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Bringing You The Best Of Smashing

Bringing You The Best Of Smashing Bringing You The Best Of Smashing Iris Lješnjanin 2020-07-17T11:00:00+00:00 2020-07-17T12:42:06+00:00 Well, I guess we can all agree that this year has been quite something. We’ve all been challenged in one way or the other, and the new normal is not quite the old normal. Still, the overriding emphasis remains on safety and everyone’s wellbeing, as well as the importance on sharing thoughts and feelings on creative wellness within the community. Unfortunately, the effects of COVID-19 are still so wide-reaching throughout the world, so that the Smashing team has had to make big changes to our plans this year. As Rachel Andrew, editor-of-chief of Smashing Magazine, nicely puts it: “The pandemic has made life unpredictable and scary for many people. At Smashing, we’ve had to very quickly figure out new ways of delivering great content — in a way that supports the business but also our speakers and workshop leaders. We have been encouraged by the enthusiasm from the community, the messages of support, and the willingness to try these new formats.” On that note, we have decided to take all 2020 dates online. We hope to see you there! August 20–21 SmashingConf Live Tell me more → September 7–8 SmashingConf Freiburg Tell me more → October 13–14 SmashingConf Austin Tell me more → November 10–11 SmashingConf San Francisco Tell me more → We’re able to do these all these wonderful things because of your support, and we truly and sincerely appreciate it. Interactive Workshops To Help You Boost Your Skills With online workshops, we aim to give you the same experience and access to experts as in an in-person workshop, without needing to leave your desk. So you can learn at your own pace, in your own time, and follow interactive exercises along the way. We’ve done our best to provide you with a mix of both design- and frontend-related workshops: July 28–29 Designing For Emotion Aarron Walter Design August 6–14 Web Application Security Scott Helme Front-end August 17–31 Behavioral Design Susan and Guthrie Weinschenk Design Aug. 19 – Sept. 3 Front-End Testing Umar Hansa Front-end Aug. 20 – Sept. 4 Designing For A Global Audience Yiying Lu Design September 1–16 Jamstack! Jason Lengstorf Front-end September 10–11 The CSS Layout Masterclass Rachel Andrew Front-end Sept. 17 – Oct. 2 Vue.js: The Practical Guide Natalia Tepluhina Front-end Sept. 22 – Oct. 6 Smart Interface Design Patterns, 2020 Edition Vitaly…

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It’s Good To Talk: Thoughts And Feelings On Creative Wellness

It’s Good To Talk: Thoughts And Feelings On Creative Wellness It’s Good To Talk: Thoughts And Feelings On Creative Wellness Jhey Tompkins 2020-07-17T09:30:00+00:00 2020-07-17T09:47:47+00:00 In fields as fast-paced and technical as web design and development, it’s easy to lose sight of our own wellbeing. For many, there’s a constant sense of trying to keep up or ahead. We may not even realize we’re doing it. Ask yourself, when was the last time you stepped away for a day and didn’t think about coding or design for a day? For me, that’s very hard to answer. For many, it’s a vocation that we can’t switch on and off. We can’t turn it off at 5 or 6 PM. Let’s talk about that and ways we can deal with it. It’s important to start right off the bat by saying this article isn’t a dictation. The aim here is to spark interest, engagement, and discussion. These are things that sometimes get lost in the whirlwind industry we are a part of. Different things work for different people, and these words are written with the best intentions. Why now? I’d planned to write something about this topic at the tail end of last year. I was making my way back from my first NodeConfEU and feeling inspired by a talk I attended, “Building Open Source Communities with Tierney Cyren”. I made a bunch of notes, then life and other commitments cropped up and the article made its way to the backburner. But, that’s OK. And that’s kind of where this post leads us to. It’s OK if you didn’t write that post, work on that side project this weekend, and so on. Pressure Culture If you’re reading this, odds are you’ve seen or experienced pressure culture — that constant, nagging expectation to dedicate every waking hour to skills development and side projects, even if your heart might not be in it. This pressure can be self-imposed, and whether we like it or not social media also plays a big part. If we aren’t careful, it can eat away at us. Pressure culture isn’t something that’s popped up recently. It’s been around a long time, a constant looming external force. Left unchecked it can fill you with guilt, anxiety, and other feelings we aren’t fond of. Work/Play balance by The Awkward Yeti. (Image source: theawkwardyeti.com) (Large preview) This is a common result of the…

