My hope is for you to see that Make is an automation/orchestration tool that can be used in place of other modern build tools, and will help to strengthen your understanding and ability to use the terminal/shell environment (which is a big plus in my opinion, and helps open up many avenues of technical progression). Whole books have been written on the topic of Make and writing Makefiles so Mark will leave it up to you to investigate further beyond this post if he manages to kindle your interest.
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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at.
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nginx released 1.9.5 this week and with that, lets you enable HTTP/2. Also, Firefox 41 is out and now brings support for SVG favicons. Our dear friend Anselm Hannemann is keeping track of everything in the web development reading list so you don’t have to. The result is a carefully collected list of articles that popped up over the last week and which might interest you.
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While animations may have great visual appeal, they also make app experiences more intuitive and engaging. Animation can make an app feel more fluid and responsive by providing feedback on user interaction. This means that, for designers, creating authentic animations is increasingly becoming a part of the job description. Whether you’re a designer, product manager, developer or anyone else working on a product, Keynote is a great way to communicate ideas quickly. The speed, gentle learning curve and quality of output all make it an ideal tool for your arsenal.
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CSS quantity queries follow the concept of changing the styles based on a condition: the condition within a quantity query being the number of sibling elements. An example would be navigation where items are 25% wide when four items are available; yet when there are five items available, the width of the navigation items changes to 20%. This is a common problem with dynamic site frameworks like WordPress or Ghost. Can you avoid too many media queries and JavaScript workarounds? Yes, you can. This is where quantity queries are best used. By being creative with CSS selectors, we can count the number of sibling items and apply styles if they meet the conditions. Using these queries, we can future-proof our designs and projects, and allow them to scale gracefully.
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Unless your project is structured beautifully, certain animations are a pain to tweak. Just let the client know what your intentions are for the animations, and let the tweaking and finetuning happen in the code of the final product. Until then, you are simply painting a functional and visual picture for the client and developers, giving them a clear view of your vision. Web design transitions and animations are great to prototype in After Effects. In this article, Matt Reamer will be scratching the surface of how to fit After Effects into your UX Workflow, and he’ll share details, advice, experience and links that you could use as influence and thought starters in your next project.
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Tools are an extension of our hands, and as such, they should be versatile, quick and intuitive. A lot has changed between the print era of offset presses and the digital era of cross-platform screens. Developers have attempted to adapt our tools, but Sketch is perhaps the most successful app in this regard. In this article, Patrick Keenan will not only show you a new tool, but also start you on your way to a new design system. Remember, no matter how good it looks, the greater focus is not on the pixels, but on the user. If your sight is true, all else will follow.
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Toward the end of 2014, a Google spokesperson hinted that the mobile user experience would become a ranking factor. In January 2015, a number of website owners received messages warning about mobile usability issues on their websites, linking to a section of Webmaster Tools where they could review the problems. In this article, Tim Jensen will review how to flag mobile issues in Webmaster Tools, explain the most common issues and show you how to assess mobile usability problems on your website based on these flags.
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Flex items are truly accommodating and a pleasure to work with. Most web apps consist of a series of modular, reusable components. You can use flexbox for those bits of layout that induce headaches and that depend on brittle CSS hacks to work. It takes a while to have your “Aha!” moment with flexbox, because it involves unlearning what you already know about CSS layouting. But once you speak the flexbox language fluently, your process of designing responsive apps will become effortless and your style sheets will get leaner!
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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!
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