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 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…
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 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 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…
December 31, 2013 in Learn
How to Keep Up with the Web Industry
It can feel impossible to stay up to date with the latest news and information in the web industry. It seems like every week there are new front-end frameworks, new JavaScript projects, new must-have apps, and so much more. How…
December 24, 2013 in Learn
How to Fix a Broken Image on a Website [Guide]
If you’ve ever created a website using HTML and had an image not show up or a picture that you can’t see, you have what’s called a broken image. This can be caused by a couple of different problems, but…