Amazon has been adding new “skills” for its Echo personal assistant almost as fast as developers can make them, but ask any Echo owner and chances are you’ll hear a common refrain: It’s impossible to browse and find new skills to bolster what Echo can do. Not anymore. Amazon has finally overhauled the skills section…
Traditional “live TV” still commands the most time of any media channel, says Nielsen in its first-quarter 2016 Total Audience Report. However it no longer dominates for the most coveted consumer segments. The report, released earlier today, focuses on three primary areas: reach, time spent with media and audience composition. Nielsen’s legacy business is TV…
Redux is one of the hottest libraries in front-end development these days. However, many people are confused about what it is and what its benefits are. As the documentation states, Redux is a predictable state container for JavaScript apps. To rephrase that, it’s an application data-flow architecture, rather than a traditional library or a framework…
We’ve all heard the stats: This year, marketers plan to produce 70 percent more content than they did in 2015. Content marketing has become the most significant part of the marketing mix and is showing no signs of slowing down. However, brands and agencies often still struggle to really define their ROI. One primary challenge…
Evan Lorne / Shutterstock.com Remember bookstores. Remember how if you wanted a book you had to put in the extra effort required to physically go somewhere to get it. Then remember when you started buying books online and it was so much easier and the bookstores started going away because it was cheaper for them…
Accessibility has always been a slightly unsettling realm for web developers. Surrounded with myths, misunderstandings and contradicting best practices, it used to be a domain for a small group of experts who would “add” accessibility on top of the finished product. Today we’re privileged to announce our brand new book on inclusive design patterns, written…
We live in a mobile-first, cloud-first world powered by technology that changes by the nanosecond. And search is no different. Search is changing in look, form and function to become part of the fabric of our everyday lives, barely recognizable from its inception as a text box. By 2020, 50 percent of searches will be…
Let’s be honest: We designers can be difficult to work with. We might come from a controversial company culture, work an unconventional schedule or get impatient whenever our Internet connection is slower than the speed of light. Would you be at ease with a service provider who matches this description? When talking to potential clients,…
Alexander Supertramp / Shutterstock.com If recent accounts on the rise of voice search are anything to go by, the volume of long-tailed queries with more natural language and searches with a question is heading nowhere but up and to the right. This, the argument goes, should in turn impact our digital strategy as we strive…
I love to fish. Over the years, I’ve enjoyed many excellent fights and satisfying catches, but I’ve also spent days staring at my line without so much as a nibble in reward. On those days, it can be pretty tempting to give up and assume, “There are no fish in this river!” Of course, it’s…
