February 15, 2016 — In May of 2015, Facebook unveiled its new in-app publishing platform, Instant Articles. A month later, Apple declared that the old Newsstand experience (essentially a fancy folder full of news apps) would be replaced in iOS 9 with a brand new news-aggregation and discovery … Read More…

February 4, 2016 — Smashing Magazine is known for lengthy, comprehensive articles. But what about something different for a change? What about shorter, concise pieces with useful tips that you could easily read over a short coffee break? As an experiment, this is one of the shorter … Read More…

January 13, 2016 — The way we consume open source software (OSS) dramatically changed over the past decade or two. Flash back to the early 2000s, we mostly used large OSS projects from a small number of providers, such as Apache, MySQL, Linux and OpenSSL. These projects came from well-known … Read More…

December 21, 2015 — What is the difference between a web page and a web application? Though we tend to identify documents with reading and applications with interaction, most web-based applications are of the blended variety: Users can consume information and perform tasks in the same place. … Read More…

December 10, 2015 — When technical performance optimizations reach certain limits, psychology and perception management might help us to push the limits further. Waiting can consist of active and passive phases; for the user to perceive a wait as a shorter one, we increase the active phase and … Read More…

November 28, 2015 — Let’s get a few things out of the way first. This isn’t your regular Smashing Magazine article. It’s not a “how to“; it won’t show you how to build a better menu or improve your project tomorrow. This article shows you how a core problem in computer science works and why … Read More…

November 11, 2015 — With this article, we start exploring various industries and study the current state of front-end, UX and performance of relatively complex websites. First up are airline websites. Some sections of the article were written by the editorial team. We’d love to hear your … Read More…

November 10, 2015 — I’ve been around the block quite a bit as an SEO specialist, and in my experience website speed has emerged as an increasingly important search engine ranking factor over the last few years. Google, in particular, considers website loading speed to be very important and has … Read More…

October 24, 2015 — They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But online, a picture can be worth a thousand kilobytes or more! HTTP Archive shows that images make up 64% of a web page’s total size on average. Given this, image optimization is key, especially considering that many users will … Read More…