Archive for year: 2018

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Designrfix/~3/85j4tfDP-Ug/smartphone-photography-basics-bundle

Not too long ago, people invest in fancy cameras in order to take good quality photos. Some even hire professional photographers just to capture their life’s precious moments. Today, however, you no longer need to spend a huge sum of money on top-of-the-line equipment in order to take decent quality photos. In fact, your smartphone […]

The post 83% Off: Get the Smartphone Photography Basics Bundle for Only $19 appeared first on designrfix.com.

Original Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/09/smashing-book-6-release/

Smashing Book 6 Is Here: New Frontiers In Web Design

Smashing Book 6 Is Here: New Frontiers In Web Design

Vitaly Friedman

2018-09-13T13:25:00+02:00
2018-09-13T15:20:36+00:00

Imagine you were living in a perfect world. A world where everybody has fast, stable and unthrottled connections, reliable and powerful devices, exquisite screens, and capable, resilient browsers. The screens are diverse in size and pixel density, yet our interfaces adapt to varying conditions swiftly and seamlessly. What a glorious time for all of us — designers, developers, senior Webpack configurators and everybody in-between — to be alive, wouldn’t you agree?

Well, we all know that the reality is slightly more nuanced and complicated than that. That’s why we created Smashing Book 6, our shiny new book that explores uncharted territories and seeks to discover new reliable front-end and UX techniques. And now, after 10 months of work, the book is ready, and it’s shipping. Jump to table of contents and get the book right away.

eBook

Hardcover

eBook$19Get the eBook

PDF, ePUB, Kindle. Free for Smashing Members.

Hardcover$39Get the Print (incl. eBook)

Printed, quality hardcover. Free airmail shipping worldwide.

About The Book

Finding your way through front-end and UX these days is challenging and time-consuming. But frankly, we all just don’t have time to afford betting on a wrong strategy. Smashing Book 6 sheds some light on new challenges and opportunities, but also uncovers new traps and pitfalls in this brave new front-end world of ours.

Our books aren’t concerned with short-living trends, and our new book isn’t an exception. Smashing Book 6 is focused on real challenges and real front-end solutions in the real world: from accessible apps to performance to CSS Grid Layout to advanced service workers to responsive art direction. No chit-chat or theory. Things that worked, in actual projects. Jump to table of contents.

The Smashing Book 6, with 536 pages on real-life challenges and opportunities on the web. Photo by our dear friend Marc Thiele. (Large preview)

In the book, Laura and Marcy explore strategies for maintainable design systems and accessible single-page apps with React, Angular etc. Mike, Rachel and Lyza share insights on using CSS Custom Properties and CSS Grid in production today. Yoav and Lyza take a dive deep into performance patterns and service workers in times of Progressive Web Apps and HTTP/2.

Inner design of the Smashing Book 6. Designed by one-and-only Chiara Aliotta. Large view.

Ada, Adrian and Greg explore how to design for watches and new form factors, as well as AR/VR/XR, chatbots and conversational UIs. The last chapter will guide you through some practical strategies to break out of generic, predictable, and soulless interfaces — with dozens of examples of responsive art direction. But most importantly: it’s the book dedicated to headaches and solutions in the fragile, inconsistent, fragmented and wonderfully diverse web we find ourselves in today.

Table Of Contents

Want to peek inside? Download a free PDF sample (PDF, ca. 21 MB) with a chapter on bringing personality back to the web by yours truly. Overall, the book contains 10 chapters:

Making Design Systems Work In Real-Life
by Laura Elizabeth
Accessibility In Times Of Single-Page Applications
by Marcy Sutton
Production-Ready CSS Grid Layouts
by Rachel Andrew
Strategic Guide To CSS Custom Properties
by Mike Riethmueller
Building An Advanced Service Worker
by Lyza Gardner
Loading Assets On The Web
by Yoav Weiss
Conversation Interface Design Patterns
by Adrian Zumbrunnen
Building Chatbots And Designing For Watches
by Greg Nudelman
Cross Reality And The Web (AR/VR)
by Ada Rose Cannon
Bringing Personality Back To The Web (free PDF sample, 21MB)
by Vitaly Friedman

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.smb6-authors {
display: grid;
grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fit, 130px);
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From left to right: Laura Elizabeth, Marcy Sutton, Rachel Andrew, Mike Riethmuller, Lyza D. Gardner, Yoav Weiss, Adrian Zumbrunnen, Greg Nudelman, Ada Rose Edwards, and yours truly.

536 pages. Quality hardcover + eBook (PDF, ePUB, Kindle).
Published late September 2018.
Written by and for designers and front-end developers.
Designed with love from Italy by Chiara Aliotta.
Free airmail worldwide shipping from Germany.
Check delivery times for your country.
If you are a Smashing Member, don’t forget to apply your Membership discount.
Good enough? Get the book right away.

eBook

Hardcover

eBook$19Get the eBook

PDF, ePUB, Kindle. Free for Smashing Members.

Hardcover$39Get the Print (incl. eBook)

Printed, quality hardcover. Free airmail shipping worldwide.

