вторник, 18 декабря 2012 г.

Smashing Newsletter #74 (Christmas Edition): Facebook Buttons - Photoshop - jQuery

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The Smashing Email Newsletter

Issue #74 | Tuesday, December 18th 2012 | 127,868 subscribers | Previous issues

Dear Friends,

Time passes quickly, and another year reaches its ending. For us, it was a vibrant, truly smashing year. We've launched the redesign of our site and organized our very first Smashing Conference. We've produced the Smashing Book 3 as well as the brand new Mobile Book. We've also launched our Smashing eBook Library and invested more than ever into our editorial process. It was a busy year, full of discoveries and explorations.

Editorial
Our brand new Mobile Book, available as hardcover and as eBook. We hope you'll love it as much as we do.

We've got big plans for the next year as well. You can expect Christian Heilmann's new book and the very special Smashing Book 4. We've started planning the second Smashing Conference as well as meet-ups and regular workshops. We have a plenty of special, exclusive articles in works, and also something new for our legendary monthly desktop wallpapers.

We'll be honored to take this journey with you! Whether you just discovered us, or have been reading us for a while, we're very excited to get out of the comfort zone and face new challenges and opportunities. Feel free to share your ideas, thoughts, feedback, anything else using the hashtag #sm2012 on Twitter — we'd love to know what you think!

Happy holidays everyone! Enjoy your time with your family, stay offline for a couple of extra days and have a fantastic, successful and a truly smashing 2013!

— The Smashing Editorial Team

Table of Contents

01. "I Really Like Your Style But..."
02. How Do Users Experience Apps?
03. Stop The Social Media Buttons Madness!
04. Taking Office Sports To The Next Level
05. (Photoshop) Learning Never Stops
06. Sticky Captions For Images With jQuery
07. New on Smashing Job Board
08. Smashing Highlights (From Archives)
09. Recent Articles on Smashing Magazine


1. "I Really Like Your Style But..."

As designers, we often have a very unique technical perspective on the way things work and how they are built for the Web. However, many clients do not have the insights that we take for granted. That's not our fault, but it's not their fault either. In fact, it's our job as problem solvers to clearly explain and communicate to our clients why we think they are wrong.

I Really Like Your Style But...

Some of the quotes from clients have become almost legendary, popping up every other project; others reveal common misconceptions and general mistakes that happen as a project develops. Sharp Suits reviews and illustrates some common client quotes in their gallery. The result is an entertaining resource which might even help you resolve a new issue by not taking it too seriously, or by making it clear that design decisions should be in your hands. (vf)


2. How Do Users Experience Apps?

If you want to create a great new app, you want to optimize the path that your users will follow when they use your app. You have to think about user flows, i.e. the initial point from where a user starts, where he ends up, and the transitions in between. In this case, UX Archive might be just what you are looking for: a showcase of user flows in apps. The website takes you on a path through each and every step of the UX experience of some beautiful iPhone apps — in a sequence of interface screenshots.

How Do Users Experience Apps?

The tool looks closely at how these apps handle exploration of features, onboarding, search and sharing. This smart classification helps you compare the different design patterns and get an impression of what might work in your project. It would mean a whole lot of work if you had to get this kind of data by yourself, that's for sure. Drop that effort, lean back and experience some exciting user flows. It's very inspiring and gives you a feeling of being able to travel back and forth in time. (ea)


3. Stop The Social Media Buttons Madness!

Integrating social media widgets such as the almighty "Tweet" badges or Facebook "Like" buttons is a common feature of Web projects. However, when it comes to performance, all those buttons are quite a nightmare, slowing down the sites with HTTP requests and convoluted JavaScript. So if users don't have a good connection or want to read an article on their mobile device, the chances are high that they never actually see the article, all due to the "sharing" buttons.

Stop The Social Media Buttons Madness!

SocialCount by Filament Group is a clever solution to resolve the performance issues for social widgets. The jQuery plugin lets you easily customize the appearance of the buttons, and defer loading of individual native widgets until the user actually expresses intent to share the content with their friends. The library is just 3 KB for the JavaScript and CSS (after minification and gzip).

