Several years ago, there was a big push by designers to increase the font-size of websites and I feel like we’re living in another era of accessibility improvements where a fresh batch of designers are pushing for even larger text sizing today. Take this post by Christian Miller, for example, where he writes:
The majority of websites are still anywhere in the range of 15–18px. We’re starting to see some sites adopt larger body text at around 20px or even …
The post Your Body Text is Too Small appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
Microsoft plans to extend IntelliSense code analysis for Python to tools beyond Visual Studio, using its Python Language Server. IntelliSense provides autocompletions for variables, functions, and other symbols that appear as developers type code.
Available as a beta in the July release of the Python extension for Visual Studio, the Python Language Server will be offered later this year as a standalone component for use with tools that support the Language Server Protocol. That protocol lets editing tools and IDEs support multiple languages.
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This is a wondrous little project by Wenting Zhang that showcases a series of variable fonts and lets you manipulate their settings to see the results. It’s interesting that there’s so many tools like this that have been released over the past couple of months, such as v-fonts, Axis-Praxis and Wakamai Fondue just to name a few.
Direct Link to Article — Permalink…
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I tend to think of variable fonts as a font format in which a single font file is capable of displaying type at near-infinite variations of things like boldness, width, and slantyness. In my experience, that's a common use case. Just check out many of the interactive demos over at Axis-Praxis:
or
Make sure to go play around at v-fonts.com as well for loads of variable font demonstrations.
But things like boldness, width, and slantyness and just a few…
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There's this popular analogy of Vue that goes like this: Vue is what you get when React and Angular come together and make a baby. I've always shared this feeling. With Vue’s small learning curve, it's no wonder so many people love it. Since Vue tries to give the developer power over components and their implementation as much as it possibly can, this sentiment has led to today's topic.
The term renderless components refers to components that don’t render anything. …
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Webfonts are difficult to get right. An often overlooked and disruptive piece of web performance, webfonts can slow down your site and leave your visitors confused and agitated. No one wants agitated visitors.
Webfonts Are ▢▢▢ Rocket Science Recorded at our special web performance themed SmashingConf in London, Zach Leatherman demystifies webfonts in order that we can avoid font-related performance issues. He takes us through a detailed guide to best practices when using webfonts, so you can use beautiful fonts without sacrificing performance.
With plans to deprecate the Nashorn JavaScript engine in the upcoming Java Development Kit (JDK) 11, Oracle is encouraging developers to take a look at GraalVM virtual machine instead. Oracle says it’s more capable than Nashorn, and it has laid out a migration path from Nashorn to GraalVM. Oracle does plan to support Nashorn for a few years to provide time to migrate.
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In this seventh episode of Do More with R, learn how to create maps in R—it’s easier than you think, thanks to new and updated packages like sf, tmap, and ggplot2
The team behind Google’s Go language, aka Golang, has released the beta version of Go 1.11, the next version of the popular open source language. Go 1.11 is expected to be in production release in August 2018. The most recent beta adds preliminary support for modules.
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In this wacky and satirical post, Heydon Pickering describes a wild new technology called Cascading Style Sheets that solves a lot of the problems you might bump into when styling things with JavaScript:
A good sign that a technology is not fit for purpose is how much we have to rely on workarounds and best practices to get by. Another sign is just how much code we have to write in order to get simple things done. When it comes …
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Maya Benari:
Accessibility is a crucial part of government product design. First, it’s the law. Federal agencies face legal consequences when they don’t meet accessibility requirements. Second, it affects us all. Whether you have a motor disability, you sprained your wrist playing dodgeball, you need a building to have a ramp for your wheelchair or stroller, or you literally just have your hands full, we all find ourselves unable to do certain things at different points in our …
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NVD3.js is a JavaScript visualization library that is free to use and open source. It’s derived from the well-known d3.js visualization library. When used the right way, this library can be extremely powerful for everyday tasks and even business operations.
For example, an online dashboard. We can use NVD3.js to compile data into a centralized space that visualizes the information in neat charts and graphs. That’s what we’re going to look at in this post.
Making a dashboard with NVD3.js …
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In March and April 2018, Kentico conducted the first global report about the state of headless CMS market. We surveyed 986 CMS practitioners in 85 countries about their opinions, adoption, and plans for using headless CMS. The survey contains valuable industry insights into topics such headless CMS awareness, preferred headless CMS models, current and future uptake of the headless CMS approach, and much more, from leading industry players.
Download your complimentary copy of the …
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(This article is kindly sponsored by SVGator.) Animated SVG files have become very popular. They are entirely scalable (because they are vectors), small and 100% code-based, which allows for so many transformations and tweaks. This, however, comes at a price: the steep learning curve for complete beginners.