About The Designer

The cover was designed with love from Italy by one-and-only Chiara Aliotta. She founded the design studio Until Sunday and has directed the overall artistic look and feel of different tech companies and not-for-profit organizations around the world. We’re very happy that she gave Smashing Book 6 that special, magical touch.

Behind The Scenes Of The Design Process

We asked Chiara to share some insights into the design process of the cover and the interior design and she was very kind to share some thoughts with us:

“It all started with a few exchanges of emails and a Skype meeting where Vitaly shared his idea of the book and the general content. I had a lot of freedom, which is always exciting and scary at the same time. The only bond (if we want to call it like this) was that the “S” of Smashing Magazine should be the main protagonist of the cover, reinvented and creatively presented as per all the other previous Smashing Books.

The illustration on paper. The cover sketched on paper. Also check the close-up photo. (Large preview)

I worked around few keywords that Vitaly was using to describe the book during our meetings and then developed an idea around classical novels of adventure where the main hero leaves home, encounters great hazards, risks, and then eventually returns wiser and/or richer than he/she was before.

So I thought of Smashing Book 6 as a way to propose this basic and mythic structure under a new light: through the articles of this book, the modern web designer will be experiencing true and deep adventures.

I imagined the “S” as an engine, the starting point of this experience, from where different worlds were creating and expanding. So the cover was the map of these uncharted territories that the book explores.

Every element on the cover has a particular meaning that constructs the S. Large view.

I am a person who judges books by its cover and having read some of the chapters and knowing some of the well-established writers, I wanted to honour its content and their work by creating a gorgeous cover and chapter illustrations.

For this edition of Smashing Book, I imagined a textile cover in deep blue, where the graphic is printed using a very old technique, the hot gold foil stamping.

Together with Markus, part of the Smashing Magazine team and responsible for the publishing of all the Smashing Books, we worked closely to choose the final details of the binding and guarantee an elegant and sophisticated result, adding a touch of glam to the book.

Smashing Book 6 comes wrapped with a little bookmark. Photo by our dear friend Marc Thiele.

As a final touch, I added a paper wrap around the book that invites the readers to “unlock their adventure”, suggesting a physical action: the reader needs to tear off the paper before starting reading the book.
And for this only version, we introduced a customise Smashing Magazine bookmark, also in printed on gold paper. Few more reasons to prefer the paperback version over the digital ones!”

A huge round of applause to Chiara for her wonderful work and sharing the thoughts with us. We were remarkably happy with everything from design to content. But what did readers think? Well, I’m glad that you asked!

Sketches for chapter illustrations. (Large preview)

Feedback and Testimonials

We’ve sent the shiny new book to over 200 people to peek through and read, and we were able to gather some first insights. We’d love to hear your thoughts, too!

“Web design is getting pretty darned complicated. The new book from SmashingMag aims to bring the learning curve down to an accessible level.”

— Aaron Walter, InVision

“Just got the new Smashing Book 6 by SmashingMag. What a blast! From CSS Grid Layout, CSS Custom Properties and service workers all the way to the HTTP/2 and conversational interfaces and many more. I recommend it to all the people who build interfaces.”

— Mihael Tomić, Osijek, Croatia

“The books published by SmashingMag and team are getting better each time. I was thrilled to be able to preview it… EVERY CHAPTER IS GOOD! Having focused on a11y for much of my career, Marcy Sutton’s chapter is a personal favorite.”

— Stephen Hay, Amsterdam, Netherlands

The Smashing Book 6, with 536 pages on real-life challenges and solutions for the web. Huge thank-you note to the smashing community for supporting the book and out little magazine all these years. (Large preview)

Thank You For Your Support!

We’re very honored and proud to have worked with wonderful people from the industry who shared what they’ve learned in their work. We kindly thank all the hard-working people involved in making this book reality. We kindly thank you for your ongoing support of the book and our little magazine as well. It would be wonderful if you could mention the book by any chance as well in your social circles and perhaps link to this very post.

We’ve also prepared a little media kit .zip with a few photos and illustrations that you could use if you wanted to — just sayin’!

We can’t wait to hear your thoughts about the book! Happy reading, and we hope that you’ll find the book as useful as we do. Just have a cup of coffee (or tea) ready before you start reading, of course, stay smashing and… meow!

eBook

Hardcover

eBook$19Get the eBook

PDF, ePUB, Kindle. Free for Smashing Members.

Hardcover$39Get the Print (incl. eBook)

Printed, quality hardcover. Free airmail shipping worldwide.

(ra, il)

Original Source: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/download-and-delete-everything-google-knows-about-you/

A detailed guide on how to check and delete your data collected and stored by Google on its servers.

The post How to Download and Delete Everything Google Knows About You appeared first on Hongkiat.

Visit hongkiat.com for full content.

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/integrating-mongodb-and-amazon-kinesis-for-intelligent-durable-streams/

This article was originally published on MongoDB. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

You can build your online, operational workloads atop MongoDB and still respond to events in real time by kicking off Amazon Kinesis stream processing actions, using MongoDB Stitch Triggers.

Let’s look at an example scenario in which a stream of data is being generated as a result of actions users take on a website. We’ll durably store the data and simultaneously feed a Kinesis process to do streaming analytics on something like cart abandonment, product recommendations, or even credit card fraud detection.

