Articles

Is Multi-Cloud Infrastructure the Future of Enterprises?

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Cloud services from multiple vendors would allow business enterprises to access best-in-breed services and technologies. According to the data published by Faction, about 92% of companies have already switched to a multi-cloud environment and 82% of the large business entities adapted to hybrid cloud infrastructure. This clearly shows the influence of multi-cloud strategy in the business world.  

Multi-cloud infrastructure plays a key role in improving the IT infrastructure of an organization which leads to experiencing huge benefits. Adapting to the multi-cloud infrastructure would enable businesses to meet the business needs and expectations of modern consumers according to the market condition. 

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Exciting New Tools for Designers, October 2022

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We write this guide to the best new tools for designers and developers each month. For October, we’ve sought out tools to make you a better website builder, some handy utilities to make you more productive, and a spooky font for the end of the month. Enjoy!

Microsoft Designer

Microsoft Designer is a brand-new app for creating images from text prompts. You can create social media posts, blog images, and any other assets you need with its step-by-step guided process.

Remix

Remix is a full-stack web framework for React that lets you focus on designing your UI. Remix is geared towards web standards and delivers a resilient user experience so you can build better sites.

Ultra

Ultra is a super-fast package manager that uses hardlinks to install packages. It’s up to ten times faster than NPM and Yarn, and the project is open-source.

AskEdith

AskEdith is an AI-powered app that translates English into SQL so you can query your database without writing custom SQL. Just type a description of what you want to know, and the app creates the query for you.

Wide Angle Analytics

Wide Angle Analytics is a GDPR-compliant Google Analytics alternative that puts privacy first. Track actions across multiple sites and discover insights about your site without exposing yourself to privacy violations.

story.to.design

Imagine being able to import a whole webpage straight into Figma. You can, with story.to.design, a fantastic app that imports code into Figma for updating UI elements or speeding up redesigns.

Metlo

Metlo is a testing platform for securing APIs. By running comprehensive tests against your API, you can uncover issues like unidentified endpoints, before they become a security threat.

StockAI

Nothing is more frustrating than searching for the right stock image when one doesn’t exist. StockAI is a day-saver that searches for stock images, and if the sought-after image doesn’t exist, it will generate one for you.

Growthfyi

If ad-blockers are playing havoc with your Google Analytics, check out this script from Growthfyi. It’s an invaluable service that doubles the speed of GA while ensuring ad-blockers don’t catch it.

Sourcery

Sourcery is an excellent tool for developers that continually reviews your code and suggests improvements automatically. Write better code, and catch errors before it goes to review.

Cyber Security Icons

This set of Cyber Security Icons contains 20 illustration-style icons. In addition, there are some great interpretations of complex ideas like retina scans, crypto vaults, and end-to-end encryption.

Blinqo

Blinqo is a handy little Chrome extension for anyone that needs to share their screen. It allows you to blur parts of your screen when sharing or recording, so your private details remain private.

Instaprice

Instaprice is a helpful new service that shows you what other freelancers charge for the job you’re quoting on. Earn the actual market rates and never get caught out undercharging again!

Leta

Leta is a great app that allows you to design your own keyboard layout. You can redesign the key positions for macOS, Linux, or Windows and download them for free.

Blogic

Build blogs powered by the Notion API with Blogic, a no-code blog builder that can create fast, SEO-friendly blogs in under a minute. Custom domains and third-party scripts are supported.

Digital Maker Toolkit

The Digital Maker Toolkit is a collection of resources for anyone releasing digital products. It includes guides on process, a handy step-by-step checklist, a list of further resources, and a guide to the available tools.

Slides

Slides is a static website generator you can use to create beautiful, animated websites in minutes. Select layouts from a collection of templates and publish with clean code that downloads fast.

AXplorer

AXplorer is a privacy-focused browser with a built-in VPN. Created by the Axia blockchain network, it generates free crypto in the form of AXIA coins when using it to browse the web.

Font Engine

Can’t decide on a font for your latest side project? Font Engine is a handy little app that will suggest fonts for you. Just tell it your brand values and hit the ‘Suggest’ button.