SVGator pledges to solve this problem, making it really easy for anyone to make simple animations using a familiar interface. It’s a web-based animation app that lets you import, animate and export SVG animations, and it eliminates the need for beginners to learn to code.
Successful software projects please customers, streamline processes, or otherwise add value to your business. But how do you ensure that your software project will result in the improvements you are expecting? Will users experience better performance? Will the productivity across all tasks improve as you hoped? Will users be happy with your changes and return to your product again and again as you envisioned?
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There’s an awful lot of dull, unattractive websites out there that are in dire need of upgrading or total redesign. The owners of those websites are either unaware of the problem or hesitant to ask how much redesign would cost. Web designers would of course welcome the work, even though most would prefer spending their […]
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The most FA of all the FAQs.
Here's Laura Kalbag:
Find what you love. Don’t worry about needing to learn every language, technique or tool. Start with what interests you, and carve your own niche. And then use your powers for good!
And my own:
Buy a domain name. Figure out how to put an HTML file up there. Isn’t that a powerful feeling? Now you’ve got table stakes. Build something.
Definitely, go read other A Book Apart author answers …
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You know those tedious tasks you have to do at work: Updating configuration files, copying and pasting files, updating Jira tickets.
Time adds up after a while. This was very much the case when I worked for an online games company back in 2016. The job could be very rewarding at times when I had to build configurable templates for games, but about 70% of my time was spent on making copies of those templates and deploying re-skinned implementations.
What…
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Before buying followers on Instagram was a common practice, before Russian trolls made fake news an Olympic sport, we had linkbuilding. Today, we still have linkbuilding, its just that you haven't noticed it — or have you?
Welcome, to the Twilight Zone, dear folks. You are about to go through a linkbuilding crash course. This will help you preserve your website, detect potential problems in content or consider why you keep receiving strange emails from strangers wanting to get their links all over your content.
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You might be building a website for your own needs and doing all the work yourself. In this case, you may think there’s no need for a collaboration tool to smooth out your workflow. Still, having one or more extra pairs of eyes looking over your work can be beneficial. It’s a different story for […]
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The big data landscape has exploded in an incredibly short amount of time. It was just in 2013 that the term “big data” was added to the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary. Fewer than five years later, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is being generated every day. In response to the creation of such vast amounts of raw data, many businesses recognized the need to provide significant data storage solutions such as data warehouses and data lakes without much thought.
On the surface, more modernized data lakes hold an ocean of possibility for organizations eager to put analytics to work. They offer a storage repository for those capitalizing on new transformative data initiatives and capturing vast amounts of data from disparate sources (including social, mobile, cloud applications, and the internet of things). Unlike the old data warehouse, the data lake holds “raw” data in its native format, including structured, semistructured, and unstructured data. The data structure and requirements are not defined until the data is needed.
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(This article is kindly sponsored by Adobe.) The persuasive design toolbox is filled with powerful tools based on psychology. These tools range from Cialdini’s set of six principles of persuasion to ten times that number of Persuasive Patterns. Presented with all these methods, it can be tempting to use all of them to cover all possible bases, using a shotgun approach, hoping that one will resonate with your target users.
Version 2.14 of GitHub Enterprise, the behind-the-firewall version of GitHub’s code-sharing platform tuned for businesses, improvement configuration visibility and adds anonymous Git read access.
Users can configure visibility for new members of an organization, across private or public instances. Administrators also can prevent users from changing their visibility from the default configuration. Default settings can be enforced through a command-line utility.
GitHub Enterprise Version 2.14 also adds the ability for administrators to enable anonymous Git read access to public repositories when an instance is in a private mode. Anonymous read access can let users bypass authentication requirements for custom tools on an instance.
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Azure’s service platform’s adoption of Kubernetes and containerschanges how you build, deploy, and manage cloud-native applications, treating containers and services as the targets of your builds, rather than the code that makes up those services.
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For even the simplest of components, the cost in human-labour may have been significant. UX teams do usability testing. An array of stakeholders have to sign off on the design.
Developers conduct AB tests, accessibility audits, unit tests and cross-browser checks. Once you’ve solved a problem, you don’t want to repeat that effort. By building a reusable component library (rather than building everything from scratch), we can continuously utilize past efforts and avoid revisiting already solved design and development challenges.
Deep learning is an important part of the business of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook, as well as countless smaller companies. It has been responsible for many of the recent advances in areas such as automatic language translation, image classification, and conversational interfaces.
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You check your blood pressure, tire pressure, and your stock prices. But when was the last time you audited your agile?
Even experienced agilists can fall into bad habits, and it’s important to catch them early.
That’s why I recommend auditing your agile process every six months. It might sound daunting, but everything you need boils down to four questions you can fit on a standard 3x5 notecard.
