Testing Metro Apps With the Windows 8 Simulator

Posted on June 8, 2013 by Darlene Tate

This tutorial demonstrates how to test Metro apps using the Visual Studio Express 2012 RC for Windows 8 Simulator. Watch more at: Building Your First Windows Store App with XAML and Visual Basic.

This specific tutorial is just a single movie from chapter one of the Windows 8 Metro App Development First Look course presented by lynda.com author David Gassner. The complete Windows 8 Metro App Development First Look course has a total duration of 3 hours and 2 minutes and shows developers how to get started building Metro style application for Windows 8

Windows 8 Metro App Development First Look table of contents:

Introduction
1. Getting Started
2. Creating Metro Apps with XAML
3. Creating Metro Apps with HTML
4. Integrating Apps with Windows 8 Features
5. Preparing an App for Deployment

Metro (design language)

The new Windows 8 Start Screen, making use of flat, colored live tiles and a laterally scrolling canvas as used in Windows Phone and Xbox 360 Dashboard.

Metro is an internal code name of a typography-based design language created by Microsoft, originally for use in Windows Phone. A key design principle of Metro is better focus on the content of applications, relying more on typography and less on graphics (“content before chrome”). Early uses of the Metro principles began as early as Microsoft Encarta 95 and MSN 2.0, and later evolved into Windows Media Center and Zune. Later the principles of Metro were included in Windows Phone, Microsoft’s website, the Xbox 360 dashboard update, and Windows 8.

Microsoft itself has stopped using the term “Metro” to refer to this design language. For a brief period of time, it used “Modern UI” before gradually adopting “Microsoft design language”.

Metro Principles

Microsoft’s design team cites as an inspiration for the design language signs commonly found at public transport systems; for instance, those found on the King County Metro transit system, which serves the greater Seattle area where Microsoft has its headquarters. The design language places emphasis on good typography and has large text that catches the eye. Microsoft sees the design language as “sleek, quick, modern” and a “refresh” from the icon-based interfaces of Windows, Android, and iOS. All instances use fonts based on the Segoe font-family designed by Steve Matteson at Agfa Monotype and licensed to Microsoft. For the Zune, Microsoft created a custom version called Zegoe UI, and for Windows Phone Microsoft created the “Segoe WP” font-family. The fonts mostly differ only in minor details. More obvious differences between Segoe UI and Segoe WP are apparent in their respective numerical characters. The Segoe UI in Windows 8 had obvious differences – similar to Segoe WP. Characters with notable typographic changes included 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, I, and Q.

Microsoft designed the design language specifically to consolidate groups of common tasks to speed up usage. It achieves this by excluding superfluous graphics and instead relying on the actual content to function as the main UI. The resulting interfaces favour larger hubs over smaller buttons and often feature laterally scrolling canvases. Page titles are usually large and consequently also take advantage of lateral scrolling.

Animation plays a large part. Microsoft recommends consistent acknowledgement of transitions, and user interactions (such as presses or swipes) by some form of natural animation or motion. This aims to give the user the impression of an “alive” and responsive UI with “an added sense of depth.”

Internally, Microsoft has compiled a list of principles considered core to the design language.

Close to the official launch date of Windows 8 (October 26, 2012), as more developers and Microsoft partners started working on creating new Metro applications, many websites with resources related to this topic have been created, including Microsoft’s UX guidelines for Windows Store Apps.

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Visual Studio Tutorial: Exploring the New Features of Visual Studio 2012

Posted on June 4, 2013 by Darlene Tate

Take a tour of all that’s new in Visual Studio 2012. Watch more at: Visual Studio 2012 Essential Training.

This tutorial is a single movie from the Visual Studio 2012 Essential Training course presented by lynda.com author Walt Ritscher. The complete course duration is about 7 hours and 13 minutes and shows how to get comfortable in Visual Studio, the full-featured app development environment from Microsoft, and learn how to create a variety of projects, from websites to rich Internet applications.