Alternatively, you could use the Social Share Privacy jQuery plugin by Heise which was developed out of privacy concerns and allows users to select which social network they'd like to keep activated by default. Now, if that's not a good reason to not load "native" social media buttons by default, what is? (vf)


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4. Taking Office Sports To The Next Level

Do you play any office sports? Not ringing any bells? Well, here are some examples: foosball, ping pong, pool, Wii…In fact, Nathan Hoad observed that the majority of cool workplaces have some kind of olympic competitions with at least one kind of office sport.

Taking Office Sports To The Next Level

As with many great ideas, this one is simple but effective: he invented the Athletable, an online tool that helps with recording the results and also calculating ranks and scores. The tool costs $10 a month and allows you to add up to 50 players for every sport. You simply enter the names and the kind of game and let the tool do the rest. Sounds more like fun now, doesn't it? (tts)


5. (Photoshop) Learning Never Stops

Are you a Photoshop geek through and through? Are you still cherishing all the great tricks and shortcuts of your favorite application or are you already taking them for granted? Take another look at some of the best Photoshop layers tricks and shortcuts by Veerle Pieters.

(Photoshop) Learning Never Stops

The article reviews 30 useful Photoshop shortcuts and tricks which Veerle learned along her way. These tricks may be familiar to you, or you might have already forgotten them: displaying layers, layers panel preview options, auto-select layers, and many more. Some of the tricks Veerle discovered on Julieanne Kost's Blog, a great source of in-depth tutorials, training, techniques and shortcuts for working with Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. (ea)


6. Sticky Captions For Images With jQuery

We all know the drill: you have lots of image thumbnails with captions shown on hover, yet they are not visible to the user because the bottom of the image is overflowing the viewport. The user would have to scroll down to see the section of the image with the caption.

Sticky Captions For Images With jQuery

Sticky Captions is a technique by Manoela Ilic that keeps the caption visible by making it stick to the image and "moving" with it. The solution is a jQuery plugin that also uses the jQuery Masonry plugin. Perhaps there is a way to achieve the same result with pure JavaScript as well? (vf)


7. New on Smashing Job Board

Here are the job openings published recently at our very own Smashing Job Board:

  • Mathematician Web Developer at Hurricane Electric (Fremont, CA)
    Looking for a great opportunity to learn and grow in knowledge of the Internet and to put your knowledge to use? Looking for a position at a large, stable, and growing technology company? Looking to contribute to a team with worldwide reach and impact? Join our team and grow, learning about leading-edge Internet technology in a fun, interesting environment.

  • Back-end developer (PHP) at Dusted. (London, UK)
    To support our growing digital team, we are seeking a London based, full-time back-end developer that has an unhealthy interest in development, UX and design. For digital projects, we aim to provide the user with a great experience, while meeting project goals and providing clients with easy-to-use content management platforms.

  • Senior Graphic Designer at Promega Corporation (Madison, WI)
    The Area – Marketing Services. Our job is to provide relevant, often times complex, information in a manner which is both easy to access and refreshing to review. Our communications create an avenue for exchange. Our ambition to follow best practices integrates our capabilities in scientific writing, web development, graphic design and marketing.


The Mobile Book

8. Smashing Highlights (From Archives)

  • Free Food and Cakes Icon Set (20 Icons)
    A set with 20 beautiful, original and sweet icons in resolutions 48×48px – 128×128px and formats .png, .ico, .incs and .tif. Also, the vector source (.eps) is available for free download as well.

  • The Z-Index CSS Property: A Comprehensive Look
    z-index has undoubtedly caused as much confusion and frustration as any other CSS property. Ironically, however, when z-index is fully understood, it is a very easy property to use, and offers an effective method for overcoming many layout challenges.

  • Lessons From Swiss Style Graphic Design
    Also known as International Style, the Swiss Style does not simply describe a style of graphic design made in Switzerland. It became famous through the art of very talented Swiss graphic designers, but it emerged in Russia, Germany and Netherlands in the 1920's.


9. Recent Articles on Smashing Magazine


Join our community: follow us on Twitter and join us on Facebook

The authors are: Esther Arends (ea), Talita Telma Stöckle (tts), Iris Lješnjanin (il), Vitaly Friedman (vf), Sven Lennartz (sl), Christiane Rosenberger (research), Elja Friedman (tools), Clarissa Peterson (proofreading).

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среда, 12 декабря 2012 г.

The New Smashing Mobile Book Is Finally Here!

