As our JavaScript takes on more and more responsibilities, we need a reliable codebase—one that is thoroughly tested. Integration tests focus on how the pieces of an application work together, but don’t tell us whether individual units of functionality are behaving as expected. That’s where unit testing comes in. And we’ll have a hard time writing unit tests until we start writing testable JavaScript. Rebecca Murphey explains how to save time in the long run by writing cleaner application code and testing, testing, testing.
Topic: JavaScript
Node at Work: A Walkthrough
In “Even Better In-Browser Mockups with Node.js,” Garann Means explained why Node.js makes designing applications easier and more efficient, and how to get started. Now it’s time to see your new design process in action. In this walkthrough, we’ll build a feature for a mock art store, complete with live demo and GitHub repository. Follow along at home (or in your cubicle) and you’ll have a mockup that mimics the interactions it will have with its production server precisely on the client—without the need for hard-coded data or temporary workarounds.
Even Better In-Browser Mockups with Node.js
Designing in the browser has all sorts of benefits, like producing more accurate, comprehensive results and removing the extra step of converting from image file to markup and CSS. But even sites designed in a browser still require pasting in content, faking interactions with the server, and creating placeholder JavaScript that isn’t usable on the live site. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could go from just designing layouts and interactions to designing the whole client side of the application during the same process? We can, says Garann Means in the first of two articles explaining how Node.js can streamline your design process.
Hack Your Maps
Web maps have come a long way. A ubiquitous and critical component of many apps, they’ve also become one of the mobile space’s most successful transplants. The core web map UI paradigm itself—a continuous, pannable, zoomable surface—has even spread beyond mapping to interfaces everywhere. Yet nearly five years since Paul Smith’s landmark article, “Take Control of Your Maps,” web maps are still a blind spot for most web designers. It’s time to integrate maps into our designs in powerful, creative, progressively enhanced new ways. Young Hahn starts us on the journey to map mastery.
Improving UX Through Front-End Performance
Adding half a second to a search results page can decrease traffic and ad revenues by 20 percent, says a Google study. For every additional 100 milliseconds of load time, sales decrease by 1 percent, Amazon finds. Users expect pages to load in two seconds—and after three seconds, up to 40 percent will simply leave. The message is clear: we must make performance optimization a fundamental part of how we design, build, and test every site we create—for every device. Design for performance; measure the results.
Environmental Design with the Device API
Real-world factors like low batteries and weak signal strength can turn even the most expertly crafted digital experience into a frustrating clustercuss. These factors are beyond your control, and, until recently, there was nothing you could do about them. Now there just may be. Tim Wright explains how to begin improving your users’ experiences under constantly shifting (and sometimes quite dreadful) conditions, via environmental design thinking and the Device API.
Implicit and Explicit Loops in jQuery
One of jQuery’s strengths is that it allows one to act on entire groups of elements without writing out a for loop or using jQuery’s each method to iterate through every element. Those loops are still taking place behind the scenes though, and we can use that abstraction to help—or hinder—the efficiency of our code.
Application Cache is a Douchebag
We’re better connected than we’ve ever been, but we’re not always connected. ApplicationCache lets users interact with their data even when they’re offline, but with great power come great gotchas. For instance, files always come from the ApplicationCache, even when the user is online. Oh, and in certain circumstances, a browser won’t know that that the online content has changed, causing the user to keep getting old content. And, oh yes, depending on how you cache your resources, non-cached resources may not load even when the user is online. Lanyrd’s Jake Archibald illuminates the hazards of ApplicationCache and shares strategies, techniques, and code workarounds to maximize the pleasure and minimize the pain for user and developer alike. All this, plus a demo. Dig in.
Building Twitter Bootstrap
Bootstrap is an open-source front-end toolkit created to help designers and developers quickly and efficiently build great stuff online. Its goal is to provide a refined, well-documented, and extensive library of flexible design components created with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for others to build and innovate on. Today, it has grown to include dozens of components and has become the most popular project on GitHub, with more than 13,000 watchers and 2,000 forks. Mark Otto, the co-creator of Bootstrap, sheds light on how and why Bootstrap was made, the processes used to create it, and how it has grown as a design system.
Getting Started with Sass
CSS’ simplicity has always been one of its most welcome features. But as our sites and apps get bigger and become more complex, and target a wider range of devices and screen sizes, this simplicity, so welcome as we first started to move away from font tags and table-based layouts, has become a liability. Fortunately, a few years ago developers Hampton Catlin and Nathan Weizenbaum created a new style sheet syntax with features to help make our increasingly complex CSS easier to write and manage, and then used a preprocessor to translate the new smart syntax into the old, dumb CSS that browsers understand. Learn how Sass (“syntactically awesome style sheets”) can help simplify the creation, updating, and maintenance of powerful sites and apps.