Introduction
1. Getting Started
2. Exploring the Visual Studio Workspace
3. Understanding the Project Types
4. Exploring the Project Types
5. Code and Text Editors
6. Tools That Enhance Your Coding Sessions
7. Debugging and Troubleshooting Code
8. Using the Designers for UI Development

Visual Studio Designer Tools

Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 logo

Visual Studio includes a host of visual designers to aid in the development of applications. These tools include:

Windows Forms Designer

The Windows Forms designer is used to build GUI applications using Windows Forms. Layout can be controlled by housing the controls inside other containers or locking them to the side of the form. Controls that display data (like textbox, list box, grid view, etc.) can be bound to data sources like databases or queries. Data-bound controls can be created by dragging items from the Data Sources window onto a design surface. The UI is linked with code using an event-driven programming model. The designer generates either C# or VB.NET code for the application.

WPF Designer

The WPF designer, codenamed Cider, was introduced with Visual Studio 2008. Like the Windows Forms designer it supports the drag and drop metaphor. It is used to author user interfaces targeting Windows Presentation Foundation. It supports all WPF functionality including data binding and automatic layout management. It generates XAML code for the UI. The generated XAML file is compatible with Microsoft Expression Design, the designer-oriented product. The XAML code is linked with code using a code-behind model.

Web designer/development

Visual Studio also includes a web-site editor and designer that allows web pages to be authored by dragging and dropping widgets. It is used for developing ASP.NET applications and supports HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It uses a code-behind model to link with ASP.NET code. From Visual Studio 2008 onwards, the layout engine used by the web designer is shared with Microsoft Expression Web. There is also ASP.NET MVC support for MVC technology as a separate download and ASP.NET Dynamic Data project available from Microsoft.

Class designer

The Class Designer is used to author and edit the classes (including its members and their access) using UML modeling. The Class Designer can generate C# and VB.NET code outlines for the classes and methods. It can also generate class diagrams from hand-written classes.

Data designer

The data designer can be used to graphically edit database schemas, including typed tables, primary and foreign keys and constraints. It can also be used to design queries from the graphical view.

Mapping designer

From Visual Studio 2008 onwards, the mapping designer is used by LINQ to SQL to design the mapping between database schemas and the classes that encapsulate the data. The new solution from ORM approach, ADO.NET Entity Framework, replaces and improves the old technology.

WPF Control Development Unleashed: Building Advanced User Experiences

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Understanding the Windows Phone SDK Environment

Posted on June 1, 2013 by Darlene Tate

This overview introduces the Windows Phone SDK environment from a code perspective, and discusses the SDK foundation. Watch more at: Windows Phone SDK Essential Training.

This specific tutorial is just a single movie from chapter three of the Windows Phone SDK Essential Training course presented by lynda.com author Michael Lehman. The complete Windows Phone SDK Essential Training course has a total duration of 3 hours and 59 minutes, and shows how to build sample applications while learning Windows Phone concepts and frameworks, including the Metro design language.

Windows Phone SDK Essential Training table of contents:

Introduction
1. Getting Started
2. Navigating the Windows Phone Environment
3. Foundation
4. Building a Units Converter
5. Building Sonnets
6. Implementing Persistence with Isolated Storage
7. Capturing the World
8. Building Take-A-Note
9. Building TweetMonitor
10. Leveraging Built-In Tasks and the Silverlight and Coding4Fun Toolkits
11. Where to go from here

User interface

Windows Phone features a user interface based on Microsoft’s Windows Phone design system, codenamed Metro,and was inspired by the user interface in the Zune HD. The home screen, called the “Start screen”, is made up of “Live Tiles”, which have been the inspiration for the Windows 8 live tiles. Tiles are links to applications, features, functions and individual items (such as contacts, web pages, applications or media items). Users can add, rearrange, or remove tiles. Tiles are dynamic and update in real time – for example, the tile for an email account would display the number of unread messages or a tile could display a live update of the weather. Since Windows Phone 8, live tiles can also be resized to either a small, medium, or large appearance.

Several features of Windows Phone are organized into “hubs”, which combine local and online content via Windows Phone’s integration with popular social networks such as Facebook, Windows Live, and Twitter. For example, the Pictures hub shows photos captured with the device’s camera and the user’s Facebook photo albums, and the People hub shows contacts aggregated from multiple sources including Windows Live, Facebook, and Gmail. From the Hub, users can directly comment and ‘like’ on social network updates. The other built-in hubs are Xbox Music and Video, Xbox Live Games, Windows Phone Store, and Microsoft Office.

