19 Apr 2016
Once upon a time, a time not so long ago, in your favourite app store, you could find a magical blue icon: the fantastical Songza creature. The one with a toothy smile and crazy eyes?
The music app was one of my favourites and I was said to see it go and morph into Google Music. While I am a general fan of the Google apps, Google Music has failed to befriend me. I think it was the fact that I am a creature of habit, and the UI has changed just enough to throw me off. I could not find my favourite playlists. And there seemed to be ads, constantly. And surprisingly to me? The ads were for podcasts.
I am a big fan of the podcasts, so the fact that Google has introduced the Songza model to podcast listening seems really cool. People love podcasts, Google loves podcasts+podcasters
My favourites?
I am not a designer. Well, maybe not yet. But I do enjoy finding out about design workflow, especially when it comes to graphic design and UX/UI experience crafting. The podcast is always fun, and there will usually be a few puns and a lot of talk about design tools and those ethereal things - The Pixels.
I started listening to this when I first started my college course on programming. It is full of inspirational stories of people getting into code, at any stage in their life and from any background you can think of. Paul Ford, the author of the incredible What Is Code story in Bloomberg, has recently been on the show, and you just shouldn’t miss that chat.
This is a delightfully cooky … audio drama. It is …special, featuring characters like the The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home, a levitating cat and quotes such as “If you love someone, set them free. Set them free now. This is the police, and we have you surrounded.”
These guys know .NET, also - other things, such as best practices and what it really means to be an Intermediate or a Senior Developer. Apparently, they are still learning programming, and I am still learning from them about all the things I don’t know. Thanks, guys!
You cannot fail to mention a classic, can you? The gripping first Season was worse than Netflix, when it comes to binging on a good story. It is a murder mystery, and it is real life, and I am pretty sure this is the podcast that made me truly appreciate the podcast art.
25 Oct 2015
… and has been, for quite awhile now.
Responsive web design, if you are unfamiliar with the term, basically means that your website will scale to any screen, and look good (or at least the way you have intended it to) on any device. This has become the standard in the industry, given the plethora of mobile devices currently flooding the market.
There is something to be said against a separate mobile website. Creative Bloq talked about that in a great article on responsiveness that includes a nifty little demo. Mobile sites have a misfortune of being scaled down versions with limited features and often unfriendly interfaces. Difficulty of use to the intended audience can only be matched by developer’s frustrations - adjusting content and maintaining two different codebases makes for a headache. And you cannot get away with a mobile unfriendly site these days, due to Google’s ranking algorithms that favour the mobile friendly. The Mobile-geddon has been a very real thing earlier this year, and much talked about on multiple news sources. Though, Google has not left web developers stranded, and provided some good overviews on responsiveness. There is even a Mobile Friendly Test you can utilize to check any URL. Googlebot will analyze the site and list any problems it might see, such as text being too small, links being too close, or any blocked content. (Also known as all the things that I have to fix with this blog. Thank you, Googlebot!)
Responsiveness comes as a saviour to the mobile friendly design.
Some key features of responsive design include:
1. Mobile first approach.
Consider small devices first and create your foundation with the smaller resolution in mind. Once all the main features are taken care of, start scaling it up and moving things around to take advantage of larger screens. Making a Case for Mobile First Designs is a quick and convincing read on the importance of the concept.
Basically, media queries is how you will differentiate between the different devices and capture the screen width. This is essential for Step 1. Remember to set your viewport and size your content to it. Here is a great tutorial on how to actually accomplish this.
3. Using relative units.
If the units are relative, scaling up and down should not be a problem at all. There are percentages of course, em (the height of the element’s font = 16px) and rem (root em: depends on the font size of the “root” element of the page, html element). This includes whitespace - padding and margins, though you can get away with pixels very often.
4. Skipping content and page anchors.
This makes for better user experience, especially on a smaller device where you would have to scroll a lot. Remember to make your anchor tags relevant to your page, since the words contained in the anchor text impact the ranking that the page will receive by search engines.
Take a look at my projects page to see an example of a responsive portfolio website.
