Archive for year: 2019

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/1stwebdesigner/~3/6FdF6zUL8wk/

The advantage of prototyping is that it allows designers to prove or disprove their concepts. Also, to fine tune their designs. And it can demonstrate how the final product will work once production is completed. Prototyping tools are used to simulate application flow, to test performance, and create a user experience.

In practice, designers use a variety of prototyping tools. Their capabilities range from simple to advanced.

Tools that support design handoff are relatively new on the scene. The available choices are still somewhat limited. Several tools that support both prototyping and handoff are described in this article.

When a tool of this type is right for your project’s workflow, it make’s life that much easier. And any one of the 5 presented here can easily make that happen.

1. Overflow

Preparing a design for product development purposes is seldom an easy task. Taking a design and presenting it in the form of a beautiful user flow diagram isn’t always that much fun. Not only are these diagrams traditionally hard to build, but they can also be a pain to update and maintain.

Part of the problem lies in that, until recently, a tool that explicitly specialized in user flow diagramming for designers hasn’t existed. Essentially one that makes it easy to connect between visual screens to illustrate the bigger picture.

Overflow changed all of that. Overflow is the world’s first user flow diagramming tool specifically tailored for designers; a tool that will significantly accelerate your user flow design diagramming process. You can sync your designs from Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD, upload images and add shapes and connectors to create interactive user flow presentations that tell the story behind your design work.

Overflow is available on MacOS for a 30-day free trial. A Windows version is expected to follow at a future time.

2. Webflow

With Webflow, you can prototype anything from a website dashboard to a mobile app, and you can do so using fully-functional forms and real, dynamic content. That’s more than most prototyping tools allow — but there’s even more to come.

Because with Webflow, you can actually skip the handoff. It enables you to take your finished prototype and move right into the build and launch phases, creating a completely custom, production-ready website without any need for coding. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript coding is done for you.

When it’s time to launch, world-class hosting is available. It’s lightning-fast, hassle-free, and doesn’t involve any of the usual, cumbersome setup.

Plus, you can build your website or app from scratch, from a template, or by using any of a large array of community-created UI kits.

In short, Webflow is a single tool that could make much of your current toolkit completely obsolete. And who wouldn’t rather be using fewer tools?

3. UXPin

UXPin is a prototyping tool created to help reduce the time spent on design and development. Fewer tools, faster collaboration, shorter time to market. Manage design tasks, create a prototype that perfectly mimics the real product, collaborate on iterations, and hand off the project to the development team – all from one tool.

The perfect solution for both professionals and those who are just starting in design. Try the free plan and scale if need be.

4. Avocode

You can use this platform-independent tool to automate your project’s design handoff workflows, import and share design versions with team members and stakeholders, and turn Sketch, PSD, and other file formats like XD, Figma or Illustrator into code.

Avocode syncs and stores your design files in the cloud and helps you keep those files correctly versioned and organized; and you don’t have to prepare your files upfront in any way.

5. Savah

With Savah at your fingertips, it’s easy to create an end-to-end journey for your web or mobile app projects. This is not your typical prototyping and design collaboration tool in the sense that it does much more than help you build a prototype.

Savah promotes collaboration and team feedback. And it also has a built-in design workflow and approval system that can immediately speed up your project’s design phase. Savah is free to use for solo designers.

Looking for an ideal prototyping and handoff tool?

While there’s certainly no shortage of tools and techniques for building prototypes, finding what you need can be a challenge. Simply because what you need depends on the task at hand, making that need a variable.

You could choose blindly or simply throw your hands up in despair, but you don’t have to do either. Just take the following into account when it’s time to make a selection:

The tool should make collaboration and information sharing easy.
It should have a shallow learning curve and be easy to use.
It should serve you well for low-fi prototyping, medium-fi prototyping, hi-fi prototyping, or if need be, all the above.
And, the price should suit your budget.