Windows Phone uses multi-touch technology. The default Windows Phone user interface has a dark theme that prolongs battery life on OLED screens as fully black pixels don’t emit light. Alternatively, users can also switch to a white background manually. The user may choose a light theme instead, and can also choose from several accent colors. User interface elements such as tiles are shown in the user’s chosen accent color. Third-party applications can be automatically themed with these colors.

Metro UI

The reception to the Metro UI and overall interface of the OS has also been highly praised for its style, with ZDNet noting its originality and fresh clean look. Engadget and ZDNet applauded the integration of Facebook into the People Hub as well as other built-in capabilities, such as Windows Live, etc.

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iOS SDK Tutorial: Understanding SQLite in iOS

Posted on May 26, 2013 by Darlene Tate

This iOS SDK tutorial explores the lightweight and self-contained database SQLite, which is ideal for iOS app development. Watch more at: iOS SDK and SQLite: Building Data-Driven Apps.

This tutorial is a single movie from the iOS SDK and SQLite: Building Data-Driven Apps course presented by lynda.com author Bill Weinman. The complete course duration is 3 hours and 45 minutes long and teaches you how to build a data-driven app for iOS devices, integrating XML data and a streamlined interface.

Introduction
1. An iOS Testbed
2. Building a Database Library
3. Creating the Tableview App
4. Parsing XML Data
5. Using a Modal View
6. The Web View Controller
7. Creating a Preferences Pane
8. Adding a Feature
9. Creating a Universal Application

SQLite is a relational database management system contained in a small (350 KB) C programming library. In contrast to other database management systems, SQLite is not a separate process that is accessed from the client application, but an integral part of it.

SQLite is ACID-compliant and implements most of the SQL standard, using a dynamically and weakly typed SQL syntax that does not guarantee the domain integrity.

SQLite is a popular choice as embedded database for local/client storage in application software such as web browsers. It is arguably the most widely deployed database engine, as it is used today by several widespread browsers, operating systems, and embedded systems, among others. SQLite has many bindings to programming languages.

The source code for SQLite is in the public domain.

Design

Unlike client–server database management systems, the SQLite engine has no standalone processes with which the application program communicates. Instead, the SQLite library is linked in and thus becomes an integral part of the application program. (In this, SQLite follows the precedent of Informix SE of c. 1984) The library can also be called dynamically. The application program uses SQLite’s functionality through simple function calls, which reduce latency in database access: function calls within a single process are more efficient than inter-process communication. SQLite stores the entire database (definitions, tables, indices, and the data itself) as a single cross-platform file on a host machine. It implements this simple design by locking the entire database file during writing. SQLite read operations can be multitasked, though writes can only be performed sequentially.

Web browsers

Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird store a variety of configuration data (bookmarks, cookies, contacts etc.) in internally managed SQLite databases, and even offer an add-on to manage SQLite databases.
Google’s Chrome browser
The Opera Internet suite and browser uses SQLite 3.7.9 for managing WebSQL databases. This is noted in opera:about, although without the mention of WebSQL (databases can be managed through opera:webdatabases).
Embedding SQLite in web browsers has resulted in adding SQLite to the HTML5 Web Storage standard and after discussion inside the W3C Web Applications Working Group the WebSimpleDB API proposal was developed.

Operating systems

Because of its small size, SQLite is well suited to embedded systems, and is also included in:

Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8
Apple’s iOS
Symbian OS
Nokia’s Maemo
Google’s Android
Linux Foundation’s MeeGo
LG’s webOS
NetBSD
OpenBSD

However, it is also suitable for desktop operating systems; Apple adopted it as an option in OS X’s Core Data API from the original implementation in Mac OS X 10.4 onwards, and also for administration of videos and songs on the iPhone.

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iOS 6 Tutorial: Introduction to iOS Collection Views

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Darlene Tate

This tutorial explores the addition of Collection Views in iOS 6 and explains their role in page layout for iOS devices. Watch more at: iOS 6 SDK New Features.

This tutorial is a single movie from the iOS 6 SDK New Features course presented by lynda.com author Simon Allardice. The complete course duration is 2 hours and 29 minutes long and shows how to bring your existing iOS development skills—and your own applications—up to speed with the new options in iOS 6 SDK

Introduction
1. Xcode and Objective-C changes
2. iOS Collection Views
3. Working with Passbook
4. Additional Frameworks

Simon Allardice

This video is a very good introduction to collection views in iOS 6. I really like the way this lynda.com author presents his video tutorials. He has a special way in his teaching that helps you to understand. Although all of the authors from lynda.com are really great – he is one of my favorites. Thumbs up to you Simon! Learn more about Simon here: Simon Allardice.

iOS 6 is the latest major version of the iOS mobile operating system from Apple Inc. The latest version of iOS 6 is 6.1.4. It was preceded by iOS 5 (final version was 5.1.1).

