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The word anticipatory comes from the Latin anticipare, which means “taking care of ahead of time.” We normally associate it with something that happens, is performed or felt in anticipation of something.

In a way, most products contain at least one element of anticipation. Aaron Shapiro from HUGE defined anticipatory design as a method where it’s up to the designer to simplify processes as much as possible for users, minimizing difficulty by making decisions on their behalf.

The post What You Need To Know About Anticipatory Design appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

Unity and Epic’s Unreal Engine, the popular middleware tools frequently used by game developers, are not limited to creating compiled applications that run as an executable. With the advent of WebGL and asm.js, developers can now harness much of the power of their computing device from within the browser and access markets previously unavailable. In this tutorial, I’ll show you a slice of “how”. Unity previously had a web player, which was a downloadable plugin that used ActiveX. Chrome killed support for NPAP (Netscape Plugin API), but announced it over one year ago. In April, with the release of Chrome 42 stable, they finally put the axe to it. There are a number of reasons as to why, but most notably they stated “hangs, crashes, security incidents, and code complexity. Google suggests using web standards instead, such as WebGL, which I will explain below. Microsoft is following suit and deprecating ActiveX, VBScript, attachEvent, and other legacy technologies in favor of web standards. The need for ActiveX controls has been significantly reduced by HTML5-era capabilities, which also produces interoperable code across browsers. Why compile to JavaScript? JavaScript is the only language which works in all web browsers. Although only JavaScript will run in the browser, you can still […]

If you’re a JavaScript developer then you probably love finding new tools. I’m always scouting GitHub and Twitter feeds to locate interesting new JS code libraries for project work.

Siddharth Parmar is a developer on GitHub who just released a library called gradStop.js. It runs with Angular.js and gives developers control over creating & styling in-browser gradient stops.

This may not prove as useful to some people who don’t need such a feature — after all, it’s not that hard to recreate something like this in CSS.

But the value appears when you’re trying to manipulate gradients based on a certain color scheme, or based on user interactions with the page. gradStop.js is not some revolutionary library that you’ll need to use on every future project. But it is something cool that once again proves JavaScript is a really versatile language.

You can download gradStop.js from the GitHub repo or check out a live demo on CodePen.

Also if you build anything cool with gradStop.js feel free to share a link in the comments below.

Read More at Introducing gradStop.js: A JavaScript Library for Equidistant Gradient Stops

The beloved web design blog Smashing Magazine has been putting on a wonderful conference for the past 4 years, and 2015 will be no different.

Smashing Conference is hosted and maintained by the overarching parent company Smashing Media AG. They’re also responsible for publishing the Smashing books of both print & digital variety.

Interestingly enough, the Smashing Conference will actually be held twice in Autumn: September 14th in Freiburg, Germany is followed up on October 20th in Barcelona, Spain.

These two events are sponsored under a similar name, but the speakers & content will be undeniably unique. They both follow the amazing Smashing Conf NYC which occurred earlier this summer, along with Smashing Conf LA from April 2015.

All tickets for the September conference have been sold out(except for workshops). But October tickets are still on sale, so act quick if you’re interested.

The October conference includes some of the largest names in web/UI design like Andrew Clarke, Chris Coyier, and Patrick Hamann(among so many other amazing people!)

A wonderful video was created & posted by AOTV which highlights the Smashing Conference of 2013. Check it out and if you’d want to go be sure to reserve your tickets & airfare ASAP!

Also there’s a huge collection of SmashingConf videos uploaded to Vimeo for anyone who can’t make it to the event. The content is fabulous and of course it’s great to have access – but nothing can beat really being there and experiencing the conference for yourself.

Stay updated with the event’s speakers through Facebook and on Twitter @smashingconf.

Read More at Smashing Conference 2015 hits Freiburg and Barcelona this Fall

The Node team has grown to 44 collaborators submitting ideas and bug reports on this open-source web framework. The team has just put together a final stable release of Node v4.0.0 with a lot of new features.

A big part of the new Node v4 release is a continuation of supporting features with io.js. Most notably this includes support for many ES6 features that some developers have been looking for.

ES6 is ECMAScript in it’s 6th release, basically an alternative to JavaScript but with a modern update for the 2015 dev environment.

In this case it’s not exactly used as a completely separate language, but rather combined into Node.js with support for major browsers. Node has a full documentation page for ES6 devs that includes release notes & future support.

This latest version of Node v4 has been tested on a wide array of ARM systems and processors – notably OS X, Windows, FreeBSD, SmartOS, along with many Linux variants. Plus first-class support for ARM processors allows developers to whip up Node applications that can run on a broader spectrum of smartphones.

Basically Node v4 is built to work on a vast number of devices with a whole lot more support from a developer’s standpoint.

You can pull down the latest v4.0.0 release right from Node’s download page and get moving right away. Experienced devs will have no problem jumping into new features, but newer devs should also feel comfortable learning the ropes with this latest stable release.

Also to read more about specific changes & bug fixes take a look at Node’s official blog post containing all the juicy details.

Read More at Node.js Publicly Releases Node v4.0.0

When we first heard about Slack we were ranting and/or raving. We compared it to HipChat, arguably the most well-known chat application.

