As developers, we know how important it is to sharpen our tools and continually add new ones to our workflow. The command line is one of the best tools you can master as a developer. With tools like Grunt, Gulp and Bower leveraging the increase in productivity that comes with working in the command line, we are seeing it become a much more friendly and comfortable place for beginners and experts alike. In this article, Wes Bos provides insight into some of the best tools to use in your day-to-day workflow in the command line and gets you started with a totally customized setup.
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Today, Rachel Andrew will be taking a look at how to build a simple yet robust workflow for developing sites that require PHP and MySQL. She’lI also demonstrate a process for using a hosted service to deploy files in a robust way to your live server. By the end of this article, you should be in a position to develop one or many sites locally, using a setup similar to how the site will run on the live server. You will deploy in the confidence that what ends up on the live server is exactly what should be on that server — no more, no less. Once you understand this type of workflow, you can explore how to streamline it further, making time to do more interesting things than fight with servers and hosting!
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Prototyping makes a project better suited to users, elevates user experience, increases the quality of your final code, and keeps clients happy. The problem is that developers often see prototyping as a waste of time. In this article, Daniel Pataki will show you that by using WordPress, highly interactive prototypes with great visuals are not at all that difficult to make. While all this seems complex, beginners should be able to follow along easily, including the “create your own server” section, which is a cinch!
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Responsive images have been keeping us on our toes for quite some time, and now that they are getting traction in browsers, they come with a scary problem: the need to efficiently resize all our image assets. As designers and developers, we have an enormous amount of power to shape how the web works. One of the biggest impacts we can have is to make our websites more performant, which will improve our users’ experiences and even make our content available to whole new markets. Cutting image weight is a relatively simple and hugely impactful way to increase performance, and I hope the information outlined above helps you make a difference to your users.
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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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The extend directive can produce undesirable side effects if it is not carefully implemented. Thankfully, there are many strategies for using extend effectively that can prevent these side effects and produce clean, organized CSS. Understanding how extend works and keeping the guidelines above in mind will enable you to use @extend to its full advantage — reducing CSS output and keeping relationships intact, no matter what exported selectors (classes, attributes, etc.) you use. Make wise use of both the @mixin and @extend directives — they’re meant to coexist in your well-organized style sheets.
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Living style guides help front-end developers transform front-end codebases into well-described pattern libraries with the minimum of effort. But to make them really efficient, we need to choose the proper tools — so let’s have a closer look at what our community has to offer. In this article, Robert Haritonov has arranged the tools by function, highlighting only the most powerful ones worth knowing about. You can find more tools, plus videos, articles and other material about style guides at styleguide.io.
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In this article, Varya Stepanova & Juuso Backman will talk about style guides that are generated directly from the style definition sources — i.e. CSS and its modern variants. Style guides are useful in many aspects of development and maintenance, so it’s little wonder that developing them has become a highly popular practice. But even with the clear benefits, taking the necessary steps to start using them is easier said than done, as quite often the challenge is cultural, requiring changes in people’s mindsets. We encourage everyone to try it!
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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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Proto.io is powerful solution for prototyping native and web apps for use on a variety of devices. The learning curve is a bit steeper than with Axure, but it can be mastered with a little time and practice. Proto.io’s real strength is its built-in support for many device types and native app libraries, and its support for gestures and transitions. The first thing to know is that unlike most prototyping tools, Proto.io is a web application, so you’ll need an internet connection to do your work. Assuming you’ll have access when you need it, Proto.io offers a lot for mobile designers to love, built right into the app.
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