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dependencies Link

On dependency

Rob Weychert: But I can’t host your site or even my own site. I didn’t build the CMS. Other people made the hardware and software I use to generate and optimize images. Other people made the fonts. Other people standardized the digital formats for those images and fonts. I didn’t write the HTML and CSS specifications, nor the browsers that interpret them, nor the operating systems that run the browsers. I didn’t solder the circuit boards. And so on. There is so much hardware and software behind a website to the extent that there is certainly no one person who understands it all. We build everything on each other’s shoulders. (Related: I, Website) But we can exert some influence about what technology we choose to use. Rob has three major considerations: Complexity: How complex is it, who absorbs the cost of that complexity, and is that acceptable?Comprehensibility: Do I understand how it works, and if not, does that matter?Reliability: How consistently and for how long can I expect it to work? I like that system. But even more, I like that he has a system at all. I bet most people don’t. That’s why “just npm install the problem away” is such a reliable conference joke. Direct Link to Article — Permalink The post On dependency appeared first on CSS-Tricks. You can support CSS-Tricks by being an MVP Supporter.

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Backdrop Filter effect with CSS

I love these little posts where some tricky-looking design is solved by a single line of CSS using a little-known property. In this case, the design is a frosted glass effect and the CSS property is backdrop-filter. The approach? Easy peasy: .container { backdrop-filter: blur(10px); } The comments in the post are worth looking into because they address cross-browser support. Coverage is actually pretty good. Caniuse shows 83% global coverage with Firefox (and, predictably, Internet Explorer) lacking support. One commenter offered a nice fallback, along with a small tweak that desaturates the effect: .container { background: rgba(0,0,0,0.8); backdrop-filter: saturate(180%) blur(10px); } Nice. But we can take it a little further by sprinkling @supports in there, as demonstrated in our background-filter Almanac entry: .container { background: rgba(0,0,0,0.8); } @supports (-webkit-backdrop-filter: none) or (backdrop-filter: none) { .container { -webkit-backdrop-filter: blur(10px); backdrop-filter: blur(10px); } } Notice the -webkit prefix in there. It’s still worth using it in production, though that’s not a big deal assuming you’re wired up with Autoprefixer. Here’s the demo from the Almanac: CodePen Embed Fallback OK, so maybe not the one-line solution it appeared to be. But hey, it’s cool that this sort of thing is relatively trivial in CSS. Direct Link to Article — Permalink The post Backdrop Filter effect with CSS appeared first on CSS-Tricks. You can support CSS-Tricks by being an MVP Supporter.

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Article

Lazy Loading Images in Svelte

One easy way to improve the speed of a website is to only download images only when they’re needed, which would be when they enter the viewport. This “lazy loading” technique has been around a while and there are lots of great tutorials on how to implement it. But even with all the resources out there, implementing lazy loading can look different depending on the project you’re working in or the framework you’re using. In this article, I’ll use the Intersection Observer API alongside the onLoad event to lazy load images with the Svelte JavaScript framework. Check out Tristram Tolliday’s introduction to Svelte if you’re new to the framework. Let’s work with a real-life example I put this approach together while testing the speed on a Svelte and Sapper application I work on, Shop Ireland. One of our goals is to make the thing as fast as we possible can. We hit a point where the homepage was taking a performance hit because the browser was downloading a bunch of images that weren’t even on the screen, so naturally, we turned to lazy loading them instead. Svelte is already pretty darn fast because all of the code is compiled in advance. But once we tossed in lazy loading for images, things really started speeding up. This is what we’re going to work on together. Feel free to grab the final code for this demo from GitHub and read along for an explanation of how it works. This is where we’ll end up by the end: CodePen Embed Fallback Let’s quickly start up Svelte You might already have a Svelte app you’d like to use, but if not, let’s start a new Svelte project and work on it locally. From the command line: npx degit sveltejs/template my-svelte-project cd my-svelte-project npm install npm run dev You should now have a beginner app running on http://localhost:5000. Adding the components folder The initial Svelte demo has an App.svelte file but no components just yet. Let’s set up the components we need for this demo. There is no components  folder, so let’s create one in the src folder. Inside that folder, create an Image folder — this will hold our components for this demo. We’re going to have our components do two things. First, they will check when an image enters the viewport. Then, when an image does enter, the components will wait until the…

