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Today’s Deal of the Week is one that has been before and before and before. Each time Mighty Deals closes it, customers flood their inboxes demanding to bring it back. So, by public demand, here it is again. Grab yourself some stock material by DepositPhotos before you’ll have to wait for the next iteration of that deal. And you can never be sure that this “next time” will ever come. So take the chance while you can… Depositphotos offers one of the largest stock photo libraries on the Web, and you can nab either 100 or 200 images of your choice for up to 92% off the regular price! What makes this deal so spectacular is that besides a giant library to browse, you can select any size photo you want, including the much sought-after and generally pricey XXL and XXXL sizes. Over 30 million high-quality images. Less than $1 each. Do you really need to even think about this one? Highlights: Save a Fortune If you regularly deal with high-quality stock photography, you know the costs can add up. In most cases, you can easily pay $5 or $10 per image, even more for large images. But thanks to […]

When you are new to front-end development and start mastering HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, the obvious next step is to put your hands on tools that most developers use to stay sane in this complex space. You too deserve to have more flexibility and features while writing your CSS sheets by using less. You too deserve to optimize bandwidth by minifying your JS code. You too deserve to be able to automatically check that your JS code is good using JSHint. You deserve all this good stuff. So you start to use all these great tools by hand; running more and more command lines manually. Sometimes, you forget to run the less compiler… Sometimes you forget to run JSHint and a bug is shipped… And suddenly you find yourself wondering: is there any solution to automate all these tools? How can you create a repeatable workflow to prevent you from doing mistakes? Obviously a solution exists, and two tools in particular are waiting for you to get started: Grunt and Gulp. As a newbie using these tools, you are wondering how they work and which one to use, aren’t you? Well perfect then, you are reading the right article! The […]

We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork, and as designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one — desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd.

This creativity mission has been going on for seven years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for August 2015. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper!

The post Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: August 2015 appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

Gaming on the Web has come a long way with HTML5 technologies like Canvas, WebGL, and WebAudio. It’s now possible to produce high-fidelity graphics and sound within the browser. However, to provide a true gaming experience, you need input devices designed for gaming. The Gamepad API is a proposed standard of the W3C, and is designed to provide a consistent API across browsers. The Gamepad API allows users to connect devices like an Xbox Controller to a computer and use them for browser-based experiences! If you have a gamepad, try plugging it into your computer and press a button. You’ll see the Xbox controller below light up to mirror each movement you make! Try it out interactively here. This tutorial is the 3rd in a series on Flight Arcade – built to demonstrate what’s possible on the web platform and in the new Microsoft Edge browser and EdgeHTML rendering engine. You can find the first two articles on WebGL and Web API, plus interactive code and examples for this article at flightarcade.com. Flexible API The Gamepad API is intelligently designed with flexibility in mind. At a basic level, it provides access to buttons and axes. Button values range from [ […]

In 1992, I thought I was the best programmer in the world. In my defense, I had just graduated from college, this was pre-Internet, and I lived in Boulder, Colorado working in small business jobs where I was lucky to even hear about other programmers much less meet them.

I eventually fell in with a guy named Bill O’Neil, who hired me to do contract programming. He formed a company with the regrettably generic name of Computer Research & Technologies, and we proceeded to work on various gigs together, building line of business CRUD apps in Visual Basic or FoxPro running on Windows 3.1 (and sometimes DOS, though we had a sense by then that this new-fangled GUI thing was here to stay).

Bill was the first professional programmer I had ever worked with. Heck, for that matter, he was the first programmer I ever worked with. He’d spec out some work with me, I’d build it in Visual Basic, and then I’d hand it over to him for review. He’d then calmly proceed to utterly demolish my code:

• Tab order? Wrong.
• Entering a number instead of a string? Crash.
• Entering a date in the past? Crash.
• Entering too many characters? Crash.
• UI element alignment? Off.
• Does it work with unusual characters in names like, say, O'Neil? Nope.

One thing that surprised me was that the code itself was rarely the problem. He occasionally had some comments about the way I wrote or structured the code, but what I clearly had no idea about is testing my code.

I dreaded handing my work over to him for inspection. I slowly, painfully learned that the truly difficult part of coding is dealing with the thousands of ways things can go wrong with your application at any given time – most of them user related.

That was my first experience with the buddy system, and thanks to Bill, I came out of that relationship with a deep respect for software craftsmanship. I have no idea what Bill is up to these days, but I tip my hat to him, wherever he is. I didn’t always enjoy it, but learning to develop discipline around testing (and breaking) my own stuff unquestionably made me a better programmer.

It’s tempting to lay all this responsibility at the feet of the mythical QA engineer.

QA Engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a sfdeljknesv.

— Bill Sempf (@sempf) September 23, 2014

If you are ever lucky enough to work with one, you should have a very, very healthy fear of professional testers. They are terrifying. Just scan this “Did I remember to test” list and you’ll be having the worst kind of flashbacks in no time. And that’s the abbreviated version of his list.

I believe a key turning point in every professional programmer’s working life is when you realize you are your own worst enemy, and the only way to mitigate that threat is to embrace it. Act like your own worst enemy. Break your UI. Break your code. Do terrible things to your software.

This means programmers need a good working knowledge of at least the common mistakes, the frequent cases that average programmers tend to miss, to work against. You are tester zero. This is your responsibility.

