For a long, long time I was hardily against the idea of outsourcing. I wanted to be everything behind the site for a client — the mind, the creative, the worker — everything. Outsourcing felt wrong. It felt like cheating and I wanted no part of it. Not until the time when I decided to bite off more than I could chew. There were about four open projects I had going and probably two others that I was putting the finishing touches on — and let's be honest, we all know how clients can be nearing the end of a...
Today, GitHub launched a new application, GitHub Desktop, for both Windows and MacOS platforms. As most GitHub users will know, GitHub already had applications for Windows and MacOS, although they were wildly different experiences on occasion. According to the blog post announcing the release, the new GitHub desktop provides: “a unified experience across both platforms.” Overall, the new app aims to improve collaboration between developers, which is afterall, what Git does best. Extra...
A large number of new websites—perhaps even the overwhelming majority of them—have started to take on a really familiar look: there is a navigation bar at the top of the screen—usually inverse in color to the rest of the page—followed by a huge carousel of images (both in terms of physical size and the number of images it contains), often some kind of hideous Google AdSense advertisements, and then finally, if we're lucky, there will be some actual content to read before we have to reach for the...
Gift cards possess huge potential for merchants who want to increase revenue, acquire new customers and get their brand noticed. It’s generally believed that a gift card program is a marketing tool perfect only for the biggest holiday season or that it can be applied merely by big brands. However, gift cards can be a great tool to drive customers and increase sales, regardless of the season or the brand size. According to the National Retail Federation 2014 survey, 60% (or 6 in 10) of shoppers say...
Developers and designers who’ve been wanting more freedom in their work can rejoice: Microsoft has at long last released the final versions of two development tools that are suitable for any developer working on any platform. Earlier this week, the software company unveiled Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 4.6, which improves the .NET framework further. Microsoft first announced the Visual Studio 2015 Preview and the .NET 2015 Preview at one of its developer conferences in New York City late last year....
jQuery users and fans don’t always have major releases to look forward to, but that just changed with last week’s releases of jQuery 3.0 and jQuery Compat 3.0. The former supports today’s browsers and IE9-and-beyond environments while the latter supports IE8. (Both versions support Yandex. Browser, which was released in 2012.) You can get your files from the jQuery CDN or opt to link to them directly at: https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.0.0-alpha1.js and https://code.jquery.com/jquery-compat-3.0.0-alpha1.js...
Since its release, AngularJS has dominated the world of open source JavaScript frameworks. Being an extremely advanced client-side MVW framework, it has achieved widespread adoption and support from both individuals and enterprises. Developed by Google in 2009, Angular not only enhances HTML used in web applications but also simplifies development and testing tasks for developers. Even though the latest version of Angular (1.4) is both stable and highly performant, the AngularJS team has...
Exposure: it’s what we all strive for and desire as freelancers. We want the exposure and recognition, and rightfully so. The bad part about it is that we aren’t alone — there are a ton of developers, at all different levels, attempting to get that same exposure that we’re all competing for. Another issue is that many developers don't have a solid strategy for what they're doing. They want to do it all and hope that something sticks. And trust me, there are so many different avenues we can choose...