Deliciozo

Deliciozo is an excellent display font with irregular strokes and styling, making it feel like a paper cut-out. It’s perfect for magazines, cookbooks, and even logos.

Kayino

If you’re looking for a font to convey the hippy era, look no further than the psychedelic stylings of Kayino, a groovy display font with crazy details.

Noganas

Noganas is a spooktacular font for the upcoming Halloween festivities. Use it to add some gruesome frivolity to your seasonal designs.

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The post Exciting New Tools for Designers, October 2022 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

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How to Use Python to Loop Through HTML Tables and Scrape Tabular Data

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Tabular data is one of the best sources of data on the web. They can store a massive amount of useful information without losing its easy-to-read format, making it gold mines for data-related projects.

Whether it is to scrape football data or extract stock market data, we can use Python to quickly access, parse and extract data from HTML tables, thanks to Requests and Beautiful Soup.

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How To Make Your Designs Scannable (And Why You Should)

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Jakob Nielsen’s How Users Read on the Web is 25 years old this week, and one glance at an eye-tracking study will tell you its key observations are still relevant today.

Simply put, users don’t read a web page; they scan it for individual words and sentences.

A typical pattern shown in eye-tracking reports is that users will rapidly scan a page, scrolling down to do so. Then either hit the back button and pump your bounce rate, or scroll to the top and re-engage with the content.

Even when content, volume, and quality tick all the user’s boxes, and they choose to stay on your site, they still don’t read; they scan; a slightly deeper scan, but still a scan.

As a result, it’s vital to design websites to be easily scannable, both in a split-second scan to decide if your page is worth the reader’s time and on a second or third pass.

Clarify the Page’s Purpose Immediately

Every page should have a primary goal. The majority of the time, that goal is embodied in a CTA (Call to Action).

The good news is, if your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) has gone to plan, your goal (i.e., to sell something) and your user’s goal (i.e., to buy something) will align. By clarifying the page’s purpose, you can show the user that your goals align.

You can be experimental if you’re an established company and the user knows what to expect. But if you’re new to the market or have a lower profile, you need to conform to established design patterns. This means that a SaaS should look like a SaaS, a store should look like a store, and a blog should look like a blog.

Including your CTA above the fold — which in the context of the web, means the user doesn’t have to interact to see it. Doing so makes it easier for the user to progress and clearly tells the user what you are offering.

The landing page for next month’s Webflow Conf 2022 clarifies the page’s content, with a clear CTA above the fold.

Employ a Visual Hierarchy

The Von Restorff effect states that the more something stands out, the more likely we are to notice and remember it.

Visual hierarchies are excellent for guiding a user through content. HTML has the h1–h7 heading levels — although, in reality, only h1–h4 are much use — which gives you several levels of heading that can be scanned by different readers scanning at different rates.

For example, we know that subheadings have little impact if a user diligently reads the page from top to bottom, but they are excellent for catching the eye of skim readers.

Amnesty uses very a very simple hierarchy, the only change for its subheading being increased weight. But it is enough to catch the user’s eye.

You can also create visual hierarchies with other forms of contrast; weight and color are often employed in addition to size. For accessibility and inclusive design, it’s wise to combine visual indicators when creating a hierarchy; for example, headings are usually larger, bolder, and colored.

Use Negative Space

Imagine a person standing in a crowd. Let’s say they’re wearing a red and white striped jumper and a red and white bobble hat — pretty distinctive. But if there are hundreds of other characters around them, they might be hard to spot.

Now imagine the same person dressed the same, standing on their own. How long will it take you to spot them? Even without the stripy outfit, it’s not much of a challenge.

Elements in isolation are not only easier to spot, but they pull the eye because the negative space (sometimes referred to as white space) around them creates contrast.

When using negative space, the key is to give elements enough room to breathe and attract the eye without giving them so much room that they are disassociated from the rest of your content.

Across its site, Moheim uses negative space to highlight UI elements while grouping associated content.

Use F Patterns

Users scan a page using either an F-pattern or a Z-pattern.

