CategoryCoding

February 26, 2015 — Product Hunt is a community where people post, vote on and comment on new products they’ve discovered or launched. Whether you’re looking for the next big thing to invest in or just want to find a better weather app, Product Hunt has got you covered. As Product Hunt’s success has shown, there’s a big demand for websites that help us deal with information overload by streamlining and centralizing content. Telescope is a fast, modern platform on which to build your own community, social news app or link-sharing website. In this article, Sacha Greif will show you how easy is to extend it. He encourages you to give it a try! Read more…

February 23, 2015 — It’s very easy to get bogged down by accessible output and to forget that, ultimately, accessibility is about people. Whether you are working in product, UX, development or quality assurance, remember to always give users control, over the page integrate accessibility into annotated UX and style guides and design with choice in mind. In this article, Henny Swan will explain these, and more key principles which will ensure that products are inclusive and usable for disabled people. Listening to users and actively including their feedback, along with adhering to organizational standards and guidelines, are essential. Read more…

February 18, 2015 — Static analyzers look at code and find problems before you run it. They do simple checks, like enforcing syntax, and more holistic checks, like making sure your functions aren’t too complex. Static analyzers also find errors that you can’t find with testing, like instances of == when you meant ===. In large projects and on big teams, you’ll be happy to have a little help finding those “simple” bugs that turn out to be a lot less simple than they looked. Read more…

February 16, 2015 — ESI works in a similar way to other methods of including fragments in your pages, such as Server Side Includes (SSI) or PHP include statements, but it has been designed for reverse proxies like Varnish that sit in front of a web server and cache content. In this article Rachel Andrew will explain how you can benefit from using Varnish even when there are parts of your pages that can’t be cached for long periods, using Edge Side Includes. Read more…

February 11, 2015 — JavaScript is “real” programming. This means you not only have to learn a whole new and complex syntax but also have to “learn how to think.” The barriers to entry are high and prevent many designers from taking the plunge. uilang tries to fix that. In this article Benjamin De Cock will introduce you to uilang’s philosophy and syntax. You’ll start with a simple example to get you comfortable with the basics, before moving to something more exciting. At the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to code many typical interface widgets, such as popovers, tabs, overlays and much, much more. Read more…

February 3, 2015 — The total size of media elements on the average web page is increasing constantly. Yet, especially on mobile devices, performance bottlenecks remain, which stem from bandwidth issues, widely varying network latency, and limitations on memory and the CPU. You need solutions for better and faster browsing experiences that work across all devices and browsers. In this article Denis Ryabov & Ugur Kaner will discuss why they should and shouldn’t use Lazy Load, and how to implement it. Read more…

January 26, 2015 — Spartan is a project that has been in the making for some time now. It will be a matter of few months until users and developers alike will be able to try Spartan for themselves, but we can share some of the interesting bits already today. In this article, Jacob Rossi will cover the inside story of the rendering engine powering Spartan, how it came to be, and how 20 years of the Internet Explorer platform (Trident) has helped inform how it was designed. Read more…

January 22, 2015 — When approaching AngularJS for the first time, the interaction between scopes, directives and controllers is what immediately becomes (and remains) confusing for most. After the confusion sets in, you start learning about the advanced concepts, which are mind-blowingly complex as well. In this article, Nicolas Bevacqua will navigate the salt marsh that is AngularJS scopes and the lifecycle of an AngularJS application, while providing an amusingly informative, in-depth read. Read more…

January 20, 2015 — As developers and designers it’s our job to make the web welcoming, not overwhelming. The HTML5 Page Visibility API is used effectively in recent projects by Active Theory, such as their work for Under Armor and A Spacecraft For All: click to another tab and you’ll find that the multimedia presentation pauses and the music fades away. This behavior typifies what I like to call the “polite web”: sites that are considerate of users’ attention, bandwidth and abilities. Read more…

January 13, 2015 — AJAX calls do not cover updates from the server, which are needed for the modern real-time and collaborative web. PubSub (as in “publish and subscribe”) is an established messaging pattern that achieves this. In this article, Alexander Gödde will look at precisely how PubSub solves the updating problem, and he’ll look at one particular solution (the WAMP protocol) that integrates both the calling of procedures on the server and PubSub into a single API. Read more…