We’ll do this by setting up a Stitch Trigger. When relevant data updates are made in MongoDB, the trigger will use a Stitch Function to call out to AWS Kinesis, as you can see in this architecture diagram:

What you’ll need to follow along

An Atlas instance
If you don’t already have an application running on Atlas, you can follow our getting started with Atlas guide here. In this example, we’ll be using a database called streamdata, with a collection called clickdata where we’re writing data from our web-based e-commerce application.
An AWS account and a Kinesis stream
In this example, we’ll use a Kinesis stream to send data downstream to additional applications such as Kinesis Analytics. This is the stream we want to feed our updates into.
A Stitch application
If you don’t already have a Stitch application, log into Atlas, and click Stitch Apps from the navigation on the left, then click Create New Application.

Create a Collection

The first step is to create a database and collection from the Stitch application console. Click Rules from the left navigation menu and click the Add Collection button. Type streamdata for the database and clickdata for the collection name. Select the template labeled Users can only read and write their own data and provide a field name where we’ll specify the user id.

Configuring Stitch to Talk to AWS

Stitch lets you configure Services to interact with external services such as AWS Kinesis. Choose Services from the navigation on the left, and click the Add a Service button, select the AWS service and set AWS Access Key ID, and Secret Access Key.

Services use Rules to specify what aspect of a service Stitch can use, and how. Add a rule which will enable that service to communicate with Kinesis by clicking the button labeled NEW RULE. Name the rule “kinesis” as we’ll be using this specific rule to enable communication with AWS Kinesis. In the section marked Action, select the API labeled Kinesis and select All Actions.

Write a Function that Streams Documents into Kinesis

Now that we have a working AWS service, we can use it to put records into a Kinesis stream. The way we do that in Stitch is with Functions. Let’s set up a putKinesisRecord function.

Select Functions from the left-hand menu, and click Create New Function. Provide a name for the function and paste the following in the body of the function.

exports = function(event){
const awsService = context.services.get(‘aws’);
try{
awsService.kinesis().PutRecord({
Data: JSON.stringify(event.fullDocument),
StreamName: “stitchStream”,
PartitionKey: “1”
}).then(function(response) {
return response;
});
}
catch(error){
console.log(JSON.parse(error));
}
};

Test Out the Function

Let’s make sure everything is working by calling that function manually. From the Function Editor, Click Console to view the interactive javascript console for Stitch.

The post Integrating MongoDB and Amazon Kinesis for Intelligent, Durable Streams appeared first on SitePoint.

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/the-8-best-wordpress-themes-for-small-business-websites/

This article was created in partnership with BAWMedia. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

A well-designed website can serve as a powerful marketing tool. These days, creating one for a small business is not distressing or expensive at all. However, it was just a few short years ago.

Today, you can take advantage of the features provided by the best WordPress themes. There are special themes for small business-oriented websites. It's not difficult to find a website-building theme that matches a specific business. This can be a startup, a service provider, or some other venture.

You undoubtedly want nothing but the best business theme, right? Check out those described below. Each possesses functional designs loaded with amazing features. They will help you create a thoroughly engaging website to promote a business.

1. Be Theme

We’ll start with Be Theme, a responsive, multipurpose WordPress theme that takes every small business need into account with its more than 370 pre-built websites. There's a multiplicity of small business WordPress themes in this pre-built website collection — each one embedded with the functionality you need to establish an effective online presence, and fully customizable to meet your business and marketing needs.

The range of business niches covered is impressive, With more pre-built websites being added every month it's destined to become even more so. Web designers like Be Theme because it allows them to create a website for most small business types in as little as four hours.

Clients appreciate the rapid turnaround they receive and the ease in which changes or additions they have in mind can be accommodated.

Be Theme, one of the best WordPress themes for small business websites is a ThemeForest top 5 best seller whose core features include easy to work with page-building tools, a multiplicity of design features and options, and great support.

2. Astra

Astra is fast, fully customizable, and one of the best WordPress themes for business websites as well as for blogs and personal portfolios. Built with SEO in mind, Astra is responsive and WooCommerce ready — mandatory features in today's online business environment. Its capabilities are easily extendible with premium addons and Astra can be used with most of the popular page builders. This free WP-based theme is definitely worth considering.

3. The100

A theme selected for WordPress for small businesses can be free or it can be a premium theme requiring an expenditure on your behalf. There are several excellent free themes on the market, and one of them is The100. While it is advertised as having premium-like features, bear in mind that free themes like this one generally can't compete with premium themes. Nevertheless, The100 is an easy-to-use WP theme that features a multiplicity of layouts and plenty of customization options.

4. Uncode – Creative Multiuse WordPress Theme

Uncode has proven to be one of the best WordPress themes for business websites. It's a multipurpose theme featuring 30+ homepage concepts designed to get designers and their clients off to a fast start on any small business website. Features include an enhanced version of the popular Visual Composer page builder, and an Adaptive Images System that enables mobile users to see what you want and expect them to see.

The post The 8 Best WordPress Themes for Small Business Websites appeared first on SitePoint.