Because users scan your page in predictable ways, we can employ layouts that cater to this tendency.

Designers have been aware of F and Z patterns for some time, and because they’ve been used for so long, they may be self-fulfilling, with users being trained to scan a page in this fashion. However, both patterns are similar to how eyes travel from line to line in horizontal writing systems.

Whatever the cause, by placing key content along these paths, you increase the chance of capturing a user’s attention.

Kamil Barczentewicz uses a beautiful, natural layout that also conforms to a classic F pattern.

Include Images with Faces

Images are a great way of conveying brand values and making a site engaging. But when it comes to catching the eye of a user scanning your design, the best images include faces.

For example, a testimonial with an image of the customer will catch the eye more than a text-only testimonial.

The Awwwards Conference uses an animated computer with a face to capture attention. And large images of speakers making eye contact.

This is almost certainly due to social conditioning; we see a face, and we engage with it to see if it is a threat or not. Most of us naturally look to expressions of emotion to understand situations, and the distinction between a real-life person and an image hasn’t made its way into our mental programming yet.

You don’t need to use photos. Illustrations are fine. The key is to ensure there is a face in the image. That’s why illustrations of characters perform so well.

Copy Print Design

Print design is centuries older than the web, and many print applications, from newspapers to advertising, developed design elements to catch the eye of readers scanning the design.

Subheadings, lists, blockquotes, and pull quotes all catch the eye. Introductory paragraphs in a larger size or even italics draw users into the text. Shorter paragraphs encourage users to keep reading.

Horizontal rules used to delineate sections of text act as a break on eyes traveling over content with momentum. They are a good way of catching a scan-reader who is losing interest.

You can use a horizontal rule or break up your layout with bands of color that divide content sections.

Omono uses horizontal bands to highlight different sections of content.

Mass, Not Weight

We often discuss design elements as having weight; font-weight is the thickness of strokes.

But it is more helpful to think of design elements as having mass; mass creates gravity, pulling a user’s eye towards them.

The trick is to design elements with enough mass to attract the user‘s eye when scanning at speed without forcing the user to change how they engage with your content.

 

Featured image via Pexels.

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The post How To Make Your Designs Scannable (And Why You Should) first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

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Exciting New Features in Safari 16

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Apple has released an OS update. Packaged in with it is the latest version of Safari, 16.

Expected to be released ahead of next month’s macOS 13, Safari 16 is packed with updates, making it one of the most capable browsers available.

For web designers, the significance is the forward momentum in web technologies that enable freer design work and fewer hacks to achieve complex layouts. Little by little, CSS recommendations are being implemented to the point that using JavaScript for layout is rapidly becoming as unnecessary as it is disliked.

Some of this was announced in June in the Safari 16 beta. But a lot has been added in the last couple of months. So here’s what’s new in Safari 16 today.

CSS Container Queries

The most exciting addition to Safari 16 is CSS Container Queries.

It is hard to understate how in-demand this feature has been; if you imagine an edit button on Twitter that gifted you crypto every time you corrected a typo, you’d be getting close to how popular this feature is.

Until now, media queries have detected the whole viewport. And so, if you have an element like a card, for example, that needs to change at smaller viewports, you need to calculate the available space and adapt the element’s design accordingly. Unfortunately, this frequently gets out of sync with edge cases causing more than a few headaches for front-end developers.

Media queries are severely restrictive to modern layout methods like Grid that wrap elements automatically because there is no way to detect how the elements are laid out.

Container Queries solve this by allowing you to define styles based on the size of the actual containing element; if a div is 300px wide, the contents can have one design, and if it’s 400px wide, they can have a different design—all without caring what size the whole viewport is.

This is dangerously close to OOP (Object Orientated Programming) principles and almost elevates CSS to an actual programming language. (All we need is conditional logic, and we’re there.)

The latest versions of Chrome, Edge, and now Safari (including mobile) support CSS Grid. Even discounting the rapid decline of Twitter, this is way more exciting than any edit button.