You also want to look at the pros and cons of any given tool, whether it’s for prototyping or design handoff, taking into account the following criteria:

Fidelity: How well does the tool support visual and interaction design?
Consistency: Does it have the necessary features to ensure design consistency in your work?
Accuracy: Does it enable you to strictly adhere to your organization’s “source of truth”?
Collaboration: Does it make collaboration and co-design activities easy to perform and manage?
Developer Handoff: What processes does it follow to generate specifications and assets for developers?

Remember, you’re not looking for the “best”. You’re looking for a tool that will do the job and do it well without placing any bothersome constraints on you or on your design.

Conclusion

You can save a ton of time and avoid a certain amount of grief by staying up to date with the latest tools and techniques. That includes prototyping tools and most certainly handoff tools. The handoff tools are a recent addition to a web designer’s toolbox.

Some tools can be used for virtually any project, unless or until they become obsolete. Usually you need to consider the task at hand when selecting one. The ability to work on a given platform or any platform should always be considered. Also, a possible need to integrate with other design tools should be considered.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/d_RSgYtaWqo/exploring-istanbul-night-mirror-world

Exploring Istanbul at Night – Mirror World

AoiroStudioOct 16, 2019

Elsa Bleda is a photographer and visual artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has been taking photographs of Istanbul, Johannesburg and more; she has a distinct style that would immediately make you remind of Blade Runner. When you think of this movie, you would think about scenes from cities from Tokyo, Hong Kong and etc. But it’s much more than that when you think of it, the same inspiration can also be taken from any cities around the world. It’s all into the perception of what you see around you and being inspired of the movie Blade Runner. Please enjoy Elsa’s work, it’s quite inspirational!

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Digital Photography

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tympanus/~3/1HB37HJYcA4/

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The SQL Murder Mystery

Use SQL queries to solve the murder mystery. Suitable for beginners or experienced SQL sleuths.

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js13kGames Winners

Check out the winners of this year’s Js13kGames competition.

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Blocke: Social web UI kit

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Collective #557 was written by Pedro Botelho and published on Codrops.

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/graphql-react-native-getting-started/?utm_source=rss

In 2012, Facebook engineer Nick Schrock started work on a small prototype to facilitate moving away from an old, unsupported partner API that powered the current Facebook News Feed. At the time, this was called “SuperGraph”. Fast forward to today and SuperGraph has helped shape the open-source query language GraphQL, which has been much of the buzzword in recent times.

Facebook describes GraphQL as a “query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data”. Put simply, GraphQL is an alternative to REST that has been steadily gaining popularity since its release. Whereas with REST a developer would usually collate data from a series of endpoint requests, GraphQL allows the developer to send a single query to the server that describes the exact data requirement.

Prerequisites

For this tutorial, you’ll need a basic knowledge of React Native and some familiarity with the Expo environment. You’ll also need the Expo client installed on your mobile device or a compatible simulator installed on your computer. Instructions on how to do this can be found here.

Project Overview

In this tutorial, we’re going to demostrate the power of GraphQL in a React Native setting by creating a simple coffee bean comparison app. So that you can focus on all of the great things GraphQL has to offer, I’ve put together the base template for the application using Expo.

To get started, you can clone this repo and navigate to the “getting-started” branch, which includes all of our basic views to start adding our GraphQL data to, as well as all of our initial dependencies, which at this stage are:

{
"expo": "^32.0.0",
"react": "16.5.0",
"react-native": "https://github.com/expo/react-native/archive/sdk-32.0.0.tar.gz",
"react-navigation": "^3.6.1"
}

To clone this branch, you’ll need to open up terminal and run this command:

git clone https://github.com/jamiemaison/graphql-coffee-comparison.git

To then navigate to the getting-started branch, you move into the newly cloned repo with cd graphql-coffee-comparison and run git checkout getting-started.

The next stage is to install our dependencies. To do this, make sure you’re on Node v11.10.1 and run npm install in the root directory of the project. This will add all of the dependencies listed above to your node_modules folder.

