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…
January 22, 2014 in Learn
The Best Chrome Extensions for Web Professionals
It’s no secret that web designers and developers love the Google Chrome web browser and Chrome Extensions. The strength of the Chrome Developer Tools make it an excellent choice for web design and development work. The Chrome DevTools provide lots of…
January 21, 2014 in Learn
Exploring the Battery Status API
With the rise in popularity of mobile web apps there’s been a big push to develop device APIs that allow web developers to reach out of the browser and access the underlying device hardware. We’ve seen the introduction of getUserMedia,…
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 16, 2014 in Learn
What is Unobtrusive JavaScript and Why it’s Important?
Unobtrusive JavaScript is a best practice methodology for attaching JavaScript to the front-end of a website. It’s an ideal to strive toward and something we should bear in mind whenever we’re adding JavaScript to a site. It is the separation…
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 9, 2014 in Learn
Getting Started with the WebP Image Format
When it comes to optimizing websites for performance one of the biggest goals is to reduce the amount of data that needs to be sent to the browser (the payload). As images commonly make up the largest chunk of the…
January 6, 2014 in Learn
Automating Web Performance Best Practices with mod_pagespeed
Web performance is a brilliant, but sometimes complex world. Concatenating and minifying files, optimizing images, setting up caching, these are all tasks that can lead to great performance wins. We know that this stuff is good for performance but actually…