CSS Subgrid

Speaking of Grid, if you’ve built a site with it (and if you haven’t, where have you been?), you’ll know that matching elements in complex HTML structures often results in nesting grids. Matching those grids requires careful management, CSS variables, or both. With CSS Subgrid, grids can inherit grid definitions from a grid defined higher up the hierarchy.

CSS Subgrid has been supported by Firefox for a while but is not yet part of Chrome or Edge. Until there’s wider support, it’s not a practical solution, and using a fallback negates any benefit of using Subgrid. However, its introduction in Safari will surely herald rapid adoption by Google and Microsoft and moves the web forward considerably.

CSS Subgrid is likely to be a practical solution within 18 months.

AVIF Support

AVIF is an exceptionally compact image format that beats even WebP in many instances. It even allows for sequences, creating what is essentially an animated GIF but smaller, and for bitmaps.

AVIF is already supported by Chrome, with partial support in Firefox. Safari now joins them.

AVIF support is one of the more valuable additions to Safari 16 because you’re probably already serving different images inside a picture element. If so, your Safari 16 users will begin receiving a smaller payload automatically, speeding up your site and boosting UX and SEO.

Enhanced Animation

Safari 16 introduces some significant improvements in animation, but the one that catches the eye is that you can now animate CSS Grid.

Yes, let that sink in. Combine Container Queries and animation. The possibilities for hover states on elements are tantalizing.

Safari 16 also supports CSS Offset Path — known initially as CSS Motion Path — which allows you to animate elements along any defined path. This enables the kind of animated effect that previously needed JavaScript (or Flash!) to accomplish.

Chrome, Edge, and Firefox all support CSS Offset Path; the addition of Safari means it’s now a practical solution that can be deployed in the wild.

Web Inspector Extensions

Announced as part of the beta release, Web Inspector Extensions allow web developers to create extensions for Safari, just as they would for Chrome.

Web Inspector Extensions — or Safari Extensions as they’re destined to be known — can be built in HTML, CSS, and JS, so the learning curve is shallow. It’s a good route into app development for web designers.

Because the underlying technology is the same as other browser extensions, anyone who has made a Chrome, Edge, or Firefox extension will be able to port it to Safari 16+ relatively easily. As a result, there should be a rapid expansion of the available extensions.

Improved Accessibility

Accessibility is key to an effective and inclusive web. Be like Bosch: everybody counts, or nobody counts.

When testing a design for accessibility, emulators don’t cut it. In my experience, Safari has some of the most reliable accessibility settings, especially when it comes to Media Queries like prefers-reduced-movement.

Further gains in this field mean that Safari continues to be an essential tool for QA tests.

Reduced Resets

Finally, I want to throw up my hands to celebrate the reduced number of non-standard CSS appearance settings.

For years we’ve been prefacing our style sheets with elaborate resets like Normalize, designed to undo all the assumptions browser developers make about design and the UI preferences of their engineers.

Safari 16 has reportedly “Removed most non-standard CSS appearance values.” How effective this is and how much we can rely on it given the other browsers on the market remains to be seen. However, like many of Safari 16’s changes, it’s a step towards a browser that’s on the developers’ side instead of an obstacle to overcome.

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Angular vs React: Which JS Framework Is Better?

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Currently, there are 1.9 billion active websites with 4.6 Google searches per day and more than 5.4 billion unique Internet users. To date, the market size of the Web Design Services industry is equal to $11 billion, with the total number of web developers and designers in the US expected to increase to 205,000 in 2030 from 178,900 in 2020.number of jobs

The revenue in the application development software industry is expected to reach $149.7 billion in 2022 and grow to $218.80 billion by 2027 at a CAGR of 7.89%. The top 5 countries expected to generate the most revenues over the 2022-2027 period include:

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Database Replication: Open-Source Tools and Options

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For the past few years, business systems have been generating large amounts of data and need tools to manage the data. One of the business requirements was to copy the primary data to secondary databases. Several popular tools are available in the market to replicate the data from master DB to secondary DB. This article will discuss various open-source tools for DB replication and stream-based replication for real-time.

Replication is the process of sharing/storing information in multiple places to ensure reliability, fault tolerance, and accessibility. The replication options are described as follows:

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