TypeScript In 50 Lessons: A New Smashing Book
Smashing Magazine’s latest release, “TypeScript In 50 Lessons”, aims to demystify TypeScript’s quirks through short, digestible chapters. Co-authored with Stefan Baumgartner, the book targets both newcomers and developers who have already tried TypeScript and want to deepen their understanding. Topics range from type systems to handling complex JavaScript scenarios.
The book is available as a quality hardcover print edition with free worldwide shipping and a 100-day money-back guarantee, or as a DRM-free eBook in ePUB, Kindle, and PDF formats (included with a Smashing Membership). A free sample chapter (2.3 MB PDF) can be downloaded, and the table of contents is available on the book’s page. For related reading, Smashing Magazine has published articles on understanding TypeScript generics and setting up TypeScript for React projects with Webpack.
Get the eBookUpcoming Events and Workshops
The final live event of 2020 will be SmashingConf San Francisco, taking place November 10–11. The schedule and tickets are now online.
Spots are still open for the ongoing online workshop series, covering a variety of topics suitable for different project needs and career paths.
Smashing Podcast: What’s Next
The Smashing Podcast, hosted by Drew McLellan, publishes new episodes every second Tuesday, featuring conversations with design and development experts. Subscriptions are available through your preferred podcast app.
The next episode is scheduled for Oct. 20 and will feature Stefan Baumgartner discussing TypeScript. Listeners with suggestions for future topics or guest speakers can reach out via Twitter.
The release of the new book adds to Smashing Magazine’s growing collection of guides, which continues to expand with resources aimed at improving workflows and skills. Topics covered recently include creating artwork through code and handling clunky website policy disclosure pages.
Community Finds Worth Bookmarking
The Smashing Newsletter now lands in inboxes weekly, with each edition focused on a single topic rather than a broad roundup. Recent issues have zeroed in on CSS, front-end accessibility, JavaScript, UX, and handy utilities. Readers keep surfacing useful projects from across the community, and a few recurring favorites stand out.
Date Pickers That Behave Themselves
Date picker libraries are plentiful, but reliable ones are harder to come by. Duet Date Picker is a solid option: it's WCAG 2.1 compliant, framework-agnostic, and supports setting minimum and maximum dates out of the box. At roughly 10kb minified and gzipped — styles and icons included — it won't weigh down your bundle.
If you're working in React, React Dates from Airbnb is worth a look. It's built with internationalization, accessibility, and mobile use in mind.
Kickstarting Creativity
Staring at a blank page happens to everyone. The Deck of Brilliance offers 52 free tools designed to help you generate ideas quickly. The premise is simple: pick a tool, work through it, and write down whatever comes to mind. The more ideas you produce, the better your odds of landing on a strong one.
A More Inclusive Reading Experience For Comics
Complex layouts often get flattened into images for the sake of simplicity, but that approach leaves out a lot of users. Comica11y, an experiment from Paul Spencer, rethinks how comics can work on the web. The project explores reading modes with closed captions, panel-to-panel focus management, high-contrast styling, SVG color blindness filters, selectable and translatable text, LTR and RTL support, and adjustable font sizes — a good demonstration of how far UI accessibility can be pushed.
A Curated Hub For Product Designers
Bookmarks are fine, but a searchable library is better. Design Notes is a community-contributed resource that currently aggregates 334 links for product designers. You can filter by topic, from user experience to design and prototyping tools. Missing something? Anyone can submit additions to the site.
What Challenger Banks Get Right
To understand what makes newer banks stand out, UX specialist Peter Ramsey opened 12 real UK bank accounts and documented everything. The result is a six-chapter case study covering account opening, first payments, freezing cards, international transfers, open banking, and customer support. It's a practical reference for designing better financial experiences.
Taming Complex Data Tables
Tables remain one of the trickiest components to design responsively. Several recent articles offer practical approaches. Andrew Coyle's "Design Better Data Tables" covers patterns like show/hide columns and breaking rows into cards.
For a broader overview, Molly Hellmuth's "The Ultimate Guide to Designing Data Tables" bundles best practices with a free design kit. Smashing Magazine's own "How To Architect Complex Web Tables" dives into building maintainable systems for resizing, filtering, truncation, and per-cell states. And for mobile specifically, "Designing a Complex Table for Mobile" shows how to convert a dense enterprise table into something navigable on small screens.
Git Command References
Git's command set is easy to forget. A few cheatsheets help. Git log covers common ways to track changes and search commits. Git Branch walks through listing, creating, renaming, switching, and deleting branches.
For deeper dives, Atlassian's Git cheatsheet covers undoing changes, rewriting history, and working with remote repositories. GitHub's Cheat Sheet focuses on inspecting and comparing code, tracking path changes, ignoring patterns, and temporary commits.
A Growing Accessibility Resource List
Finding the right accessibility answer when you need it is never easy. A11yresources, curated by Hannah Milan, organizes accessibility tools and articles, browser extensions, newsletters, podcasts, and videos into a single searchable list.
Survey Data On Design Systems And Prototyping
Two surveys offer insight into how teams work. The 2020 Design Systems Survey from Sparkbox reports on challenges and strategies reported by organizations invested in design systems, including in-house systems, maturity levels, and cultural impact.
Framer's State of Prototyping 2020 is a 31-page PDF (email registration required). It notes that only a third of respondents can turn around a prototype within 12 hours, with steep learning curves and tool mismatch cited as common blockers. Litmus's State of Email 2020 complements both with trends in email design and development.
Command Line Utilities Worth Installing
Marcel Bischoff maintains a curated list of command line apps, covering automation, backup, encryption, productivity, and version control. It even includes games for breaks between tasks. Contributions are welcome if your favorite tool isn't listed yet.
Automated Form Testing With Realistic Input
Manually filling out forms during testing is tedious. The Fake Filler browser extension automates it. Available for Chrome and Firefox, it populates inputs with dummy data and randomly selects radio buttons, dropdowns, and checkboxes. It respects the maxlength attribute and skips CAPTCHA, hidden, disabled, and readonly fields.
Quiet Calls With AI Noise Removal
Background noise is a fixture of remote work. Krisp is an AI-powered tool that removes noise on both ends of a call at the click of a button. It works across more than 800 conferencing, messaging, streaming, and recording apps, and processes audio locally, so no voice data leaves your device.
From The Smashing Press
Smashing Magazine's printed books collect the expertise of community members who've shared their experience in lasting form. Paul and Alla are among those authors; their titles remain available alongside the rest of the catalog.
