By: Jeremy White
Continue reading...While overall trends indicate a national growth in construction employment, in certain areas of the country, there is still cause for concern. According to findings by the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC), this is heavily tied to the health of the local economy.
Between July 2015 and July 2016, 39 states and Washington, D.C., added construction jobs. However, upon closer inspection, only 23 states and Washington, D.C., added jobs between June 2016 and July 2016. While overall growth is undeniable, the AGC identified some reasons for the hiccups some states are experiencing.
When is a keyboard not a keyboard? When it's also a notepad and a graphics tablet
By: James Temperton
Continue reading...When people think of the low-carbon economy and the multiple technologies in place that are fueling the growth of green, it is likely that most of them would point to wind and solar as the two most significant and influential drivers of the trend.
Not so, according to a new report from Goldman Sachs, "The New Energy Landscape: The Future of Clean Energy." Their pick: LEDs, which they identify as "one of the fastest technology shifts in human history."
We all love a good wallpaper to polish up our desktops. So to provide you with fresh artwork on a regular basis, we embarked on our desktop wallpapers mission eight years ago. Each month we challenge you, the design community, to get your creative juices flowing and produce some inspirational and unique desktop wallpapers.
And, well, also this time designers and artists from across the globe challenged their artistic abilities and contributed their designs for September. The result is a collection of desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. All of them come in versions with and without a calendar and are free to download. A big thank-you to everyone who shared their artwork! Now, which one will make it to your desktop?
The post Desktop Wallpaper Calendars: September 2016 appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
Prototyping is essential to help your team create the best product possible. It's a chance to experiment with ideas and turn them into something tangible that you can test and build upon. When you fail with your prototype, you land softly - there's always the chance to iterate and improve.
The team behind Adobe's new prototyping tool Experience Design (Adobe XD) uses prototyping as a method to test new features before they make it into the program. Being a product manager on the Adobe XD team, I'll share some insights into how the team uses prototyping to build and improve Adobe XD, and make prototyping more efficient for designers.
The post How We Use Prototyping, And How It Made Us More Efficient appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
According to the latest "Electric Power Monthly" report, released late August 2016 by the US Energy Information Administration, renewable electricity generation has surpassed levels of previous years in every month so far this year, with both hydroelectric and non-hydroelectric (wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass) renewables contributing to this trend.
Designers, developers and managers often work with compressed timeframes and multiple projects simultaneously. A team must be able to respond quickly to feedback on their product from clients, project managers and developers. Each minor revision in the UI or UX needs to be reflected in the documentation, so that designers and developers always have the latest information.
A style guide ensures that your project doesn't encounter serious problems when you implement the initial design. Making sure that all specifications are accurate to their designs is critical, because an inaccurate specification means that developers will have to either rely on guesswork when building the app or go to the design source to get answers to their questions.
The post Pixel-Perfect Specifications Without The Headaches appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
Have you ever opened a website, started reading and, after some time had passed and all assets had finished loading, you found that you've lost your scroll position? I undergo this every day, especially when surfing on my mobile device on a slow connection - a frustrating and distracting experience.
Every time the browser has to recalculate the positions and geometries of elements in the document, a reflow happens. This happens when new DOM elements are added to the page, images load or dimensions of elements change. In this article, we will share techniques to minimize this content shifting.
The post Ways To Reduce Content Shifting On Page Load appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
In the last few years, I've seen a lot of code. As a freelancer working on multiple big projects with a lot of people, you'll inevitably see all varieties of code styles. But I also realized how much writing JavaScript changed over the past years.
Having learned JavaScript before ES6 was there, a great mentor (Hans Christian Reinl) taught me the most important lesson: Always write clean, understandable code. Avoid ternary operators, declare variables in one place, make functions as simple as possible. Basically things that so many JavaScript style guides also advise. But with the growing adoption of ES6/ES2015, I also saw an increase of code where most of these principles (except for keeping functions small) are ignored.
The post Web Development Reading List #151: Microinteraction UX, Feature Policy, And Passport.js appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
The WhatsApp update is designed to improve user experience across the app and Facebook.
By: Sarah Griffiths
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The galaxy is roughly the same mass as the Milky Way, but our galaxy has a hundred times more stars
By: Sarah Griffiths
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