An Example of AJAX with Vanilla Javascript

Following on from our introduction to AJAX, here’s an example which uses the XMLHttpRequest API to initialize an AJAX request. AJAX Example Have a look at the following basic structure: <div> <img src=”http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/Einstein.jpg” alt=”Einstein”> <button id=”request”>Learn more about Einstein</button> <div id=”bio”></div> </div> Also, consider the related visualization: Here’s what we want to happen: when we… Continue reading An Example of AJAX with Vanilla Javascript

New Course: Surreal Digital Painting

What You’ll Be Creating What story would you like to tell the world? Surrealism is a style that allows you to express your feelings and thoughts on the world through your art.  In our new course, Surreal Digital Painting, you’ll learn how to create a symbolic painting inspired by real-life events.  What You’ll Learn First… Continue reading New Course: Surreal Digital Painting

An Introduction to Intel RealSense Technology for Game Developers

Intel RealSense technology pairs a 3D camera and microphone array with an SDK that allows you to implement gesture tracking, 3D scanning, facial expression analysis, voice recognition, and more. In this article, I’ll look at what this means for games, and explain how you can get started using it as a game developer. What is… Continue reading An Introduction to Intel RealSense Technology for Game Developers

How to Create a Scrolling Background in Affinity Designer

What You’ll Be Creating In this tutorial we’ll go through the process of creating a horizontal, tileable background that is perfect for side-scrolling 2D games (action, adventure, hack & slash) for PC, mobile and browsers. We’ll be using the basic vector tools of Affinity Designer, and you’ll see how we can make the image seamless… Continue reading How to Create a Scrolling Background in Affinity Designer

Creating Your First Desktop App With HTML, JS and Electron

Web applications become more and more powerful every year, but there is still room for desktop apps with full access to the hardware of your computer. Today you can create desktop apps using the already familiar HTML, JS and Node.js, then package it into an executable file and distribute it accordingly across Windows, OS X and… Continue reading Creating Your First Desktop App With HTML, JS and Electron

Knowledge Persistence and Sessions With React

Having a “remember me” function is a very useful feature, and implementation with React and Express is relatively easy. Continuing from our last part where we set up a WebRTC chat application, we will now add Mongo-backed persistent sessions and a database-backed online user list for good measure. Sessions? If you have not used sessions… Continue reading Knowledge Persistence and Sessions With React

25 Free Hero Images and Mock-ups: The First Impression Counts

The use of giant, so-called Hero images is a trend of the younger years. Some say it was Apple who brought it forth, some say gigantic images have been there forever, but couldn’t be used due to poor bandwidths. The latter is becoming less and less of a problem, so why not start using hero… Continue reading 25 Free Hero Images and Mock-ups: The First Impression Counts

Creating Your First Node.js Command-line Application

Command-line utilities are a must for every seasoned web developer. Node.js makes developing such tools extremely easy thanks to a wealth of open source modules and a great package manager. In this tutorial, we will convert our Cute File Browser, which we published last week, from PHP to Node. Our goal is to create a… Continue reading Creating Your First Node.js Command-line Application

FreshBooks’ First Book Helps Designers Price Their Work Effectively

One of the biggest challenges most freelance designers face is setting their prices. How do you charge for your work in a way that’s fair to both you and your clients? A lot of folks assume they should charge by the hour. However, in doing so, they immediately limit their earning potential. You can only… Continue reading FreshBooks’ First Book Helps Designers Price Their Work Effectively

Cardinal: A Small & Mobile First CSS Framework

Cardinal is a small, “mobile first” CSS framework with some useful default styles, scalable typography, reusable modules, and a simple responsive grid system. Cardinal provides a new approach to scaling web typography and layout across multiple devices. It places little emphasis on pixel-precision, but does not restrict its usage. Instead, Cardinal leverages modular scale, unit-less… Continue reading Cardinal: A Small & Mobile First CSS Framework

How to Make a Tumblr-powered News Ticker

Tumblr is a blogging service with an elegant interface for creating and publishing content. In this tutorial, we are going to use it as the foundation of a news publishing system. We are going to develop a simple widget which cycles through the most recent posts on a Tumblr blog, and presents them as news items… Continue reading How to Make a Tumblr-powered News Ticker

Your First 30 Days of Learning Web Design: How to Get Started and Not Give Up

Congratulations! Web design can be one of the most useful skills to acquire in your professional career. Your first 30 days of learning are crucial because many people simply give up after a week or two. In this article, we’ll go through some useful tips and tricks to help you get started with web design… Continue reading Your First 30 Days of Learning Web Design: How to Get Started and Not Give Up

Quick Tip: Precision Colour Control in Photoshop

In this quick tip, I’ll show you a simple and easy way to take control of the colours in your Photoshop documents using the power of adjustment layers. We will consider two scenarios, with the second being somewhat more complex than the first. I’m always preaching about the importance of non-destructive editing in Photoshop, and… Continue reading Quick Tip: Precision Colour Control in Photoshop

Creating an iOS-like Home Screen with CoffeeScript

Today we are going to create an iOS-like home screen using CoffeeScript – a new JavaScript based language, and the jQuery library. CoffeScript has a clean syntax that lies somewhere in between Ruby and Python. If you haven’t used any of them, don’t worry – it is not required. However you will need to be… Continue reading Creating an iOS-like Home Screen with CoffeeScript