Exploring the Animation Landscape of 2023 Wrapped
Each year, we aim to elevate the Spotify Wrapped experience for our users, crafting captivating data stories and pushing the boundaries of what the experience delivers to users. Since 2019, Spotify Wrapped has been available through the Spotify app on both Android and iOS. In 2023, we embarked on a path to share the joy of Wrapped with a larger global audience with a complementary web experience.
Making Sense Of “Senseless” JavaScript Features — Smashing Magazine
JavaScript may be the most popular client-side language in the world, but it’s far from perfect and not without its quirks. Juan Diego Rodriguez examines several “absurd” JavaScript eccentricities and explains how they made it into the language as well as how to avoid them in your own code.
The View Transitions API And Delightful UI Animations (Part 1) — Smashing Magazine
The View Transitions API is a new — but game-changing — feature that allows us to do the types of reactive state-based UI and page transitions that have traditionally been exclusive to JavaScript frameworks. In the first part of this mini two-part series, Adrian Bece thoroughly explains why we need the API and demonstrates its basic usage.
The developer experience of the Frontend Cloud
Vercel's Frontend Cloud offers a complete Developer Experience (DX) Platform, to automate complex systems and offer best-in-market iteration velocity.
New CSS Viewport Units Do Not Solve The Classic Scrollbar Problem — Smashing Magazine
Since the introduction of CSS viewport units in 2012, many of us have been using `width: 100vw` as a way to set an element’s width to the full width of the viewport. But, as Šime Vidas explains in this deep dive, `100vw` does not always represent the full width of the viewport due to differences in how browsers handle scrollbars.
Integrating Turnstile with the Cloudflare WAF to challenge fetch requests
By editing or creating a new Turnstile widget with “Pre-Clearance” enabled, Cloudflare customers can now use Turnstile to issue a challenge when a page’s HTML loads, and enforce that all valid responses have a valid Turnstile token
CSS Scroll Snapping Aligned With Global Page Layout: A Full-Width Slider Case Study — Smashing Magazine
Have you run into a situation where you need the padding of one element to align with the padding of another element? In this article, Brecht De Ruyte demonstrates the issue with a full-width slider component that breaks out of the main page container and shares a couple of techniques to keep it visually aligned with other elements on the page.
Our Journey Migrating to AWS IMDSv2
We are heavy users of Amazon Compute Compute Cloud (EC2) at Slack — we run approximately 60,000 EC2 instances across 17 AWS regions while operating hundreds of AWS accounts. A multitude of teams own and manage our various instances. The Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) is an on-instance component that can be used to gain an…
Getting Started with React Native Skia - Shopify
Skia is a cross-platform 2D graphics library that provides a set of drawing primitives which run on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, Linux, and the browser. Over the past two years, Shopify Engineering has sponsored development of the @shopify/react-native-skia library that exposes Skia functionality to React Native. The React Native (RN) Skia community is one of the most vibrant and interesting in t
How Marketing Changed OOP In JavaScript — Smashing Magazine
Discussing the decisions surrounding JavaScript prototypes, the article by Juan Diego Rodriguez scrutinizes their origin, examines missteps in the design, and explores how these factors have affected the way we write JavaScript today.
The user experience of the Frontend Cloud
The user experience of the Frontend Cloud: Part 2 of the developer's guide to a future-proofed stack.
The power of headless: Ecommerce success with Next.js, Vercel, and Shopify
CSS Responsive Multi-Line Ribbon Shapes (Part 2) — Smashing Magazine
In Part 1 of the series, Temani Afif demonstrated how creating ribbon patterns in CSS has evolved with the availability of new CSS features. In this second installment of this brief two-part series, we look at two additional ribbon variations that introduce techniques for masking a repeated background gradient in CSS.
An Interactive Guide to CSS Grid
CSS Grid is an incredibly powerful tool for building layouts on the web, but like all powerful tools, there's a significant learning curve. In this tutorial, we'll build a mental model for how CSS Grid works and how we can use it effectively. I'll share the biggest 💡 lightbulb moments I've had in my own learning journey.
The foundations of the Frontend Cloud
An introduction to the underlying infrastructure of the Frontend Cloud: Part 1 of the developer's guide to a future-proofed stack for the modern frontend.
CSS Responsive Multi-Line Ribbon Shapes (Part 1) — Smashing Magazine
Ribbons have been used to accent designs for many years now. But, the way we approach them in CSS has evolved with the introduction of newer features. In this article, Temani Afif combines background and gradient tricks to create ribbon shapes in CSS that are not only responsive but support multi-line text and are easily adjustable with a few CSS variables.
Creating Accessible UI Animations — Smashing Magazine
Animation and accessibility are often seen as two separate powers at odds with one another. How is it possible to strike a balance between elements that move and the possible negative effects they expose to users who are sensitive to motion? Oriana García explains how her team at Mercado Libre tackled the challenge by creating guiding principles for applying animation to user interfaces and incorp
Headless Component: a pattern for composing React UIs
As React UI controls become more sophisticated, complex logic can get intertwined with the visual representation. This makes it hard to reason about the behavior of the component, hard to test it, and necessary to build similar components that need a different look. A Headless Component extracts all non-visual logic and state management, separating the brain of a component from its looks.
