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 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 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 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 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
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 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…
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 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 30, 2013 in Learn
Getting Started with Bower
There are now more libraries and frameworks available for front-end development than ever before. It’s not uncommon to have five or more of these libraries involved in a single project. But keeping track of all these libraries and making sure…
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….