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Irregular-shaped Links with Subgrid

Michelle Barker covers a situation where you need offset rectangles part of a clickable area. The tricky part is having just the rectangles be clickable. That rules out using some parent element and making the whole larger encompassing rectangle clickable, which is a common (but equally tricky) pattern. Kicking one rectangle outside the bounds of the linked one with absolute positioning could work, but Michelle takes a path here that lays everything out on a grid, then uses pointer-events to get the click areas just right. Feels more robust to me. CodePen Embed Fallback Yet another good example of why we need subgrid everywhere, stat. Direct Link to Article — Permalink The post Irregular-shaped Links with Subgrid appeared first on CSS-Tricks. You can support CSS-Tricks by being an MVP Supporter.

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Collective #614

Inspirational Website of the Week: Anastasiia Afanasieva So many engaging details, fantastic motion and superb typography! Without a doubt, our pick for you this week. Get inspired Our Sponsor Instant websites for your clients with Divi Layout Packs With the Divi Layout Packs you’ll get world-class designs ready to be used for your client projects. Check it out The WET Codebase Dan Abramov shares his talk where he shows “why strict adherence to writing code that is free of duplication inevitably leads to software we can’t understand”. Check it out Style Stage from Modern CSS Solutions A modern CSS showcase styled by community contributions. Maintained by Stephanie Eckles of ModernCSS.dev. Check it out 30 Great Websites with Parallax Scrolling A great collection of websites with interesting parallax effects. Check it out How To Create A GitHub Profile README Learn how to access GitHub’s new profile level README feature. Read it Awesome Github Profile README A curated list of awesome Github Profile READMEs. Check it out zerodivs.com An experimental UI editor for creating illustrations with single-element CSS. By Joan Perals. Check it out Tabler Icons In case you missed it: 550+ customizable free SVG icons. Check it out Super Expressive Super Expressive is a lightweight JavaScript library that allows you to build regular expressions in almost natural language. Check it out Webwaste An excerpt from Chapter 9 of Gerry McGovern’s Book World Wide Waste, from Silver Beach. Check it out Grids Part 1: To grid or not to grid Sarah Higley’s first article in a series on interactive grid accessibility. Read it Zettlr Zettlr is an open source Markdown editor with many advanced features. Check it out The State Of Pixel Perfection An interesting article on pixel perfection and why the modern web should overcome the concept. Read it Scrollable sidebar with sticky footer using Flexbox Learn how to use Flexbox to create a scrollable sidebar with a sticky footer in this great video by CodyHouse. Watch it Foam Foam is a personal knowledge management and sharing system for VSCode. Check it out What is CSS Specificity? Sarah Chima explains CSS specificity, an important topic to understand if you want to get better at CSS. Read it Clipped Image Reveal on Hover A very nice clipped hover effect by Katherine Kato. Check it out 3D Radio An interactive 3D radio made by Ricardo Oliva Alonso. Check it out GUI Sites Simone…

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10+ Best iPad Stands to Buy for 2020

A list of 10+ iPad stands that you can buy along with their different unique features. The post 10+ Best iPad Stands to Buy for 2020 appeared first on Hongkiat. Visit hongkiat.com for full content.

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Methods Of Improving And Optimizing Performance In React Apps

Methods Of Improving And Optimizing Performance In React Apps Methods Of Improving And Optimizing Performance In React Apps Shedrack Akintayo 2020-07-16T11:00:00+00:00 2020-07-17T03:06:27+00:00 React enables web applications to update their user interfaces (UIs) quickly, but that does not mean your medium or large React application will perform efficiently. Its performance will depend on how you use React when building it, and on your understanding of how React operates and the process through which components live through the various phases of their lifecycle. React offers a lot of performance improvements to a web app, and you can achieve these improvements through various techniques, features, and tools. In this tutorial, we will discuss various methods of optimizing performance in React applications, and also the features of React that we can use to improve performance. Where To Start Optimizing Performance In A React Application? We can’t begin to optimize an app without knowing exactly when and where to optimize. You might be asking, “Where do we start?” During the initial rendering process, React builds a DOM tree of components. So, when data changes in the DOM tree, we want React to re-render only those components that were affected by the change, skipping the other components in the tree that were not affected. However, React could end up re-rendering all components in the DOM tree, even though not all are affected. This will result in longer loading time, wasted time, and even wasted CPU resources. We need to prevent this from happening. So, this is where we will focus our optimization effort. In this situation, we could configure every component to only render or diff when necessary, to avoid wasting resources and time. Measuring Performance Never start the optimization process of your React application based on what you feel. Instead, use the measurement tools available to analyze the performance of your React app and get a detailed report of what might be slowing it down. Analyzing React Components With Chrome’s Performance Tab According to React’s documentation,, while you’re still in development mode, you can use the “Performance” tab in the Chrome browser to visualize how React components mount, update, and unmount. For example, the image below shows Chrome’s “Performance” tab profiling and analyzing my blog in development mode. Performance profiler summary (Large preview) To do this, follow these steps: Disable all extensions temporarily, especially React Developer Tools, because they can mess with the result of…

