Setting up Gulp, Bower, Bootstrap Sass, & FontAwesome

Let’s face it. Managing front end dependencies is still a headache. As developers, we have a plethora of options for building dependencies. Some of the tools off the top of my head are Grunt, Gulp, Broccoli, Component, NPM, and probably 5 more have been released since I started writing this post. In this tutorial, I am going to focus on Gulp but I’m sure it can be modified to work with any of the others. Continue reading “Setting up Gulp, Bower, Bootstrap Sass, & FontAwesome”

iPhone 6 plus thumb zone

6-plus-thumbzone

A great graphic via mashable to keep in mind for building new iOS apps and for optimizing your mobile sites. I haven’t seen a plus in person yet, but being a short person this seems worrisome. The pictures I’ve seen make it look like an iPad mini mini.

Not only does Apple provide an API for interacting with the operating system and install apps, but they also provide an Objective-C bridge to work directly with native libraries such as Cocoa. This is HUGE.

That’s why the fact that Apple is now offering JavaScript for task automation is so compelling. It’s not that developers have been dying to write more task automations, it’s that we have all long been searching for a universal language for building applications. The fragmentation in mobile has agitated this to nearly a tipping point. Nobody wants to install different IDEs, learn different SDKs, and maintain separate code bases. It’s simply not sustainable. Cross-compilation is appealing for this reason, but results in enormously bloated apps and a level of complexity between the developer and the operating system that they cannot control. If there is one thing developers hate, it’s a black box.

I totally missed this announcement but indeed it’s very exciting and could be a huge step for bringing web developers into true app development. Hopefully, it gets integrated beyond just Automator.

This update cannot be installed because it requires at least 6.9 GB of storage. You can make more storage available by deleting items in Usage Settings.

— iOS 8

EVERY iOS UPGRADE, EVER!

This might be old news to you, but new to me:

In order to solve this problem, we decided to try to understand pages by executing JavaScript. It’s hard to do that at the scale of the current web, but we decided that it’s worth it. We have been gradually improving how we do this for some time. In the past few months, our indexing system has been rendering a substantial number of web pages more like an average user’s browser with JavaScript turned on.

I just ran into indexing of JavaScript that was embedded inside an iFrame. I figured no way they could index that, I was wrong.

Typekit Typography Lessons:

Lessons walk through specific topics or methods in the practice of typography, with a clear objective or takeaway skill that can be immediately applied to design work.

A great resource for typography, one of things in web development that I struggle to get exactly right.