respect and carefully consider the ideas and motivation behind each and every artist’s work. This is why we give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience through their works. This is also why the themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves. Read more…