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The Smashing Email Newsletter

Friends,

Our brand new Smashing Mobile Book has finally arrived, and it has almost reached your doorstep! If you've pre-ordered the book weeks ago, then it's really only a matter of days! Until then, the complimentary digital version is waiting for you in your Smashing Shop dashboard. And if you haven't ordered just yet, make sure to get the book now!

At this very moment, all pre-orders are being shipped from Berlin, Germany, by airmail. Due to a unexpected huge amount of pre-orders in the past days, delivery of the new book orders will take a bit longer since we only had a limited amount of printed books available in pre-sale stock. Of course, we are printing extra copies in this very moment as you read this mailing, and will deliver future book orders in January 2013.


eBook Is Now Available (PDF, ePUB, Kindle)

The eBook of the Mobile Book is available for download immediately! If you have pre-ordered your copy, your copy of the eBook is waiting for you in your Download area. Also, please keep in mind that the eBook is included in the Smashing eBook Library—our annual subscription with 70% discount on all Smashing eBooks.

If you still haven’t ordered yet, you can get the Mobile book right now, and start reading within a couple of minutes! The printed book is in fact a fantastic, beautiful masterpiece crafted thoroughly and manually. The printed book has a special detail which you'll discover as soon as you hold it it in your hands, but let's make that our small secret for now.


Thank You For Your Support!

We would appreciate it if you could inform your friends, colleagues and followers about the book. Feel free to link to www.the-mobile-book.com and use the hashtag #mobilebook on Twitter. If you choose to blog about the book, please feel free to use the images and information from our Mobile Book media kit (.ZIP, 6.6 Mb) which includes screenshots, photos and general information about the book.

Thank you for your support, everybody—we truly appreciate it. And we hope that you'll love the Mobile Book just as much as we do!

Yours truly,
The Smashing Team

Join our community: follow us on Twitter and join us on Facebook


вторник, 4 декабря 2012 г.

Smashing Newsletter #73: Photoshop - JavaScript - CSS - Web Fonts

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The Smashing Email Newsletter

Issue #73 | Tuesday, December 4th 2012 | 124,734 subscribers | Previous issues

Dear Friends,

Traditionally, December has always been a fantastic time for Web designers. Not only because of the upcoming holidays bringing along calm days and less stress, but also because of the many fantastic Advent calendar journals being published throughout the month. And this year is not going to be an exception.

Editorial

On the 1st of December, good ol' 24ways and WebAdvent have opened their doors to Web designers and developers to discuss HTML & CSS, performance, UX, freelancing, system administration, and provide visual inspiration. There is also a MDN Calendar and a WebKrauts Kalendar (available in German only).

In addition, if you're looking for a book to keep you good company during the holidays, make sure to get our upcoming printed Smashing Mobile Book with 20% discount while it lasts. The book is being printed this very minute, so you shouldn't have to wait too long!

Happy holidays everyone! We wish you a truly smashing December!

— The Smashing Editorial Team

Table of Contents

01. Getting Inner Border Radius In CSS Right
02. Best Practices On Form-Based Authentication
03. Photoshop Secrets Revealed, No Strings Attached
04. Heyoffline.js: Simple Tool, Big Impact
05. Sunrise: Your Daily Schedule Digest
06. Better Welcome Emails And Trial Conversions
07. Stay Up To Date Even When You're Short On Time
08. Plenty Of Zip Codes For Your Form Auto-Completion
09. The Exquisite Forest
10. Smashing Highlights (From Our Archives)
11. New on Smashing Job Board
12. Recent Articles on Smashing Magazine


1. Getting Inner Border Radius In CSS Right

Perhaps you've been there: You have a block element inside a padded container and both of them have different backgrounds and both have border-radius, but the rounded corners on the edges of the inner element don't look... right. It feels like the "rounded" area is off, so you have to reduce the inner border-radius to make things right again.

Getting Inner Border Radius In CSS Right

Joshua Hibbert stumbled upon a short post about this issue on CSS-tricks and put together a little tool that helps you calculate the "proper" inner radius easily. As Joshua admits, the tool is only a guide; you may encounter situations where an adjustment is required to get the best result. Nevertheless, there is no excuse to not make those border radii right from now on! (vf)


2. Best Practices On Form-Based Authentication

You have a yet another issue and Google can't really help you find the solution that you are looking for—and the replies in your social circles are slow as well. What do you do? Well, if your question is related to Web design, the chances are high that somebody has already asked this very question and perhaps got an answer. In fact, Stack Overflow threads are great for just this. However, we can do a bit more with them.