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Adobe Flash Business & Tech Flash end of life flash player Macromedia Flash web technologies

In Memory of Flash: 1996-2020

We are gathered here today…. Today I write in memory of Adobe Flash (née Macromedia), something that a bunch of people are actually too young to remember. I write this with love, longing, and a palpable sense of relief that it’s all over. I have come to praise Flash, to curse it, and finally to bury it. We’ve been hearing about the death of Flash for a long time. We know it’s coming. December 2020 has been announced as the official timeframe for removal, but let’s be real about this: it’s dead. It’s super-dead. It’s people-are-selling-Flash-game-archives-on-Steam dead. That last bit actually makes me happy, because Flash games were a huge part of my childhood, and the archives must be preserved. Before I’d ever heard of video cards, frames per second, and “git gud”, I was whiling away many an hour on disney.com, cartoonnetwork.com, MiniClip, Kongregate, and other sites, looking for games. I think we’ve established in my previous work that even as a missionary kid, I did not have a social life. The Internet itself gave me a way to reach out and see beyond my house, my city, and my world, and it was wonderful. Flash was a part of that era when the Internet felt new, fresh, and loaded with potential. Flash never sent anyone abuse, or death threats. Flash was for silly animations, and games that my parent’s computer could just barely handle, after half an hour of downloading. I even built my first animated navigation menus in Flash, because I didn’t know any better. At all. But those menus looked exactly like the ones I’d designed in Photoshop, so that’s what mattered to me, young as I was. That was a part of Flash’s charm, really. What Flash Got Right Flash Brought Online Multimedia into the Mainstream Funny story, JavaScript was only about a year old when Flash was released. While HTML5 and JS are the de-facto technologies for getting things done now, Flash was, for many, the better option at launch. JS had inconsistent support across browsers, and didn’t come with a handy application that would let you draw and animate whatever you wanted. It was (in part) Flash that opened up a world of online business possibilities, that made people realize the Internet had potential rivalling that of television. It brought a wave of financial and social investment that wouldn’t be seen again until…

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bem css-in-js Link

Tradeoffs and Shifting Complexity

This is a masterclass from Dave: After you hit the wall of unremovable complexity, any “advances” are a shell game, making tradeoffs that get passed down to the user … you get “advances” by shifting where the complexity lives. You don’t get free reductions in complexity. In CSS land, you don’t get to pick some styling strategy and have all your troubles go away. This is plenty of nuance here, but largely whatever technologies you pick, you’re just placing the complexity in different buckets. CodePen Embed Fallback The best we can hope for is picking buckets that feel the most comfortable and productive for us and our teams. Direct Link to Article — Permalink The post Tradeoffs and Shifting Complexity appeared first on CSS-Tricks. You can support CSS-Tricks by being an MVP Supporter.

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animations Link SVG animation

Making lil’ me

Cassie Evans made a lovely illustration of herself and then used Greensock to add a flourish of animations to polish it off. Cassie wrote a series of posts about how she did it: In this post we’ll cover how to get values from the mouse movement and plug them into an animation. This is my favourite thing about SVG animation. Not mouse movement in particular, but interactivity. Exporting animation as an mp4 is cool and all. But you can’t play with it. Animating on the web opens up so many cool possibilities! Speaking of combining great illustrations with impressive animations, Jhey Tompkins recently shared a bunch of tips he’s learned from building complex CSS illustrations. This first piece of advice? It takes time and have patience. I’m sure he needed all the patience in the world to pull off his animated Matryoshka dolls. Direct Link to Article — Permalink The post Making lil’ me appeared first on CSS-Tricks. You can support CSS-Tricks by being an MVP Supporter.