Addressing Accessibility Concerns With Using Fluid Type — Smashing Magazine
The CSS `clamp()` function is often paired with viewport units for “fluid” font sizing that scales the text up and down at different viewport sizes. As common as this technique is, several voices warn that it opens up situations where text can fail WCAG Success Criterion 1.4.4, which specifies that text should scale up to at least 200% when the user’s browser reaches its 500% maximum zoom level. M
How Meta built Threads in 5 months
In about five short months, a small team of engineers at Meta took Threads, the new text-based conversations app, from from an idea to the most successful app launch of all time, pulling in over 100M users in its first five days. But this achievement wouldn’t have been possible without Meta’s existing systems and infrastructure. […]
Building secure and performant web applications on Vercel
Vercel's Frontend Cloud offers support for deploying complex and dynamic web applications with managed infrastructure so you have control and flexibility without having to worry about configuration and maintenance
What Removing Object Properties Tells Us About JavaScript — Smashing Magazine
Removing properties from an object in JavaScript might not be the most exciting job, but there are many ways to achieve it, each revealing a fundamental aspect of how JavaScript works. Juan Diego Rodríguez explores each technique in this article.
How To Animate Along A Path In CSS — Smashing Magazine
CSS loaders and progress indicators are some of the most widely used examples in tutorials and documentation. In this article, Preethi demonstrates an approach using animated custom properties, a conic gradient, CSS `offset`, and emoji to create the illusion of a scooter racing along a donut track.
js13kGames 2023 winners 🏆
The twelfth annual js13kGames coding competition, challenging participants to create games in 13kB or less of JavaScript in a month, just wrapped up. This post highlights the top thirteen entries.
Re-Creating The Pop-Out Hover Effect With Modern CSS (Part 2) — Smashing Magazine
Re-create a fancy hover effect where an avatar pops out of a starburst pattern for the frame on hover. The idea is to apply the concepts in a new context and gain another view of how trigonometric functions can influence the way we mask elements in CSS.
Re-Creating The Pop-Out Hover Effect With Modern CSS (Part 1) — Smashing Magazine
This article is all about experimenting with modern CSS features. We will combine things like CSS masks, CSS variables, trigonometric functions, `@property`, and more to create a neat hover effect that would have been extremely difficult to do even a few years ago without the latest and greatest that CSS has to offer.
Running Serverless Puppeteer with Workers and Durable Objects
We’ve heard from developers that configuring and maintaining their own serverless browser automation systems can be quite painful. The Workers Browser Rendering API solves this
A Socket API that works across JavaScript runtimes — announcing a WinterCG spec and Node.js implementation of connect()
Engineers from Cloudflare and Vercel have published a specification of the connect() sockets API for review by the community, along with a Node.js compatible implementation of connect() that developers can start using today
The Path To Awesome CSS Easing With The linear() Function — Smashing Magazine
With the new CSS `linear()` easing function on the horizon, the possibilities of what we can do to create natural-feeling animations and transitions in the future are greatly expanded. Jhey Tompkins looks at the current state of CSS easing in this article and demonstrates what we can expect from `linear()`, including handy tools to get your hands on it today.
How Whop improved their Real Experience Score by 200% with the Next.js App Router
Why Vercel and Next.js are the perfect fit for this global fashion media group
Understanding the JavaScript Modulo Operator
One of the most commonly-misunderstood operators is Modulo (%). In this tutorial, we'll unpack exactly what this little bugger does, and learn how it can help us solve practical problems.
Revealing Images With CSS Mask Animations — Smashing Magazine
Let’s play with images and experiment with CSS masks. The idea is fairly simple: take a single `` tag and harness the power of CSS to accomplish complex hover transitions. Through different demos, you will see how CSS masks combined with gradients allow us to create fancy effects — with efficient, reusable code.
Gradients, Blend Modes, And A Really Cool Hover Effect — Smashing Magazine
Gradients are a powerful CSS feature. We use them for texture, depth, and even to hide parts of elements with CSS masking. This article covers another interesting way to use gradients — as a hover effect that affects the appearance of other elements around the hovered element.
Making Sense of React Server Components
This year, the React team unveiled something they've been quietly researching for years: an official way to run React components exclusively on the server. This is a significant paradigm shift, and it's caused a whole lot of confusion in the React community. In this tutorial, we'll explore this new world, and build an intuition for how it works, and how we can take advantage of it.
Getting started with edge computing
Edge computing practitioners answer your questions about when and why to build applications at the edge.
A Few Interesting Ways To Use CSS Shadows For More Than Depth — Smashing Magazine
We often think of shadows in CSS as something to reach for when we want to add depth to a design. But shadows can be used for more than depth. Let’s experiment with different shadows — two CSS properties and a filter — to make interesting hover effects, different text styles, and even casting shadows on other shadows.
CSS And Accessibility: Inclusion Through User Choice — Smashing Magazine
In this article, Carie Fisher outlines which CSS media features are available for detecting user preferences and how they are used to design and build more inclusive user experiences.