Best Practices On Form-Based Authentication

Michiel de Mare suggested that Stack Overflow should not only be a resource for specific technical questions, but also a definite resource for general guidelines on how to solve common problems. As a result, his thread "Form-Based Authentication For Websites" is an extensive guideline with best practices and expert advice including topics such as email validation, password storage, logging in, CAPTCHAs, forgotten password functionality, etc. If you have a question on the topic, it's been covered very well in the thread by the active members of the community. Why don't you open a similar thread next time you encounter a problem or just participate in an existing thread? (ml)


3. Photoshop Secrets Revealed, No Strings Attached

Photoshop secrets is a Tumblr blog by Photoshop Jedi turned Edward Sanchez and a great place to hang out, if you're keen on figuring out useful details about Photoshop — such as how to set a shortcut for style and color panels or how to set default global light to 90º. Edward collects useful tips, links to actions, practical Photoshop plugins, goodies and other resources that could be useful to designers working with Photoshop daily.

Photoshop Secrets Revealed, No Strings Attached

For example, you can find out how to export or import all your Photoshop CS6 settings, how to merge two vector shapes quickly, how to copy and paste shape colors and styles or how to change Layer Blending Modes with your keyboard. The blog is updated regularly, and if you have a Photoshop tip to share, Edward and readers of the blog will be surely pretty happy to hear from you. (ea)


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4. Heyoffline.js: Simple Tool, Big Impact

How annoying is it — especially when using a mobile browser on the go — when you have filled out a form, hit the "Submit" button and realized that your connection dropped. Often everything you have entered is gone and you have to start over from scratch.

Heyoffline.js: Simple Tool, Big Impact

Heyoffline.js is a simple tool that prevents your users from this kind of frustration. Written in CoffeeScript and compiled into JavaScript, the library can warn your users when their network goes down so that they don't lose anything. Once JavaScript is loaded, it can react to the loss of connection and change the page accordingly. Heyoffline.js is released under an MIT license and is available on GitHub. Now that's a little simple tool that can have a big impact on the user experience of your sites! (cm)


5. Sunrise: Your Daily Schedule Digest

Your day today: Woke up. Checked your email. Had a good look at your private schedule. Off to work. There, your first thing to do is look at what's on the books for today. Google Calendar. Open Facebook. Any birthdays, anniversaries, pet owners meetings. You looked at the clock and realized you just spent an inordinate amount of time finding out what your time had to be spent on today. Signed up with Sunrise.

Sunrise: Your Daily Schedule Digest

Your day tomorrow: Wake up. Check email. Receive the first of many nicely-designed daily emails from Sunrise, with all your Google Calendar schedule, Facebook birthdays and events, LinkedIn schedule and EventBrite plans nicely summarized. Maybe you'll even have a cup of coffee to celebrate the amount of time you saved. (jc)


6. Better Welcome Emails And Trial Conversions

How often do you find yourself signing up for a service just to receive a welcome email, sign in once and never visit the site again? Perhaps you are missing advanced features, or perhaps you just didn't have time to invest in learning the tool. What if it was introduced to you gradually, in a couple of simple steps? As a business owner, you might want to consider using userfox, a service that helps you build more productive onboarding emails that strengthen the relationship with your users and improve retention.

Better Welcome Emails And Trial Conversions

With userfox you can introduce your product through a sequence of emails. You can welcome new users on the first day, tell them to check out a certain feature on the fourth, ask how they're getting along after a week or introduce them to other users after two weeks. You decide on the intervals, the subjects and the content in order to explain your service gradually.

Feeling more attached, your users are more likely to remember you — and return — than if the only message they receive is the standard thank-you the second they register. All you have to do is paste a single snippet of JavaScript into your footer. It then tracks sends, opens and clicks and even handles unsubscriptions. There are custom HTML email templates as well as mobile-optimized templates that let you personalize your emails. The tool is free to use. (cm)


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7. Stay Up To Date Even When You're Short On Time

Do you want to stay up to date on the latest news but only have a few minutes to spare? Then these two sites are for you. TL;DR — short for Too Long; Didn't Read — is different from other news sites. The 5-member team behind it provides you with all the hot topics from World News and Politics to Tech and Design in tiny, digestible bits and with a beautiful sleek and clear interface. Great to keep you updated while on your morning commute.

