January 18, 2013 in Learn
I Have an Idea for a Killer App, but Where Do I Start?
You know the signs: you can’t stop thinking about it as you fall asleep at night. Your mind wanders back to it when you know you should be concentrating on your work that currently pays the bills. You’re even a…
January 16, 2013 in Learn
The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Sass
What is Sass? Sass stands for Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets Sass, and was created by Hampton Catlin. It’s a way to simplify your CSS workflow, making development and maintenance tasks easier. For instance, have you ever had to do a find-and-replace…
January 15, 2013 in Learn
Using Web Workers to Speed-Up Your JavaScript Applications
The performance of JavaScript applications running in the browser has increased considerably over the past few years. This is mainly due to continued work on the underlying JavaScript engines (such as V8) that actually execute the code. But as these JavaScript engines get…
January 10, 2013 in Learn
5 Useful CSS Selectors
Besides the usual type, descendant, class and ID selectors, CSS offers several pseudo-class and pseudo-element selectors that allow us to target HTML elements based on their positions in the document –– some even target virtual elements and generate content from…
January 7, 2013 in Learn
Using Microdata to Markup Structured Data in Your Web Pages
The websites that we build are full of data about people, places, products and more. As designers we work very hard to present data to our users in an easily comprehensible and aesthetically pleasing way. However what we often don’t…
January 3, 2013 in Learn
Java Basics for Android Development – Part 2
Being a good Android developer means being good with Java, though not necessarily a good Java developer. That might sound weird, but it’s true. The architecture of Java apps is very different from Android apps, but the language is the…
December 26, 2012 in Learn
5 Design Tips Every Developer Should Know
Great code and great design need each other to work well. Unfortunately, people with poor visual design skills often think they lack natural ability. In other words, there’s a common belief that you’re either born with the gift of aesthetic…
December 20, 2012 in Learn
Responsive Design of the Future with Flexbox
In CSS, float and clear serve for layout much the same way as the tables they replaced: As stand-ins that work well enough. But they’re still limited. One proposed solution is called the CSS Flexible Box Layout Module, commonly called…
December 14, 2012 in Learn
Sending Email With PHPMailer and SMTP
Many PHP websites and web applications need to send transactional emails. A user may request a password reset that sends them an email, or you may need to notify a customer that their order has shipped. PHP does have a…
December 13, 2012 in Learn
Stylish Custom User Settings Dropdown Menu with CSS
You can find a lot of different menu styles on the web today. Similarly designers and developers are often more than happy to share their techniques with the world. And through these tutorials new designers can learn about trends and…
December 4, 2012 in Learn
A Quick Guide to Understanding AJAX
The term AJAX describes a methodology of loading data dynamically on a page without loading a new page. The browser makes a request that’s in the background, then a success or error callback is triggered when the request completes. The…
December 3, 2012 in Learn
A Look at Responsive CSS Frameworks
CSS frameworks have gone responsive, squeezing content into a spectrum of desktop and mobile browsers with varying degrees of success. While any CSS solution for layout is preferable to nested tables, no single solution fits every website. But that hasn’t stopped…