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When’s the last time you read a technical book that didn’t make your head spin? One that you actually learned something from, and didn’t fall asleep while reading it? One that inspired you to get up and create something better?
Book reviews aren’t exactly what you’ve come to expect from AppStorm. There’s not lots of books about web apps, though Steven Levy’s In the Plex is a great example of an excellent book about web apps: the whole Google ecosystem. But, if you’re wanting to build your own web apps or sites, you’d do well to start with reading books. Seriously. Good books can be invaluable resources, no matter how experienced you are. It’s even better when the books are actually interesting and make it easy to learn.
That’s exactly what the books from A Book Apart are.
Many tools and packages exist online to help people create websites with minimal effort and involvement. Of course, each one has their own strengths and weaknesses. Some are more aimed at creating blogs, while others are better for single-page info sites.
Moonfruit is another competitor in this market. It looks stylish, promises to be simple, and … you do want to create a new site, right? So what does it have to offer, and what are it’s pros and cons? Lets take a look…
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Web development can be a sole or group task. For the former, it’s pretty simple to organise your workflow, having everything within your own hardware and your own software. However, if you’re working as part of a development group, it’s a little more difficult to organise and collaborate.
Introducing Squad, a collaborative code editor inside your browser. By opening a local file or connecting to a server with S/FTP, you can edit code in the Squad web app alongisde others and even chat with them in a dedicated discussion area. (more…)
With so much of our information being pushed to the Web, not knowing the basics of web coding is going to become more and more of a hindrance. If you don’t know what a h1, h2, or blockquote is you’re going to find yourself at a severe disadvantage in the future.
While there are plenty of ways to learn the basics of coding, one interesting solution that has just come into the scene is Treehouse. With videos, tests, and badges, will Treehouse allow you to finally learn what you need to be learning?
Launching a new product or service via the web is no easy task in today’s fast-paced market. There’s plenty of competition and many variables involved in determining whether yours will be a success or failure. One of the metrics marketers use to determine how well their promotional web pages are doing is called bounce rate – the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which a user left your site from the landing page (the higher the rate, the less effective your page is).
Unbounce is an app built to tackle these challenges and then some. With Unbounce, you can create great-looking landing pages with ease, test them for effectiveness in lead generation and publish them to kickstart your business too. There are a lot of great ideas behind this app and they’re well-implemented too – but will they help you turn out a winner of a landing page? Let’s build one ourselves and find out.
Here at Web.Appstorm, we’ve written about a number of brilliant web apps. Some of them I use everyday, and many have become a part of my work flow and are of great use to me. The Internet is much like this, full of great apps that can help you with nearly anything you’d ever need help with. What if you want to add to the Internets great arsenal of tools orwealth of information by building your own site?
The answer to this could well be Handcraft. In essence, it’s an online text editor, though it’s a lot more than this in practice. It can become your whole web development work flow and backup setup in one. Handcraft started out as a prototyping tool, designed to let you build your sites directly in the browser, for the browser, rather than starting out in Photoshop. Let’s see if this is the tool you need to design your next great site.
One of the most important aspects of website and app design is flow – how a user navigates and goes through the process that the site/app is built for. It’s very important to properly close the loops on all navigation and actions. For example, if you’re building an online store, there should be a simple path for a shopper to get from your homepage to the checkout completion page, without getting lost or confused along the way. And when you’re working in a team with clients to report to, it’s crucial that everyone knows where each step takes a user, how one can move back and forth in the site/app and how processes (like placing orders or filling out forms) start and end.
ClickDummy can help you with that. This app allows you to share screenshots of each page/step of your project and link them together as intended in its final form. So if you need to show your clients how their upcoming web store ordering process will work, or you need to demonstrate to a designer how you intend for people to go through your site, ClickDummy can help you put together a clickable demo in minutes.
Editor’s Note: After careful consideration, we have decided to remove this post. W3Schools does have some correct information that can be useful to beginners, but it also has a number of inadequacies as our readers have pointed out in the comments. Our post was not affiliated with W3Schools in any way, and we have deleted it since it the inaccurate information in W3Schools’ sites could be especially misleading for beginning developers, the very audience of this article. If you’d like more information on the problems with W3Schools, please check out http://www.w3fools.com/ to see some of the worst problems with their content.
We’re thankful for our engaged community of readers, and endeavor to have the highest quality content possible. This article wasn’t up to that standard, and we apologize for that. If you ever have any feedback about our content, please let us know and we’ll strive to take your advice to heart.
Face it: we all hate writing up a new résumé. Whether you’ve had 2.5 million different jobs or have stayed in the same position for the past 45 years, it’s somehow incredibly frustrating to put down your skills and experience on a piece of paper and get it looking halfway decent. Perhaps it’s because we’re shy to list what we’ve done, or we’re worried about what potential employers will think. Either way, writing a résumé ranks up there with filing taxes in the list of the world’s most hated jobs.
It doesn’t have to be that hard, though. Resume.io is a brand new web app that lets you create a nicely designed résumé in seconds. In fact, if you’ve already got a filled-out LinkedIn profile, you might be able to get a polished résumé without doing anything more than signing in. In today’s economy, it’s always good to have a current résumé, and now there’s a way to do it without wasting your afternoon.
IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) are a special type of software that developers use to write software. IDEs are designed to maximize productivity, because because they typically present a single platform which all development is done. This means a developer will do less environment switching to get his job done.
Most IDEs were developed for writing desktop-based applications, or server side development, and place front-end web development as an after thought. Plus, no matter what language you’re using, with a native IDE it’s much more difficult to work from any computer or with distributed teams. The team behind Cloud9 IDE created a JavaScript-based IDE for creating web based applications, and they have open-sourced the code, free to adapt and use. Let’s take a look.