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ASP.Net Web API is a lightweight framework that can be used for building RESTful HTTP services. When working with controller methods in Web API, you will often need to pass parameters to those methods. A “parameter” here simply refers to the argument to a method, while “parameter binding” refers to the process of setting values to the parameters of the Web API methods.
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The concepts of trust and security are different, but often confounded. They are similarly nuanced as the difference between threats and vulnerabilities, but I’ll save that for another day. The difference between trust and security was highlighted recently because it was discovered that there had been more than 5 million downloads of a cryptocurrency miner virus from DockerHub. A few years back, the XCodeGhost malware infected 39 iOS apps, including WeChat and something I use personally, CamScanner. This impacted hundreds of millions of users. These two incidents highlight a serious security problem—to feel confident in your software supply chain, you have to do both of the following:
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The web continues to amaze me. With all its variety and different changes to the platform, it’s hard to see a straight pattern — if there even is (just) one. But it’s wonderful to see what is being changed, which features are added to the platform, which ones get deprecated, and how browsers implement more and more technology to protect the user from malicious website attacks. It’s interesting to see that these security features nowadays are getting as much attention as a feature for developers; this shows the importance of privacy and security and how unstable and insecure the web was in the past.
One key devops best practice is instrumenting a continuous integration/continuousdelivery (CI/CD) pipeline that automates the process of building software, packaging applications, deploying them to target environments, and instrumenting service calls to enable the application. This automation requires scripting individual procedures and orchestrating the steps from code checkin to running application. Once matured, devops teams use the automation to drive process change and strive to do smaller, more frequent deployments that deliver new functionality to users and improve quality.
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In this sixth episode of Do More with R, learn how to apply a function to a vector of values and return a data frame
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What does it take to have a decent portfolio? You will definitely need the right tools and a fair amount of creativity. Extra creativity isn’t something that someone can easily come up with. But there are some top-of-the-line WordPress themes that can help you. They are to some degree portfolio oriented. so they can take […]
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(This is a sponsored post.) If you are in the design world, chances are that you’ve already heard about Affinity Designer, a vector graphics editor for Apple’s macOS and Microsoft Windows.
It was July 2015 when Serif Europe launched the amazing software that many designers and illustrators like me are using now as their main tool for professional work. Unlike some other packages, its price is really affordable, there’s no subscription model and, as mentioned already, it’s available for both Macs and PCs.
Back in 2008, I started studying design and clearly remember how the sheer sight of code just intimidated me. I had some coding classes, and without any prior coding experience, I had a tough time understanding the code I first got in touch with. Suddenly, the words that I was used to in the English language (such as “new,” “return” and “throw/catch”) took on a whole new meaning; the cryptic syntax, semicolons, brackets and completely new rules didn’t make things any easier for me.
The power of Docker images is that they’re lightweight and portable—they can be moved freely between systems. You can easily create a set of standard images, store them in a repository on your network, and share them throughout your organization. Or you could turn to Docker Inc., which has created various mechanisms for sharing Docker container images in public and private.
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Smooth collaboration between developers and designers is something everyone aspires to, but it’s notoriously difficult. But with today’s advanced web, it's difficult — if not impossible — to build a truly great product without collaborating across disciplines. Because of the range of technologies required to build a product, the product can only truly succeed when all disciplines — developers and designers, content creators, and user experience strategists — are deeply involved from the early stages of the project.
The Xamarin acquisition was one of Microsoft’s smartest deals. It quickly gave it access to tools that let developers use familiar tools and technologies to build cross-platform applications. Now built into every version of Visual Studio, and providing the basis for its MacOS Visual Studio release, Xamarin has become a key element of Microsoft’s development tools.
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In this article, based on the talk that I gave at Smashing Conference in Toronto, I’m going to describe a method of working that I’ve adopted over the past two years that helps me to manage CSS across my projects.
I’ll be showing you how to use the pattern library tool Fractal, to manage your CSS on a component by component basis, while allowing you to use the tools you are already familiar with.
If you have experience building ASP.Net applications, you are undoubtedly familiar with role-based authorization. In ASP.Net Core – Microsoft’s lean and modular framework that can be used to build modern-day web applications on Windows, Linux, or MacOS – we have an additional option.
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It’s the kind of meta notion that makes undergraduate philosophers say, “Whoa!” Software today is so complicated that we need to write software to help us understand and construct the software we need to write. Code begets code begets more code…
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As companies today are re-architecting to become fully digital, they are putting events and data at the center of the business. In this journey, it's critical to start off on the right foot. Here’s a guide on what makes a good first project and how to use change data capture (CDC) to set yourself, and the entire company, up for success.
