CategoryJavaScript

November 18, 2013 — Video on the Web has improved quite a bit since 7th grade. But for the most part, videos are still separate from the Web, cordoned off by iframes and Flash and bottled up in little windows in the center of the page. They’re a missed opportunity for Web designers everywhere. But how do you integrate video into an app or a marketing page? In this article, Sean Fioritto will find inspiration, how-tos and a few technical goodies to get you started with modern video on the Web. Read more…

November 13, 2013 — After a decade of JavaScript library work, the progressive-enhancement revolution, the advent of polyfills, and the effort to birth the “Web Components” and “Shadow DOM” specifications have taught us surprising lessons: In every period, being able to use features in both high- and low-level forms has always been desirable. HTML is great, until it isn’t. And JavaScript-only has predictable drawbacks. Thinking that there is a “right way” to build new Web features is seductive. Turns out, it’s not that simple. Read more…

November 12, 2013 — Events can be triggered on any part of a document. They don’t just start and end in one place; they flow though the document. This life cycle is what makes DOM events so extensible and useful. As developers, we should understand how DOM events work, so that we can harness their potential and build engaging experiences. In this article, Wilson Page will introduce the basics of working with DOM events, then delve into their inner workings, explaining how you can make use of them to solve common problems. Read more…

November 7, 2013 — With the release of Ember.js 1.0, it’s just about time to consider giving it a try. This article aims to introduce Ember.js to newcomers who want to learn more about the framework. Users often say that the learning curve is steep, but once you’ve overcome the difficulties, then this framework is tremendous. Read more…

October 29, 2013 — Today, Mike Cunsolo will show us how to use Grunt in a project to speed up and change the way you develop websites, looking briefly at what Grunt can do, before jumping into how to set up and use its various plugins. Then he will explain how to build a simple input validator, using Sass as a preprocessor, how to use grunt-cssc and CssMin to combine and minify our CSS, how to build our compressed assets on the fly, and much more! Read more…

October 25, 2013 — In this article, Zeno Rocha presents a series of workflows in Alfred that will boost your productivity! A collection of great tricks to automate your work. Hopefully, some will speed up your workflow. Maybe they will even inspire you to share some of your hidden secrets of productivity. Read more…

October 24, 2013 — Much of that page weight could be reduced if images were conditionally optimized based on device width, pixel density and modern image formats. These reductions would result in faster loading times, but the debate isn’t about whether to optimize images for different devices, but about how to go about doing so. In this article, Shawn Jansepar will take a look at Mobify.js, which lets us generate small images for small devices from a single high-resolution image. Read more…

October 7, 2013 — Sometimes the simplest JavaScript features are sitting right under our noses and we just haven’t had a lot of exposure to them. In this article, Louis Lazaris won’t be talking about jQuery, and he won’t be looking at structural code concepts or patterns. Instead, he is going to introduce you to some pure JavaScript features that you can use today and that you might not have ever considered before. Read more…

September 18, 2013 — While working for Simple Focus, a couple of our designers noticed how images always scaled perfectly. The line length of hypertext, on the other hand, changes based on its parent element’s width, which has a negative effect on readability. One of our designers asked, “wouldn’t it be nice, if text worked more like images?” and a few weeks later FlowType.JS was fully-developed and ready to be sent into the world. Here’s the process of how we got there. Read more…

September 17, 2013 — This article scratches the surface of the Three.js library. Once you are comfortable with the API, experimenting with particles, mapping and more complicated meshes can yield incredible results. Three.js is a gold mine for creating beautiful and complex Web experiments. Taking the extremely simple demonstration explained here and turning it into a mind-blowing experiment merely takes experimentation and the willingness to try new things. Read more…