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Key Ingredients To Make Your App Go Viral

A viral app is the highest achievement on iTunes and Google Play. It’s an app that customers eagerly share across the Internet, through social networks, email, and word of mouth. It’s like rocket fuel, and it is the best case scenario for an app developer because word of mouth is far more powerful than any paid advertising. Ad clutter is everywhere, and people just ignore it. No one trusts ads, and they cost too much for developers anyway. But humans have shared stories since we’ve been ...

InDesign Scripts And Plugins To Speed Up Your Work

Few applications feel as complete as Adobe’s InDesign. First released in 1999 as a direct attack against the then-industry standard, Quark, the page-layout application has been made faster and more feature-rich with each iteration. But even the best applications lack some features. Luckily, Adobe realized this some years ago and opened the doors to allow designers to expand this beloved set of tools through plugins. Many designers don’t realize how powerful InDesign can be, especially ...

Introducing Jelly Navigation Menu: When Canvas Meets PaperJS

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It’s our great pleasure to support active members of the Web design and development community. Today, we’re proud to present the Jelly Navigation Menu that shows the power of PaperJS and TweenJS when used together. This article is yet another golden nugget of our series of various tools, libraries and techniques that we’ve published here on Smashing Magazine: LiveStyle, PrefixFree, Foundation, Sisyphus.js, GuideGuide, Gridpak, JS Bin and CSSComb. — Ed. There is no ...

Email Marketing For Mobile App Creators

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If you’ve developed mobile applications or have just started building one, then you probably realize that marketing should be as much of an ongoing concern as the product’s design and development. After all, what’s the point in creating a beautiful, valuable app if no one knows about it? Assuming that promotion on Google Play or Apple’s App Store will take your app from beta to bestseller is… well, magical thinking. In reality, most successful developers kick off their marketing ...

A Guide To Designing Touch Keyboards (With Cheat Sheet)

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Touch devices have rightfully been praised for generally being much more intuitive than the decades-old computer mouse and keyboard. Users interact directly with touch interfaces, which narrows the gap between human act and software response. Yet typing on mobile devices — in particular on smartphones — is quite the horror story. It’s slow, painful and error-prone. The obvious culprits are keyboard character size and proximity of the keys, but there are many other important ...

Creating High-Performance Mobile Websites

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People start to lose interest in a website if they don’t get a response within three seconds. Fulfilling this expectation for mobile phone users requires a different approach to usage analysis, design and testing. This article expands on the techniques that Johan Johansson explains in his article “How to Make Your Websites Faster on Mobile Devices,” published in April 2013. We’ll demonstrate methods to identify how people interact with a website differently on mobile devices, and the ...

Absolute Horizontal And Vertical Centering In CSS

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We’ve all seen margin: 0 auto; for horizontal centering, but margin: auto; has refused to work for vertical centering… until now! But actually (spoiler alert!) absolute centering only requires a declared (variable) height and these styles: .Absolute-Center { margin: auto; position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; bottom: 0; right: 0; } I’m not the pioneer of this method (yet I have dared to name it Absolute Centering), and it may even be a common technique, however, most ...

Backbone.js Tips And Patterns

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Backbone.js is a popular open-source JavaScript “MV*” framework that has gained significant traction since its first release a little over three years ago. Although Backbone.js provides structure to JavaScript applications, it leaves a lot of design patterns and decisions up to the developer, for better or worse, and developers run into many common problems when they first begin developing in Backbone.js. Therefore, in this article, we’ll explore different design patterns that you can ...

Introducing LiveStyle: Better, Stronger And Smarter CSS Live Reload

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In the past, we featured some exciting tools and libraries: PrefixFree, Foundation, Sisyphus.js, GuideGuide, Gridpak, JS Bin and CSSComb. All of them have been developed and released by active members of the Web design community as open-source projects. Today, we present LiveStyle, a plugin for live bi-directional (editor ↔ browser) CSS editing of the new generation! — Ed. Tools for live CSS editing aren’t new these days. You may already be familiar with tools like ...

Great Products Focus On A Motif

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What does it take to craft a great product? For those of us who design and build apps, websites and software, a great product means one that delights its users. But digital product development is a complex beast. Delivering a successful product requires multidisciplinary teams to efficiently work through varying opinions and conflicting views and, ultimately, to gather behind a common vision with a focused plan. This is a challenging act of team management and collaboration, requiring such ...