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Article jamstack lighthouse performance

Make Jamstack Slow? Challenge Accepted.

“Jamstack is slowwwww.” That’s not something you hear often, right? Especially, when one of the main selling points of Jamstack is performance. But yeah, it’s true that even a Jamstack site can suffer hits to performance just like any other site.  Don’t think that by choosing Jamstack you no longer have to think about performance. Jamstack can be fast — really fast — but you have to make the right choices. Let’s see if we can spot some of the poor decisions that can lead to a “slow” Jamstack site. To do that, we’re going to build a really slow Gatsby site. Seems strange right? Why would we intentionally do that!? It’s the sort of thing where, if we make it, then perhaps we can gain a better understanding of what affects Jamstack performance and how to avoid bottlenecks. We will use continuous performance testing and Google Lighthouse to audit every change. This will highlight the importance of testing every code change. Our site will start with a top Lighthouse performance score of 100. From there, we will make changes until it scores a mere 17. It is easier to do than you might think! Let’s get started! Creating our Jamstack site We are going to use Gatsby for our test site. Let’s start by installing the Gatsby CLI installed: npm install -g gatsby-cli We can up a new Gatsby site using this command: gatsby new slow-jamstack Let’s cd into the new slow-jamstack project directory and start the development server: cd slow-jamstack gatsby develop To add Lighthouse to the mix, we need a Gatsby production build. We can use Vercel to host the site, giving Lighthouse a way to runs its tests. That requires installing the Vercel command-line tool and logging in: npm install -g vercel-cli vercel This will create the site in Vercel and put it on a live server. Here’s the example I’ve already set up that we’ll use for testing. We’ve gotta use Chrome to access directly from DevTools and run a performance audit. No surprise here, the default Gatsby site is fast: A score of 100 is the fastest you can get. Let’s see what we can do to slow it down. Slow CSS CSS frameworks are great. They can do a lot of heavy lifting for you. When deciding on a CSS framework use one that is modular or employs CSS-in-JS so that the only…

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An Introduction To Stimulus.js

An Introduction To Stimulus.js An Introduction To Stimulus.js Mike Rogers 2020-07-15T10:30:00+00:00 2020-07-17T03:06:27+00:00 The web moves pretty fast and picking an approach for your frontend that will feel sensible in a year’s time is tricky. My biggest fear as a developer is picking up a project that hasn’t been touched for a while, and finding the documentation for whatever approach they used is either non-existent or is not easily found online. About a year ago, I started using Stimulus and I felt really happy about the code I was shipping. It’s a ~30kb library which encourages small reusable sprinkles of JavaScript within your app, organized in such a way that it leaves little hints in your accessible HTML as to where to find the JavaScript it’s connected to. It makes understanding how a piece of JavaScript will interact with your page almost like reading pseudocode. Stimulus was created by the team at Basecamp — they recently released the HEY email service — to help maintain the JavaScript they write for their web applications. Historically, Basecamp has been quite good around maintaining their open-source projects, so I feel quite confident that Stimulus has been tested thoroughly, and will be maintained for the next few years. Stimulus has allowed me to build applications in a way that feels reusable and approachable. While I don’t think Stimulus will take over the web like React and Vue have, I think it is a worthwhile tool to learn. Terminology Like all frameworks, Stimulus has preferred terms for describing certain things. Luckily (and one of the main reasons I’ve taken to liking Stimulus), there are only two you’ll need to know about: Controller This refers to instances of JavaScript classes which are the building blocks of your application. It’s safe to say that when we talk about Stimulus Controllers, we’re talking about JavaScript classes. Identifier This is the name we’ll use to reference our controller in our HTML using a data attribute that is common to Stimulus codebases. Let’s Jump Into Stimulus! In the following few examples, I’m going to use code you can drop into the browser to get started right away via the library distributed via unpkg.com. Later on, I’ll cover the webpack approach which is highly encouraged as it allows for improved organization of your code and is the approach used in the Stimulus Handbook. The Boilerplate See the Pen [The Boilerplate – Stimulus](https://codepen.io/smashingmag/pen/abdjXvP)…

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