The first step
Sometimes the first project just shows up: there is a business problem to be solved, and the architects who lead the project agree that Apache Kafka is part of the solution and the best way to solve the problem. One project leads to another and next thing you know, everything that happens in the company is streamed in real time to a central platform, where it is available for anything else to tap into, process and react to: a central exchange of events and data that connects the entire organization.
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Over the years, one thing we have consistently seen is how little insight from digital marketers is used at the planning stages of a web development project.
Data from Google Analytics and SEMrush to tools like VWO (Visual Website Optimizer) or Hotjar are all resources that can be used to provide valuable insight ahead of the first line of code being written. Basic SEO elements, such as URL structure and metadata, should also be involved in the decision making of any web design project.
Microsoft’s open source development tool is an important piece of the developer’s toolkit. Built using GitHub’s cross-platform Electron framework, Visual Studio Code is a full-featured development editor that supports a wide selection of languages and platforms, from the familiar C and C# to modern environments and languages like Go and Node.js, with parity between Windows, MacOS, and Linux releases.
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Have you heard of Redux? What is it? No googling, please!
“Fancy backend stuff.” “I have heard of it, but I’m not aware of what it is. It’s a React framework perhaps?” “A better way to store and manage states in a React application.” I’ve asked this question to over 40 designers. The above are their typical answers. Many of them are aware that Redux works with React and its job is “state management.
MySQL remains one of the most common and consistent elements in the modern application programming stack. If you want a database for your app or service, and your needs are fairly generic, MySQL is one of the easy defaults. It’s widely used and well-understood, so you can draw on a wealth of community knowledge and experience when deploying MySQL for your particular application.
MySQL migration and installation tips
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In the old world, the operating system was the center of the computing universe. In today’s modern application age, container platforms fill the space once occupied by the OS. That fact helps to explain why so much cash and code is pouring into Kubernetes.
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MySQL remains one of the most common and consistent elements in the modern application programming stack. If you want a database for your app or service, and your needs are fairly generic, MySQL is one of the easy defaults. It’s widely used and well-understood, so you can draw on a wealth of community knowledge and experience when deploying MySQL for your particular application.
MySQL migration and installation tips
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(Insider Story)
This article is part of a series in which I attempt to use the web under various constraints, representing a given demographic of user. I hope to raise the profile of difficulties faced by real people, which are avoidable if we design and develop in a way that is sympathetic to their needs. Last time, I used the web for a day without JavaScript. Today, I forced myself to navigate the web using just my keyboard.
We are now over a year on from CSS Grid Layout landing in the majority of our browsers, and the CSS Working Group are already working on Level 2 of the specification. In this article, I’m going to explain what is currently part of the Working and Editor’s Draft of that spec. Note that everything here is subject to change, and none of it currently works in browsers. Take this as a peek into the process, I’m sure I’ll be writing more practical pieces as we start to see implementations take shape.
One key platform feature of Office 365 that is not well understood is Microsoft Graph. Building on the information stored in Office 365 and in Microsoft’s systems management and identity tools, Microsoft Graph is a way of not only using that information in your code, but a way of using that information to infer additional details about the context of that information, details that could well be more useful than the underlying data.
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(Insider Story)
Recently, the Ionic team announced an open-source spiritual successor to Apache Cordova and Adobe PhoneGap, called Capacitor. Capacitor allows you to build an application with modern web technologies and run it everywhere, from web browsers to native mobile devices (Android and iOS) and even desktop platforms via Electron — the popular GitHub platform for building cross-platform desktop apps with Node.js and front-end web technologies.
Ionic — the most popular hybrid mobile framework — currently runs on top of Cordova, but in future versions, Capacitor will be the default option for Ionic apps.
During my decades as a database application developer, I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I would ever have access to a transactional, planet-scale, distributed database, much less that I would be comparing many of them. But with Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, Azure Cosmos DB, Neo4j Enterprise, and most recently YugaByte DB all available in production, that one-time pipe dream is now quite real.
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One of the features you’ll find most commonly advertised when comparing hosting providers nowadays is their ability to run various kinds of scripting languages, database solutions and similar tools that you may or may not be interested in. Sometimes, those are bundled with the default hosting package by default, potentially making it more expensive than […]
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Taking appointments might seem like a minor task. After all, it’s simply a matter of picking up the phone or answering an email. The reality is that doing so takes a lot of your available time. It also takes away your business’s money. In addition, managing those appointments can take up even more time and […]
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Every single discussion of blockchain seems to start with some variant of the phrase “secure, distributed hyperledger.” I take no issue with the fact that it’s a hyperledger—in other words, a continuously growing list of linked records. And I have no problem describing it as distributed—in this case, across a peer-to-peer network communicating over a protocol that describes how to validate new records being added to the chain.
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(Insider Story)