November Developers Notes 11/2018 💫
Trends
Recently, companies have often noticed an interest in voice assistants. The market in this direction is developing especially actively.
Mediocre usability of smart assistants: a study of users of Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri
The article covers both general concepts and very specific descriptions of how and for voice assistants to be used.
Design
Describe the task as a story
Why you shouldn’t read and write technical specifications in the usual format for unusual projects.
What happens to Apple cards and who fills them out?
Google Maps won the card war?
Samsung presented a lot of new products
New graphical shell OneUI
Bendable screen
Innovation or splash in the air? I've heard different opinions, but everyone thinks that it will be possible to do some very unusual things with this.
Microsoft updated Office 360 icons
I wrote in my channel Telegram: “It turned out cool, but from now on we’ll probably just use colored squares.”
How the ideal loading screen on mobile devices should look and work!
The three-second rule, animation and all the subtleties of splash screen development. Best practices can also be found in this article.
How app screenshots should look in the store.
Two word rule :) Lots of examples and time-based analytics. Examples of how it was before and how it should be done now.
5 Mistakes in Mobile Push Notification Design
DON'T and DO on the topic of Push notifications.
The User Experience of Chatbots
The article discusses chat interfaces with bots (what buttons, how and why to do it). The logic of constructing a dialogue in such chats.
Everysecond.io
Evolution of brands of famous companies.
Now closer to design tools, but not yet about online...
Falafel + AIC made a notebook for interface design.
There is a free template on the site. You can download and make something similar using available tools.
But the notebook itself turned out to be very good.
The new Iterate tool has also entered open testing.
Iterate
You draw curved squares and circles with your finger or the new Apple Pencil and from them you get an elegant and beautiful wireframe.
Development
Working with code only using an iPad. Is it real?
A deep dive on iPad productivity.
So... is it weak to interact with a device with the power of thought? Very cool research supported by materials and code.
Experimenting with brain-computer interfaces in JavaScript.
State of JavaScript 2018
We summed up the results of 2018 for JS.
Well, if we talk about ordinary work, then...
The Current State of Styling Scrollbars
A very interesting article about scrollbars was published on css-tricks. How to decorate them on websites and what you can do with them. Good read.
Redesigning your product and website for MacOS dark mode
Night themes. What we all love so much. Code something at night in your dark xCode or in some WebStorm... then open Stackoverflow and go blind from the white color. We brought special tools for adapting web pages to dark themes of operating systems.
How and why PayPal introduced GraphQL.
Designer Tools
Progression
A service for organizing collaboration between designers/developers, allowing you to evaluate their career growth. A very interesting project.
Cleverstack
A tool for organizing brainstorming. I have saved it to my bookmarks.. soon I will have the opportunity to try it in action. Maybe I'll write an article about my experience.
Squoosh
The most convenient and simple service for image quality compression (developed by Google)
Palx
You select a color - the tool gives auxiliary colors for the color you suggest.
Metatags.io
A tool that will show how your website looks on social networks, search engines and help correct this appearance.
Flaticon Pattern maker
A tool for easily creating patterns from flaticon icons. It turns out quickly and beautifully.
Emojibuilder
You can create your own Emoji based on Apple emoji.
UI Faces
The service will find you userpics from various resources according to the requested selection conditions. There is a free plugin for popular design tools.
NES.css
NES-style CSS framework. Do you hear this sound too?
DrawKit
Library of illustrations in the style of Dropbox and Slack under MIT license.
Everyone needs a base to start from.
Everyone needs to start somewhere. Here you will find all sorts of different resources to start a new design project.
We are DesignBase.
New popular plugins for Sketch
VK Data Sketch Plugin
A plugin that uses data from VKontakte as data for your layouts.
Turn Wireframes to UI
Plugin for quickly translating Wireframes into UI.
TimeLapse
The plugin records how you design your designs and then compiles a sped-up video from it.
Developer Tools and Libraries
web dev
If you want to improve your knowledge, come here. If you want to check your product, come here too. Cool service for testing, training and implementing features.
Loopback 4
A convenient and simple framework for developing APIs in Node.js with its own CLI, support for TypeScript, DI, OpenAPI and GraphQL. The fourth version was released at the end of October. It is gaining popularity very quickly.
Conventional Commits
Conventional Commits, a commit naming convention that improves the readability of history and allows automatic generation of a list of changes and determination of the next version (when using semver)
Graphpack
A configuration-free, minimalistic GraphQL server with live reloading, sandboxing and everything else.
Javascript Binary Bundles
For faster loading time due to fewer requests and an optimised binary format, closely compatible with Javascript internals. It is optimised in balance between size and performance, preferring performance when in doubt.
NginxConfig
NGiИX config generator.
Enquirer
Beautiful CLIs that are easy to use and create.
Signals
A very simple and highly customizable NodeJS logger.
html-sketchapp
There are a lot of tools for exporting Sketch → HTML. This solution reverses this reaction. I haven’t tried it myself, but the topic is definitely interesting and perhaps someday there will be a need for such a tool.
myth
Pure CSS preprocessed code.
It’s like a CSS polyfill :)
react-stateful-fn — Functional stateful components
Functional components are considered best practice in React, but as soon as we need local component state we cannot use them. Let’s fix that!
Well, at the end of the article I would like to congratulate everyone on the upcoming New Year and show an example of an ingenious UX solution in the traditions of Coca-Cola.
The next digest will be in early January 🎄 don’t be bored 😉
Helped me select developer tools @itsheavy. I hope you will continue to send me interesting things 😉
We’ll make a separate selection about optimization later.
If anyone has any interesting materials that can be included in the collection, send them to me on Telegram @devstorm.