Features

Two notable apps that iOS 6 removed by default are Google Maps (download on the App Store) and YouTube.

The built-in Maps app uses Apple’s new vector-based engine that eliminates the lag present while downloading bitmaps from Google’s servers, making for smoother zooming. New to Maps is turn-by-turn navigation spoken directions in certain countries, 3D views in some major cities and real-time traffic. Turn-by-turn navigation is only available for iPhone 4S or later and iPad 2 or later with cellular capability, while 3D views are only available for iPhone 4S or later, fifth-generation iPod Touch, and iPad 2 and later.

Another change includes the inability to download Podcasts through the regular iTunes application. Instead, users are prompted to download the official Podcasts App in order to continue.

iOS 6 brings the retrieval of documents such as boarding passes, admission tickets, coupons and loyalty cards through its new Passbook app. An iOS device with Passbook can be scanned under a reader to process a mobile payment at participating locations. The app has context-aware features such as notifications for relevant coupons when in the immediate vicinity of a given store.

Apple’s Siri intelligent personal assistant was improved to include the ability to make restaurant reservations, launch apps, dictate Facebook or Twitter updates, retrieve movie reviews and detailed sports statistics. Siri, which previously was only supported on iPhone 4S, is also now supported on iPhone 5, fifth-generation iPod Touch, third- through fourth-generation iPad and iPad Mini.

Facebook comes integrated through Apple’s native apps with iOS 6. Facebook features can be directly accessed from within native apps such as Calendar which can sync Facebook events, or use Facebook’s like button from within the Apple App Store.

New privacy settings are available to the user. In addition to location services, the following have been added in iOS 6: photos (already partially restricted in iOS 5), contacts (address book), calendars, reminders, Bluetooth sharing, Twitter, Facebook, and Sina Weibo. iOS 6 also comes with a “Limit ad tracking” user control in the general settings menu to allow users the option to prevent targeted advertising. Apple’s Advertising Identifier replaces the company’s existing UDID standard. Advertising networks not yet using Apple’s Advertising Identifier device identifier standard would not be affected although Apple will require the standard in the future.

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Building and Customizing jQuery Mobile Themes

Posted on May 18, 2013 by Darlene Tate

This Fireworks CS6 tutorial demonstrates how to build and customize jQuery Mobile themes and icons. Watch more at: Fireworks CS6 Essential Training.

This specific tutorial is just a single movie from chapter ten of the Fireworks CS6 Essential Training course presented by lynda.com author Ray Villalobos. The complete Fireworks CS6 Essential Training course has a total duration of 5 hours and 22 minutes, and covers all the essential drawing features in Fireworks, from drawing simple shapes to applying fills, strokes, and opacity values to objects. The course also covers how to move, scale, and otherwise transform images as well as create symbols, use sprites, and integrate CSS and jQuery Mobile

Fireworks CS6 Essential Training table of contents:

Introduction
1. Understanding the Interface
2. Working with Files
3. Drawing with Fireworks
4. Working with Objects
5. Organizing Documents
6. Using Symbols
7. Enhancing Fireworks
8. Using Sprites
9. CSS Integration
10. jQuery Mobile

Theming

jQuery Mobile provides a powerful theming framework that allows developers to customize color schemes and certain CSS aspects of UI features. Developers can use the jQuery Mobile ThemeRoller application to customize these appearances and create highly branded experiences. After developing a theme in the ThemeRoller application, programmers can download a custom CSS file and include it in their project to use their custom theme.

Each theme can contain up to 26 unique color “swatches,” each of which consists of a header bar, content body, and button states. Combining different swatches allows developers to create a wider range of visual effects than they would be able to with just one swatch per theme. Switching between different swatches within a theme is as simple as adding an attribute called “data-theme” to HTML elements.