Let’s start with Patrick McKenzie’s classic Falsehoods Programmers Believe about Names:

1. People have exactly one canonical full name.
2. People have exactly one full name which they go by.
3. People have, at this point in time, exactly one canonical full name.
4. People have, at this point in time, one full name which they go by.
5. People have exactly N names, for any value of N.
6. People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space.
7. People’s names do not change.
8. People’s names change, but only at a certain enumerated set of events.
9. People’s names are written in ASCII.
10. People’s names are written in any single character set.

That’s just the first 10. There are thirty more. Plus a lot in the comments if you’re in the mood for extra credit. Or, how does Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Time grab you?

1. There are always 24 hours in a day.
2. Months have either 30 or 31 days.
3. Years have 365 days.
4. February is always 28 days long.
5. Any 24-hour period will always begin and end in the same day (or week, or month).
6. A week always begins and ends in the same month.
7. A week (or a month) always begins and ends in the same year.
8. The machine that a program runs on will always be in the GMT time zone.
9. Ok, that’s not true. But at least the time zone in which a program has to run will never change.
10. Well, surely there will never be a change to the time zone in which a program has to run in production.
11. The system clock will always be set to the correct local time.
12. The system clock will always be set to a time that is not wildly different from the correct local time.
13. If the system clock is incorrect, it will at least always be off by a consistent number of seconds.
14. The server clock and the client clock will always be set to the same time.
15. The server clock and the client clock will always be set to around the same time.

Are there more? Of course there are! There’s even a whole additional list of stuff he forgot when he put that giant list together.

I think you can see where this is going. This is programming. We do this stuff for fun, remember?

But in true made-for-TV fashion, wait, there’s more! Seriously, guys, where are you going? Get back here. We have more awesome failure states to learn about:

• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Geography

• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Addresses

• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Gender

At this point I wouldn’t blame you if you decided to quit programming altogether. But I think it’s better if we learn to do for each other what Bill did for me, twenty years ago — teach less experienced developers that a good programmer knows they have to do terrible things to their code. Do it because if you don’t, I guarantee you other people will, and when they do, they will either walk away or create a support ticket. I’m not sure which is worse.

Often within a project, the presentation of our content changes based on certain needs. We see this when we use media queries to change our styles based on the user device. CSS quantity queries follow the same concept of changing the styles based on a condition: the condition within a quantity query being the number of sibling elements.

An example would be navigation where items are 25% wide when four items are available; yet when there are five items available, the width of the navigation items changes to 20%. This is a common problem with dynamic site frameworks like WordPress or Ghost. A client might not realize the complications that could arise, for example, by adding one more menu item when the CSS is not set up to fit it in.

The post Constructing CSS Quantity Queries On The Fly appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

Digital coupons are the online cousins of the tried and tested discount stamps. Both work the same way. But instead of scissors to cut them out you just use the copy-paste function. In this part of our online marketing series, we will show you how entrepreneurs can successfully use this tool. What is Digital Couponing? Online coupon campaigns take a more than 100 years old marketing tool and transfer it to the virtual world: the tried and tested discount stamps. You don’t have to collect them anymore, though. Nowadays it’s all about coupon codes. When buying something online, you will come across a field at checkout where to type in a promotional code. This way, you will save the fixed amount in dollars or percent that is promised with the coupon code. The discount is the buying incentive and therefore it’s what this marketing tool is all about. So this makes it rather obvious where online coupons are used most frequently: coupon codes are most suitable for online stores selling stuff, especially in the B2C retail industry. When doing such a campaign, it’s important to come up with an efficient way to distribute the code, to get the message out. […]

When it comes to CSS techniques, nobody is more stubborn and smart enough to find solutions to any problems than Lea Verou. Recently, Lea has written, designed and published “CSS Secrets”, a truly fantastic book on the little CSS tricks and techniques for solving everyday problems. If you thought that you know CSS fairly well, think again: you will be surprised. In this article, we publish a few nuggets from the book, which were also presented in Lea’s recent talk at SmashingConf New York — on designing simple pie charts, with CSS. Please notice that some demos might not work as expected due to limited support in browsers. —Ed.

Pie charts, even in their simplest two-color form, have traditionally been anything but simple to create with web technologies, despite being incredibly common for information ranging from simple stats to progress indicators and timers. Implementations usually involved either using an external image editor to create multiple images for multiple values of the pie chart, or large JavaScript frameworks designed for much more complex charts.

The post Designing Flexible, Maintainable Pie Charts With CSS and SVG appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

I’ve often heard there are four stages along the road to competence: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence. Most of us begin our careers “unconsciously incompetent,” or unaware of how much we don’t know.

I’ll never forget the first time I moved from unconscious to conscious incompetence. I was working as an office manager at a small software company, and having been impressed by my writing skills, the director of sales and marketing asked me to throw together a press release, welcoming the new CEO.

The post How Copywriting Can Benefit From User Research appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

In UX design, few things are more intricate than time and personal time management — only a good arsenal of mobile design patterns and information architecture principles can save you. This is the story of redesigning the UX for a popular calenda tool on Android: Business Calendar. We’ll cover designing systems, interaction design problems, scaling across screens and platforms, research, and big business decisions and their outcomes.

Business Calendar started out as a side project, a one-man show, and is now run by a team of eight in Berlin. The app was very successful right from the time Android entered the mainstream market, and it now has an active user base of 2 million. But instead of modernizing the design and usability regularly, the developers focused on implementing user requests and customization options.

The post Making Time: Redesigning A Calendar Experience For Android appeared first on Smashing Magazine.