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
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…
January 16, 2014 in Learn
Accepting Voice Input in HTML5 Forms
The way that we interact with computers has changed dramatically over the past decade. Touch-screen devices and laptop trackpads have enabled a much more intuitive form of interaction than is achievable using a traditional mouse. These changes haven’t been limited…
January 15, 2014 in Learn
Managing Dependencies in Objective-C Projects
When working with Objective-C projects in Xcode, you will occasionally want to work with third party libraries. This can be a bit cumbersome as Xcode doesn’t have a clean solution. You can either link a static library, which involves setting…
January 15, 2014 in Learn
Pixel Perfect Front-end Development Matters
About a month ago I hired a freelance front-end developer to code around twenty pages for Uncover – both marketing pages and pages behind a login. Interestingly enough, I hired this person via Twitter. While I didn’t vet him extensively…
January 3, 2014 in Learn
Improving Your Development Workflow with Yeoman
With so many great tools available to front-end web developers these days it can sometimes be difficult to understand how they all fit together. Deciding on a workflow that you’re happy with is often a very personal endeavour, but getting…
December 26, 2013 in Learn
Creating Immersive Experiences with the FullScreen API
Having the ability to take elements, or even entire pages fullscreen allows developers to create fully immersive experiences for the user. You can remove the distractions from other apps and help the user to focus on the task at hand….
December 19, 2013 in Learn
Timing JavaScript Code with High Resolution Timestamps
As the browser has evolved the possibilities of what can be achieved on the web have greatly increased. Technologies like Flash have given way to newcomers like Canvas and WebGL. But as we create more complex applications for the web…
December 13, 2013 in Learn
Challenges & Solutions for Your Responsive Navigation
One of the biggest hurdles when creating a responsive website is implementing the navigation – hands down. Not just from a design standpoint, but from a content and development standpoint as well. Debatably the most important element on the page,…