We somewhat humorously did the same with Sketch App: we compared it to Photoshop, because it was so appeasing to finally have somebody square up to Adobe – even more so because Bohemian Coding was(and still is) a much smaller company that we could root for like an underdog.

Slack was no different, so it’s no wonder that two of the biggest trends in design tools and communication apps work splendidly together. One of Slack’s most redeeming features is the amount of services that you can integrate with.

For designers one of the most important integrations is Sketch. Let’s have a look at how this works.

Installing the “Send to Slack” Plugin

Open Sketch and open up Slack as well. You can download Send to Slack for free if you click the “Download ZIP” button on the right-hand side.

When you’ve unzipped the download, switch back to Sketch and navigate to Plugins ? Reveal Plugins Folder. Paste the contents of your .zip file here and restart Sketch App to activate it.

Generating a Slack API Token

Sketch first needs to know where you’re sending the artboards, and for that you need to log into your Slack team and create a token for your team.

Copy that token to the clipboard because we’ll need it in a moment.

Sending to Slack

Navigate to Plugins again but this time select “Send to Slack”. You have the choice of sending artboards to either a channel, a group, a specific user in your team, or even the Slackbot!

Send it there for a test or show your teammates how easy it is to showcase your design work to the everyone without ever leaving the Sketch window

Note: First-time users will be asked for that token.

Read More at How to Send Sketch Artboards with Slack

Web designers are intimately familiar with the term “responsive web design”. This is a layout which adapts & responds based on the screen’s current size.

Mobile applications have not exactly following this same rhetoric. Apple devices originally started with just the iPhone screen. This grew into iPhone screens with smaller & larger dimensions, plus iPad screens with alternate dimensions. App development has been turned into a spectrum of support with many chaotic parts.

Mobile app design needs its responsive revolution – and it seems Twitter is taking a step forward in this direction.

Just announced in their recent blog post, Twitter has released a new mobile app that fully supports all iOS devices in one unified library of code. The redesign maintains consistent features and interface experiences between a multitude of devices.

The team at Twitter refers to this as Adaptive UI.

Reading your Timeline should be a great experience on any iOS device, no matter the screen size or orientation. For this reason, we must consider different devices and their characteristics. So we built our own responsive system, starting with the typographic elements that make a great reading experience, and built from there.

Their goal is to create one single application that adapts based on certain characteristics of the device. These characteristics could be screen dimensions, font size, or device orientation(among others).

As far as I’m aware, this is the first major company actively working to simplify the mobile app design process.

It’s clear that website designers have truly benefitted from the advancements of responsive design. Could adaptive UI techniques be the same equivalent for iOS + Android developers? Time holds the answer. But either way it’s clear that Twitter is willing to pioneer this technology by steamrolling a new route towards more unified & concise iOS app development.

Read More at Twitter for iOS Unifies a Single Responsive App UI

Recently a poster on Reddit stumbled onto a curious point from a 1989 book named “Trademarks & Symbols of the World”. It just so happens to contain a logo mark that exactly replicates the current Airbnb logo.

There’s no reason to think this was premeditated as the shape is rather basic and easy to recreate. But the odds are simply astounding!

You can see this in the picture below. Airbnb’s doppleganger is located in the third row, 2nd in from the edge(labeled as #36):

A Redditor tracked down the source of the original logo from the 1989 book copy. It was originally designed by a Japanese designer Akisato Ueda for a movie drive-in theater named Azuma. This dates back to 1975 but it’s unclear when Azuma would have closed down or ceased using this logo.

This does make sense, as the Trademarks book was written by a Japanese designer named Yasaburo Kuwayama.

You can actually buy a copy of this book right from Amazon if you’re interested to check it out.

Read More at The Airbnb Logo was found in a Logo Book from 1989

It’s surprising how many people move into the field of copywriting. It’s a much-needed position to fill in advertising and marketing agencies. But copywriters also manage content in publications like magazines, TV guides, instruction manuals, and many other printed publications. It seems almost every company or idea rests on the wordsmithing abilities of talented copywriters.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to portfolio design. The layout style tends to morph depending on what you create and how you design. But overall it’s just a website meant to showcase a particular talent. I hope this gallery provides inspiring ideas to other writers who are currently in the process of building or redesigning their own personal website.

Ashley Milhollin

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Interactive maps are a fantastic way to present geographic data to your visitors. Libraries like Google Maps and Open Street Maps are a popular choice to do this and they excel at visualizing street-level data. However, for small-scale maps, SVG maps are often a better option. They are lightweight, fully customizable and are not encumbered by any licensing restrictions.

It’s possible to find a number of SVG maps released under permissible licenses in the Wikimedia Commons. Unfortunately, it’s likely that you will eventually find these options lacking. The map you need may not exist, may be out of date (as borders change), or may not be well-formatted for web use. This article will explain how to create your own SVG maps using Natural Earth data and open source tools. You will then be able to create SVG maps of any area of the world, using any projection, at any resolution. As an illustration, we will create an SVG world map.

The post A Guide To Building SVG Maps From Natural Earth Data appeared first on Smashing Magazine.