February 26, 2014 in Learn
How to Make a Website
We have just released a brand new project that teaches you how to make a website! This project focuses on building a portfolio website from the very beginning. If you’ve never built a website before and you have no coding…
February 24, 2014 in Learn
Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Making Websites
I first started making websites when I was 11 years old. My dad showed me how to drag out tables in Microsoft FrontPage and I was hooked (which is now a very outdated technique). It was amazing to me that…
February 21, 2014 in Learn
Registering Protocol Handlers for Your Web Applications
Protocol handlers allow you to inform the browser that your web app is capable of handling links and URLs with certain schemes. Using the registerProtocolHandler method you are able to register your web app as a handler for schemes like…
February 18, 2014 in Learn
How to Use The HTML5 Sectioning Elements
HTML5 has seen the introduction of a number of sectioning elements that can be used to mark up your web pages. Using these elements gives more semantic meaning to your pages, allowing computer programs to better understand your content. In…
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…