For a while now, Sketch has been the de facto application of choice for UX and UI designers. But in the last year or two, we have seen many new contenders for the Sketch’s crown. Two of them that have made the biggest strides are Figma and Adobe XD. In this article, Ashish Bogawat will try to summarize my thoughts on how Figma and Adobe XD compete with Sketch and what unique features each one of them brings to the table. He will also reference some other alternative apps that are aiming to become leaders in the same niche.
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WebAssembly is a new language that runs in the browser alongside JavaScript. In this article, Robert Aboukhalil explores how you can speed up web applications by replacing slow JavaScript calculations with compiled WebAssembly. This is a case study on using WebAssembly to speed up a data analysis web tool. To that end, Robert will take an existing tool written in C that performs the same computations, compile it to WebAssembly, and use it to replace slow JavaScript calculations.
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The z-index property, despite all that’s written about it, is still widely misunderstood and mishandled. Stacking issues in a complex single-page web application can become a major pain. Adhering to some principles, however, we can easily avoid these issues. In this article, Pavel Pomerantsev will recap what z-index actually is and how you can stop guessing whether it might work in any specific case and start treating it just like any other convenient tool.
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With Spotify, machine learning and social media has gone musical. With their app, your friends can check out what you’re jamming to. What if the rest of the Internet could experience your algo-rhythm, too? In this article, Cher Scarlett will show you how to compose your own application to share what you’re listening to on Spotify using Vue.js and Nuxt. This tutorial is moderately complex, and it requires knowledge of HTML, CSS, Javascript (ES6), but is broken down into very consumable sections.
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Take a gander at the revenues of the top mobile apps and it’s easy to get lost in dreams of what could be if only you built a mobile app today. Then again, have you ever considered how much it actually costs to build and maintain a mobile app? When you look at the big picture, you’ll soon realize that mobile apps aren’t a smart investment for most. That’s why you need to give serious consideration to building a PWA this year. In this article, Suzanne Scacca is going to talk about why app monetization needs to be one of the first things you think about before making a choice between designing a mobile app or PWA for your clients.
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In this tutorial, Ahmed Bouchefra will use the latest versions of Bootstrap 4 and Angular 7 to build an Angular application and style the interface with Bootstrap. Let’s see how we can integrate Bootstrap CSS styles and JavaScript files with an Angular project generated using the Angular CLI, and how to use form controls and classes to create beautiful forms and how to style HTML tables using Table styles.
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For the past few months, Cory Shaw has been building a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, and throughout the development process he’s realized what a powerful tool Slack (or team chat in general) can be to monitor user and application behavior. After a bit of integration, it’s provided a real-time view into our application that previously didn’t exist, and it’s been so invaluable that he couldn’t help but write up this show-and-tell.
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With Progressive Web Apps, you can now use the web to build full-blown apps. Thanks to an enormous amount of new specifications and features, we can do things with the web that you used to need to write native apps for. However, talking to hardware devices was still a bridge too far up till now. Today, Niels Leenheer will introduce you to WebBluetooth. Thanks to this tool, we can now build PWAs that can control your lights, drive a car or even control a drone.
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Good performance is critical to delivering a good user experience, and iOS users often have high expectations of their apps. A slow and unresponsive app might make users give up on using your app or, worse, leave a bad rating. In this article, Axel Kee is going to look into five optimization tricks that will make your app feel more responsive.
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API-based solutions are becoming a critical building block of modern digital products. What are they? How can they impact your design process? Finally, how to evaluate them without bothering your software team? The growing amount of data and the need for speed in building products pushed APIs to become the lingua franca of digital teams. To design systems based on API-first systems, make sure you understand the vendors’ offerings. Today, Michał Sędzielewski brings you this hands-on testing guide which is a good starting point in doing so. It will help you explore the API capabilities even before you throw it to your teaching team, saving their energy — and yours as well.
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