How To Define An Array Of Colors With CSS — Smashing Magazine
Join Temani Afif on experiment with modern CSS features to create an array of colors. The goal is to define a comma-separated list of colors and iterate through them using an index.
Recreating YouTube’s Ambient Mode Glow Effect — Smashing Magazine
In this article, Adrian deconstructs YouTube’s “Ambient Mode” feature and how HTML `` and the `requestAnimationFrame` function are used to create the glowing effect.
Protecting data on Apple devices with Cloudflare and Jamf
Our unique partnership offering will enable Jamf customers to easily implement network Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Remote Browser Isolation (RBI), and SaaS Tenancy Controls from Cloudflare to prevent sensitive data loss from their Apple devices
Bringing HDR video to Reels
Meta has made it possible for people to upload high dynamic range (HDR) videos from their phone’s camera roll to Reels on Facebook and Instagram. To show standard dynamic range (SDR) UI elements and overlays legibly on top of HDR video, we render them at a brightness level comparable to the video itself. We solved […]
Shines, Perspective, And Rotations: Fancy CSS 3D Effects For Images — Smashing Magazine
CSS has all kinds of tricks that are capable of turning images into neat, interactive elements. This article is a collection of fancy 3D effects for images that demonstrate those CSS powers.
Cracking Electron apps open
I use the draw.io desktop app to make diagrams for my website. I run it on an actual desktop, like Windows or macOS, but the asset pipeline that converts .drawio files, to .pdf , to .svg , and then to .svg again (but smaller) runs on Linux. So I have a Rust program somewhere that opens headless chromium, and loads just the HTML/JS/CSS part of draw.io I need to render my diagrams, and then use Chro
Penpot’s Flex Layout: Building CSS Layouts In A Design Tool — Smashing Magazine
In today’s article, let’s explore how we can use Flex Layout and see how it empowers designers with greater control over their work while saving everyone’s time.
Incrementally adopting Next.js at one of Europe's fastest growing brands
Cloudflare Snippets is now available in alpha
Cloudflare Snippets are available in alpha. Snippets are a simple way of executing a small piece of Javascript on select HTTP requests, using the ruleset engine filtering logic
Meet Codux: The React Visual Editor That Improves Developer Experience — Smashing Magazine
[Codux](https://codux.hopp.to/smashing) is a new visual IDE brought to you by the fine folks over at[ Wix](https://www.wix.com/). It’s got a lot of low-code features that level the playing field for app development but is really designed for React developers. How so, you ask? That’s what we’re going to explore in this article.
Animated Pride Flags
Happy Pride month! In this tutorial, I'll share a handful of my favourite animation tricks. You'll learn how to build an animated wavy pride flag using CSS keyframes and linear gradients. We'll also see how to make it dynamic using React. 🏳️🌈
Primitive Objects In JavaScript: When To Use Them (Part 2) — Smashing Magazine
In the second part of the series, Kirill looks at the usefulness of primitive objects, exploring how reducing capabilities could be a benefit for your project.
Advanced Form Control Styling With Selectmenu And Anchoring API — Smashing Magazine
Thanks to the Open UI working community group, there’s a new element on the horizon, , that will make styling this type of form control a whole lot better. You’re going to walk through an early implementation of this new experimental element by creating a pattern that you would never have thought possible with CSS alone — a radial selection menu.
How Oxy uses hooks for maximum extensibility
Let's take a look from the perspective of an Oxy application developer, and then we can discuss the implementation of the framework and some of the interesting design decisions we made
Smashing Podcast Episode 61 With Rachel Andrew: What Is Web Platform Baseline? — Smashing Magazine
In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about Web Platform Baseline. What is it, and how can it help determine your browser support policy? Drew McLellan talks to expert Rachel Andrew to find out.
Workers Browser Rendering API enters open beta
The Workers Browser Rendering API allows developers to programmatically control and interact with a headless browser instance and create automation flows for their applications and products. Today we enter the open beta and start onboarding our customers.
Making Cloudflare the best place for your web applications
Angular, Astro, Next, Nuxt, Qwik, Remix, Solid, Svelte, Vue on Cloudflare? Deployed globally, even “beyond the edge”, with a single command? And all for $0 or a fraction of the usual cost? Try: npm create cloudflare
Solving Media Object Float Issues With CSS Block Formatting Contexts — Smashing Magazine
This article covers common problems using CSS floats and how to solve them using a block formatting context (BFC). Whether you are a beginner or an experienced web developer, you will learn valuable insights and practical solutions for dealing with CSS float issues.
A Guide To Redux Toolkit With TypeScript — Smashing Magazine
The Redux Toolkit documentation calls the library a better way to write Redux logic for React apps and a simple and efficient toolkit for Redux development. In this article, you will learn about the Redux toolkit by building an app that tracks project issues.
What does Vercel do?
Technically newsletter founder Justin Gage explains how Vercel makes building web applications as easy as possible, powered by the frontend cloud.
The Safest Way To Hide Your API Keys When Using React — Smashing Magazine
Want to make sure your API keys are safe and sound when working with React? Jessica Joseph’s got you covered! She will show you the best ways to hide your API keys, from using environment variables to building your own back-end proxy server.