To start adding GraphQL to our React Native app, we’re going to need to install a few more dependencies that help us perform a few simple GraphQL functions. As is common with modern JavaScript development, you don’t need all of these dependencies to complete the data request, but they certainly help in giving the developer a better chance of structuring some clean, easy-to-read code. The dependencies you’ll need can be installed by running npm install –save apollo-boost react-apollo graphql-tag graphql.

Here’s an overview of what these dependencies are:

apollo-boost: a zero-configuration way of getting started with GraphQL in React/React Native
react-apollo: this provides an integration between GraphQL and the Apollo client
graphql-tag: a template literal tag that parses GraphQL queries
graphql: the JavaScript reference implementation for GraphQL

Once all of the necessary dependencies have finished installing, run npm start. You should now see your familiar Expo window, and if you launch the app (either via a simulator or on a device) then you should see a screen similar to this:

In basic terms, this application has two screens that are managed by react-navigation, Home.js and CoffeePage.js. The Home screen contains a simple FlatList that renders all of the coffee beans supplied to its data field. When clicked on, the user is navigated to the CoffeePage for that item, which displays more information about the product. It’s our job to now populate these views with interesting data from GraphQL.

Apollo Server Playground

There are two main elements to any successful GraphQL transaction: the server holding the data, and the front-end query making the request. For the purposes of this tutorial, we aren’t going to start delving into the wonderful world of server-side code, so I’ve created our server for us ready to go. All you need to do is navigate to yq42lj36m9.sse.codesandbox.io in your favorite browser and leave it running throughout the course of development. For those interested, the server itself is running using apollo-server and contains just enough code to hold the data we need and serve it upon receiving an appropriate query. For further reading, you can head over to apollographql.com to read more about apollo-server.

GraphQL Query Basics

Before we get into writing the actual code that’s going to request the data we need for our coffee bean comparison app, we should understand just how GraphQL queries work. If you already know how queries work or just want to get started with coding, you can skip ahead to the next section.

Note: these queries won’t work with our codesandbox server, but feel free to create your own at codesandbox.io if you’d like to test out the queries.

At its simplest level, we can use a flat structure for our queries when we know the shape of the data we’re requesting:

QUERY: RESPONSE:
{ {
coffee { "coffee": {
blend "blend": "rich"
} }
} }

On the left, we see the GraphQL query requesting the blend field from coffee. This works well when we know exactly what our data structure is, but what about when things are less transparent? In this example, blend returns us a string, but queries can be used to request objects as well:

QUERY: RESPONSE:
{ {
coffee { "coffee": {
beans { "beans": [
blend {
} blend: "rich"
} },
} {
blend: "smooth"
}
]
}
}

Here you can see we are simply requesting the beans object, with only the field blend being returned from that object. Each object in the beans array may very well contain other data other than blend, but GraphQL queries help us request only the data we need, cutting out any extra information that’s not necessary for our application.

So what about when we need to be more specific than this? GraphQL provides the capability for many things, but something that allows for extremely powerful data requests is the ability to pass arguments in your query. Take the following example:

QUERY: RESPONSE:
{ {
coffee(companyId: "2") { "coffee": {
beans { "beans": [
blend {
} blend: "rich"
} },
} {
blend: "smooth"
}
]
}
}

What we see is that we can pass an argument — in this case, the companyId — which ensures that we are only returned beans from one particular company. With REST, you can pass a single set of arguments via query params and URL segments, but with GraphQL querying every single field, it can get its own set of arguments. This allows GraphQL to be a dynamic solution for making multiple API fetches per request.

The post Getting Started with GraphQL and React Native appeared first on SitePoint.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tympanus/~3/8W9Ozg2qIGc/

Inspirational Website of the Week: Lafaurie Paris

A super-slick and smooth scroll experience with sharp typography and excellent color choices. Our pick this week.

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Collective #556 was written by Pedro Botelho and published on Codrops.