Just Keep Scrolling! How To Design Lengthy, Lengthy Pages

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Websites with long or infinite scrolling are becoming more and more common lately, and it’s no mere trend or coincidence. The technique of long scrolling allows users to traverse chunks of content without any interruption or additional interaction — information simply appear as the user scrolls down the page.

Just Keep Scrolling! How To Design Lengthy, Lengthy Pages

Infinite scrolling is a variety of long scrolling that allows users to scroll through a massive chunk of content with no finish line in sight (it’s the endless scrolling you see on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr feeds).

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Building For Mobile: RWD, PWA, AMP Or Instant Articles?

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As we look deep into 2017, one of the questions on every web developer’s mind ought to be, “What trend will define the web in 2017?” Just three years ago, we were talking about the “Year of Responsive Web Design”, and we’ve all seen how the stakes were raised when Google announced Mobilegeddon (21 April 2015) and started to boost the rankings of mobile-friendly websites in mobile search results.

Building For Mobile: RWD, PWA, AMP Or Instant Articles?

Today, as our findings indicate, responsive web design is the norm, with 7 out of 10 mobile-optimized websites being responsive, up from 5 last year, which begs the questions: What’s next? Where is it all heading? We solved the screen-size issue and had a great run for a few years — now what?

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Web Development Reading List #175: GraphQL, IndexedDB2, And An Open Ethical Internet

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With GraphQL, FQL, and IndexedDB2, we have new tools at our fingertips that allow us to build products that are not only more flexible but also faster. With this week’s Web Development Reading List, we’ll dive a bit deeper into these promising technologies and combine this with thoughts about the openness of the internet, ethical choices, and building inclusive products. So without further ado, let’s get started!

Web Development Reading List 175

Chrome 57 just hit stable, now the Chrome developer team announced Chrome 58 beta. It includes IndexedDB2.0 support and improvements to iframe navigation. Among the smaller changes are also auto-pause/resume of video on Android when the window is in the background and the fact that HTTPS is now required for the Web Notifications API.

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Conversational Design Essentials: Tips For Building A Chatbot

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Human interactions are incredibly fascinating if you take a close look at them — the social awkwardness, the communication styles, the way knowledge is transferred, the way stories are told and trust is built. But what happens when a machine evokes the same response?

Conversational Design Essentials: Tips For Building A Chatbot

Conversational interfaces have become the new hotness in UX design. Google is about to release a new virtual assistant chatbot; Facebook has already launched the updated Messenger platform with chatbots; and Microsoft went as far as to claim that the operating system of the future isn’t Windows, but “conversation as a platform.”

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Front-End Performance Checklist 2017 (PDF, Apple Pages)

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Are you using progressive booting already? What about tree-shaking and code-splitting in React and Angular? Have you set up Brotli or Zopfli compression, OCSP stapling and HPACK compression? Also, how about resource hints, client hints and CSS containment — not to mention IPv6, HTTP/2 and service workers?

PRPL Pattern in the application shell architecture

Performance isn’t just a technical concern: It matters, and when baking it into the workflow, design decisions have to be informed by their performance implications. Performance has to be measured, monitored and refined continually, and the growing complexity of the web poses new challenges that make it hard to keep track of metrics, because metrics will vary significantly depending on the device, browser, protocol, network type and latency (CDNs, ISPs, caches, proxies, firewalls, load balancers and servers all play a role in performance).

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App Development Showdown: Why You Should Care About Revisiting The Native Vs. Hybrid Debate In 2017

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Back in 2007, the world met the iPhone for the very first time. After Apple’s product debut, it took less than six months for work to begin on PhoneGap, which would become one of the first and most adopted frameworks for hybrid mobile app development — that is, for apps written simultaneously for multiple platforms using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, rather than coded in native languages.

App Development Showdown: Why You Should Care About Revisiting The Native Vs. Hybrid Debate In 2016

When compared with the prospect of learning an entirely new language and development environment in order to program iOS (and soon Android) apps, the appeal of this type of development to the already huge population of web developers in the world was palpable.

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The (Not So) Secret Powers Of The Mobile Browser

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Apple taught us, “There’s an app for that.” And we believed it. Why wouldn’t we? But time has passed since 2009. Our mobile users have gotten more mature and are starting to weigh having space for new photos against installing your big fat e-commerce app. Meanwhile, mobile browsers have also improved. New APIs are being supported, and they will bring native app-like functionality to the mobile browser.

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We can now access video and audio and use WebRTC to build a live video-chat web apps directly in the browser, no native app or plugin required. We can build progressive web apps that bring users an almost native app experience, with a launch icon, notifications, offline support and more. Using geolocation, battery status, ambient light detection, Bluetooth and the physical web, we can even go beyond responsive web design and build websites that will automagically adapt to users’ needs and context.

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Web Development Reading List #163: The End-Of-Year Wrap-Up

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Only one week left until Christmas, and people already start freaking out again. No gifts purchased yet, work isn’t finished either, and suddenly some budget has to be spent until the end of the year. All of this puts us under pressure. To avoid the stress, I’ve seen a lot of people take a vacation from now until the end of the year — probably a good idea.

Web Development Reading List #163

And while it’s nice to see so many web advent calendars, I feel like I’ve never written a longer reading list than this one. So save this edition if you don’t have much time currently and read it during some calm moments later this year or early next year. Most articles are still worth reading in a few weeks.

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Mistakes Developers Make When Learning Design

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The blank Photoshop document glows in front of you. You’ve been trying to design a website for an hour but it’s going nowhere. You feel defeated. You were in this same predicament last month when you couldn’t design a website for a project at work. As a developer, you just feel out of your element pushing pixels around.

Mistakes Developers Make When Learning Design

How do designers do it? Do they just mess around in Photoshop or Sketch for a while until a pretty design appears? Can developers who are used to working within the logical constructs of Boolean logic and number theory master the seemingly arbitrary rules of design?

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Tech Advent Calendars For Web Designers And Developers In 2016

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With the holidays almost here and the new year already in sight, December is a time to slow down, an occasion to reflect and plan ahead. To help us escape the everyday hectic for a bit and sweeten our days with a delightful little surprise each day up to Christmas, the web community has assembled some fantastic advent calendars this year. They cater for a daily dose of web design and development goodness with stellar articles, inspiring experiments, and even puzzles to solve.

Advent Calendars For Web Folks

To make the choice of which ones to follow a bit easier, we collected a selection of advent calendars in this Quick Tip for you. No matter if you’re a front-end dev, UX designer, or content strategist, we’re certain you’ll find something to inspire you for the upcoming year. So prepare yourself a nice cup of coffee, cozy up in your favorite chair and, well, enjoy!

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