A Beginners 101 to using the Procreate App on iOS(iPadOS) and iPad Pro with Apple Pencil
Since getting my iPad Pro, I have been a big fan of Procreate, its where I do all of my illustration now, it’s so clean and smart, but there is some assumed knowledge that should be in some sort of tour (or maybe there was and I skipped it 🤷♂).
Typography
Who’d have known you can add text to your document in Procreate, it’s tucked away in the add menu, but is super powerful, and lets you import custom fonts, and do all the usual text trickery you would expect.
Colour Picking from your document
Using your finger, hold it on your Artboard where you want to pick a colour. A round colour picker will appear and let you select, at this point you can drag around to get the right colour. …
Preparing for the Google Cloud Platform Professional Cloud Architect Exam
My journey to becoming a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Professional Architect started in April 2020, giving myself a little over 3 months to learn the material.
If you have been using GCP as part of your daily work, and you have a good technical knowledge, this is a good amount of background to have before taking the exam, however if you are new to the material, expect to give yourself a lot more time.
At the time of writing, Google Cloud offers a kickstarter program with free access to some of the tools below, making it a very accessible time to start your learning. …
Using Rollup to include SCSS directly into your Sapper App
Sapper is a great, and efficient way to build your website with a SSR version of Svelte. However, adding a SCSS framework like Foundation or Bootstrap can be a bit of a pain, especially if you don’t want to just include the entire minified css file, and instead pick and choose your components.
As always, where there is a will there’s a way, and with Sapper, this comes in the form of rollup-plugin-scss.
Add rollup-plugin-scss via NPM
In your sapper repo, open up the command prompt/terminal and install rollup-plugin-scss
npm install --save-dev rollup-plugin-scssAdd in Foundation 6
npm install --save-dev…
A Simple Tutorial to easily make a URL shortener like bit.ly or ow.ly and roll your own short domains.
Services like bit.ly and ow.ly are great, and provide a handy way to shorten long, and often hard to remember URLs, into shorter, more digestible ones. When investigating how to make my own version, I came across Firebase Dynamic Links.
Firebase is a web and app platform from Google that provides affordable features for developers, like hosting, server-less functions, databases and storage. It’s got an excellent free tier, is feature packed, and easy to navigate, so let’s get started.
Grab a short domain
This is the most time consuming part of the process, how short you go is up to you, but generally anything shorter than 4 characters of the left side of your domain is going to be hard to find, or very expensive. …
Tris Tolliday describes his vision of a web UI catapulted forwards by 5G
First published in net magazine 16/04/2020
5G is a data revolution about to change every aspect of modern life, connecting everyone in real-time with unparalleled flows of data. For web developers, 5G UI is set to revolutionise the web GUI equilibrium… as soon as it has the national coverage we see with 4G.
Building C# MVC Websites with a CMS can make it difficult to create structured data; which in turn fuels rich snippets on Google.
What are Rich Snippets?
Rich Snippets are a feature of most search engines that use structured data to provide a better user experience than traditional search results, and can give your website more visibility.
Voice assistants are hopping out of emerging tech and into everyday life. As a front end developer, you already have the skills to build one, so let’s dive into the platforms.
Over the past decade, there has been a seismic shift towards conversational interfaces. As people reach ‘peak screen’ and even begin to scale back their device usage with digital well-being features being baked into most operating systems.
To combat screen fatigue, voice assistants have entered the market to become a preferred option for quickly retrieving information. …
A look back from then to now, a decade in our digital world
Moores Law means a decade is a long time in tech. Whole empires are born, broken, and dissolved. The last 10 years has marked a revolution in AI, Cloud computing, and nanoscale components. What better time to Look back at the tech that made the decade in hardware, social and software.
Smart Phones ☎️
We started the decade with phones with chins to make Bruce Forsyth jealous, and chiselled away at them until OLED screens came along allowing screens to ooze over the edge of your display and foldables. …
Stay ahead of the game for 2020
A lot of the trends heading our way this year aren’t new as such, but are becoming useful in mainstream application. Here are my picks of what’ll be hitting the fan in 2020.
1. Rise of 5G
Get ready for 5G ubiquity in 2020, with speeds set to sky rocket. What does this mean for consumer and industry?
Thinking of 5G as a faster 4G is like thinking of a car as a faster bicycle. — Robert Driver, Head of 5GUK
5G is set to be more than an incremental speed change, but a revolution in data throughput, allowing for near gigabit speeds. …
When working in tech, a client will come to you with a problem, they may ask for a website, a new piece of hardware or app.
As a solution provider, you know you can deliver the clients request, but it is worth stopping and thinking. Is this solution right for the problem? Often the best solutions start much earlier in the process.
Maybe the problem is a lack of custom, is building a website the right way to increase sales? It is worth going back to the root issue, and addressing that.
There are four key pillars that can help guide you to a brilliant, delightful and powerful solution that will address the root problem your customer is facing. …
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