In the past few months, chat bots have become very popular, thanks to Slack, Telegram and Facebook Messenger. But the chat bot idea is not new at all. A chat bot interface is mentioned in the famous Turing test in 1950. Then there was Eliza in 1966, a simulation of a Rogerian psychotherapist and an…
With new frameworks and libraries emerging, the tools we have at hand are constantly changing. But it’s not only our toolkit but also the way we write code that constantly evolves — new CSS conventions are developed all the time and the best practices to write JavaScript change at least every year. But then again,…
According to browser statistics, Chrome for Android is currently the largest mobile browser, or is about to become so. Still, too few web developers realize that these Chrome for Android numbers in fact contain several browsers, not just Google Chrome. After discussing the general state of affairs in this article, we’ll focus on the Chromium-based…
Web and mobile apps are moving away from pages towards completely personalized experiences. These new experiences are built on an aggregation of many individual pieces of content. The way this content is now being presented is in the form of cards. The card-based interaction model is spreading pretty widely, and you can see digital cards…
No thorough conversation about the front end today can end without mention of pattern libraries. Sometimes a pattern library appears in the form of a living style guide, or as a design system, or as the outcome of an atomic design process, or as an all-knowing user interface framework. In all of these cases, designers…
While I was away on vacation, the web development community stayed consistent, and since I’ve been back, the same well-known, long-running discussions about JavaScript, frameworks, and progressive enhancement are full on again. But on the other hand, we also see great new solutions for CSS, simple but efficient JavaScript libraries, and brave people sharing their…
Remember the days when hovering and clicking using the mouse were the most used trigger for interaction with site or app? Those days are gone. When Apple introduced the iPhone, multi-touch technology became mainstream and users learned that they could not only point and tap on the interface, but also pinch, spread, and swipe. Gestures…
Chances are pretty good that you’ve worked with, or at least understand the concept of, server compression. By compressing website assets on the server prior to transferring them to the browser, we’ve been able to achieve substantial performance gains. For quite some time, the venerable gzip algorithm has been the go-to solution for reducing the…
React.js is a popular JavaScript library for building reusable UI components. React Native takes all the great features of React, from the one-way binding and virtual DOM to debugging tools, and applies them to mobile app development on iOS and Android. With the React Native Universal Windows platform extension, you can now make your React…
When creating a mobile application, a developer imagines a model and the way users will use the application. One problem that developers face is that users do not always use an app the way it was envisaged by the developer. How do users interact with the app? What do they do in the app? Do…