Stay Up To Date Even When You're Short On Time

In case the short synopsis doesn't satisfy all of your information needs, a link transfers you to the original article, from well-known news sites such as The New York Times. If you are longing for something more design-centric, Sidebar is the place to get your daily dose of news. The service features five new and noteworthy design links every day — useful articles and inspiring sites. You can also subscribe to it and receive the links directly in your inbox. (cm)


8. Plenty Of Zip Codes For Your Form Auto-Completion

Zippopotamus is an initiative to crowd-source and aggregate zip code information and make it available to the public. Postal codes not only provide information about a region, they also change a lot, which means keeping track is tough. Zippopotamus wants to help by offering an API which could simplify auto-complete forms and auto-location or city, state or country information look-up.

Plenty Of Zip Codes For Your Form Auto-Completion

The site provides a free API (released under Open Database License) with JSON Response format. It supports over 60 countries already. The site is an ongoing project of Samir Ahmed and Jeff Crowell, two Computer Engineering students from Boston University who invite visitors to help to improve the site or add countries and postal codes to the project. So what's your postal address again? (ea)


9. The Exquisite Forest

Imagine a forest in which you can make the trees grow by collaborating with ideas, drawings and animations. Ar first, it sounds like a fairy tale, but this place really exists — in the virtual world, of course!

The Exquisite Forest

By clicking through the various trees displayed at Exquisite Forest, you will have the chance to observe collaborations from designers around the world and see how they grow as ideas are added. Add your idea to this project as well — it's funny to watch the trees grow. Maybe it's also a good inspiration to plant a real tree in your neighborhood. (tts)


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10. Smashing Highlights (From Our Archives)

  • Free Smashing Christmas Icon Set (39 Icons)
    All icons are designed in 3 different style: realistic 3D style, simple shape style and button style – hence the icons are extremely versatile. This set is available in both vector and pixel format and available for free download and use.

  • A Closer Look At Font Rendering
    This article presents the mechanisms of type rendering, how they were developed, and how and why they are applied by the various operating systems and browsers—so that when it comes time to choose a font for your next project, you know what to look out for to ensure the quality of the typography is consistently high.

  • The Lost Art Of Design Etiquette
    We work with a ridiculously large number of things, and how we organize them (or choose not to) is often left to personal preference. But our messy habits result in confusion for the designer or developer who inherits your work. Does it really need to be this way?


11. New on Smashing Job Board

Here are the job openings published recently at our very own Smashing Job Board:

  • Front End Wizard (Elves, Orcs and Hobbits welcome too!) at iwantmyname (Wellington, New Zealand)
    We are hiring a full-time front end developer with a passion for simplicity and building experiences that people love. We're a small international start-up where creativity, transparency and happiness are the company's core values. We have a strong commitment to open source and are frequently involved with developer community user groups, conferences and events.

  • Wordpress Expert for Information Marketing at TBA (Madison, WI)
    We are seeking an awesome individual (or team) who can produce incredible webpages and websites within the Wordpress platform. Ideally, we would like someone who can take a premium theme, like Thesis or OptimizePress, and combine it with our content to create mind blowing pages.

  • India : Come for a Holiday and bit of Experience - all paid by us. at ideaTree inc. (New Delhi, India)
    We need visionaries to manages multiple web and e-commerce ventures which we are launching across the World from our Development Centers in New Delhi & Mumbai, India. You need to have international experience in Design and Development and should be ready to either move full time to India or work remotely across IndianTime Zone.


12. Recent Articles on Smashing Magazine


Join our community: follow us on Twitter and join us on Facebook

The authors are: Melanie Lang (ml), Esther Arends (ea), Cosima Mielke (cm), Jan Constantin (jc), Talita Telma Stöckle (tts), Iris Lješnjanin (il), Vitaly Friedman (vf), Sven Lennartz (sl), Christiane Rosenberger (research), Elja Friedman (tools), Clarissa Peterson (proofreading).

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