February 17, 2014 in Learn
Hit the Reset Button on Gamification
Building apps is complicated. There’s planning, design, development, deployment, customer service, marketing, legal considerations… Yikes! There are also many additional layers of pervasive challenges: How do you keep people engaged? What’s the best way to onboard new users? To navigate…
February 11, 2014 in Learn
Build a Self-Destructing Message Android App
We have just released a new Android course where you can learn how to build Ribbit, an app that lets users send photo and video messages that “self-destruct” after they’ve been viewed! This is the Android version of the same…
February 10, 2014 in Learn
Getting Involved in Open Source Projects
The open source movement has been responsible for many great innovations over the past few decades. Linux, the Apache Web Server, and Rails are just a few examples of open source projects that have elevated the web industry to new…
February 6, 2014 in Learn
Optimizing Mobile Web Apps for iOS
When I was looking through the analytics data for a product I recently launched I was taken aback by just how much mobile traffic the web app was getting. After seeking some feedback from users it became clear that people…
February 5, 2014 in Learn
Tips for Creating a Blank Slate
The blank slate or “empty state” is when an application has no data. In other words, it’s what an app looks like the first time someone uses it. Not only is the blank slate a critical part of UX, but it…
February 4, 2014 in Learn
Getting Started with the Speech Synthesis API
With the introduction of products like Siri and Google Now, speech technology has really taken off in the past few years. Various organisations have been working on speech recognition and synthesis for decades, but it seems like only recently that…
January 31, 2014 in Learn
How to use the Meter & Progress Elements
The development of HTML5 has introduced a series of new elements that can be used to create common UI components like date pickers and autocomplete dropdowns. Two of these new elements are <progress> and <meter>. In this post you’re going…
January 29, 2014 in Learn
Why jQuery is the Most Popular JavaScript Library
John Resig released jQuery on August 26th, 2006 and changed the front-end development landscape forever. jQuery quickly arose to be the go to JavaScript framework. A number of other libraries came out around the same time such as MooTools and…
January 29, 2014 in Learn
A Tale of Front-end Sanity: Beware the Sass @import
Imagine coming into work on your first day as a front-end designer or dev and getting your Rails development system up and running for the first time. You’re really excited to start working on something in the app or website…
January 28, 2014 in Learn
How to Make a Favicon
One of the most frustrating and confusing elements of modern web design is the favicon. Short for “favorite icon” it’s the little picture you see in browser tabs, address bars, and possibly other places depending on your browser and operating…
January 23, 2014 in Learn
The Perfect WordPress Inline SVG Workflow
Today we’re going to be looking at the perfect inline SVG workflow for WordPress. Before we go any further though, if you’re unfamiliar with the different varieties of SVGs, I highly recommend you take a quick read through Chris Coyier’s…
January 23, 2014 in Learn
Product Analytics 101
Feedback loops are an essential component in product development because these loops provide regular opportunities to learn and adjust the product to have better fit. Qualitative feedback loops enable you to better understand your customers. Prototyping is another powerful feedback…