The default jQuery Mobile theme comes with five different color swatches, named “a”, “b”, “c”, “d”, and “e”. Here is an example of how you would create a toolbar with the “b” swatch:

<div data-role="header" data-theme="b"> 
        <h1>Page Title</h1> 
</div>

There are already a handful of open source style themes that are developed and supported by third-party organizations. One such open source style theme is the Metro style theme that was developed and released by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. The Metro style theme is meant to mimic the UI of the Metro (design language) that Microsoft uses in its mobile operating systems.

Adobe Fireworks

Adobe Fireworks (formerly Macromedia Fireworks) is a bitmap and vector graphics editor. It was originally developed using parts of Macromedia xRes, which Adobe acquired in 2005. Fireworks is made for web designers for rapidly creating website prototypes and application interfaces. Its features include slices and the ability to add hotspots. It is designed to integrate with other Adobe products such as Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Flash. It is available as either a standalone product or bundled with Adobe Creative Suite. Previous versions were bundled with Macromedia Studio.

On May 6, 2013, Adobe announced that Fireworks would be phased out. Adobe will continue to provide security updates and perhaps bug fixes for the current version, but does not plan to add any new feature beyond what is in Fireworks CS6.

Image optimization

Fireworks was created specifically for web production. Since not every user may be in possession of a fast Internet connection, it is at the best interest of the web developers to optimize the size of their digital contents. In terms of image compression, Fireworks has a better compression rate than Photoshop with JPEG, PNG and GIF images.

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How to Import Word Documents Into iBooks Author

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Darlene Tate

This iBooks Author tutorial shows how to import a Microsoft Word document into your iBook. Watch more at: iBooks Author Essential Training.

This specific tutorial is just a single movie from chapter three of the iBooks Author Essential Training course presented by lynda.com author Chris Mattia. The complete iBooks Author Essential Training course has a total duration of 5 hours and 45 minutes and shows how to use the Apple iBooks Author application to create and publish your own iBook, without extensive design or publishing experience.

iBooks Author Essential Training table of contents:

Introduction
1. Getting Started
2. Working with Templates
3. Adding Text
4. Formatting Text
5. Working with Objects
6. Working with Images
7. Working with Shapes
8. Working with Tables
9. Working with Charts
10. Working with Widgets
11. Creating Review Sections
12. Exporting the Book

Pages (word processor)

Pages is a word processor and page layout application developed by Apple Inc. It is part of the iWork productivity suite and runs on the OS X and iOS operating systems. The first version of Pages was announced on January 11, 2005, and was released one month later. The most recent Macintosh version, Pages 4, was released on January 6, 2009, as a component of iWork ’09. On January 27, 2010, Apple announced a new version of Pages for iPad with a touch interface. On May 31, 2011 Apple updated the iOS version of Pages to 1.4, bringing universal binaries allowing the app to be run on iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch devices. On October 12, 2011, Apple updated the iOS app to version 1.5, adding the iCloud “Documents in the Cloud” feature. iOS Pages was updated to version 1.6 on March 7, 2012 and will run on iOS 5.1 or later only.

Pages is marketed by Apple as an easy-to-use application that allows users to quickly create documents on their home computers. A number of Apple-designed templates comprising different themes (such as letters, résumés, posters, and outlines), are included with Pages.

Pages has a number of other advanced writing tools. The “Full Screen” mode (introduced in OS X Lion) hides the menubar and toolbars, allowing users to focus on a single document without being distracted by other windows on the screen. Mail merge automatically populates custom fields with contact data from Address Book or from Numbers to create personalized documents. For example, if a user wants to send one letter to three different people, mail merge allows him to create a single document with placeholder fields that will be populated when printing. Tables and charts pasted from Numbers are automatically updated if the original spreadsheet is changed.

Pages can import some AppleWorks word processing documents and Microsoft Word documents (including Word 2007′s Office Open XML format, and can export documents to rich text, PDF, EPUB and Microsoft Word DOC formats.

Simple and complex mathematical equations can be written for a Pages document with Mac OS X’s Grapher, offering similar capabilities to Microsoft Equation Editor (plus 2D and 3D rendering tools only Grapher can use).

Related Resource:

Firefly – AS3 XML Flip Book

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iOS SDK Tutorial: Parsing the Feed with NSXMLParser

Posted on May 12, 2013 by Darlene Tate

This iOS SDK tutorial shows how to run the NSXMLParser to retrieve the title and description of RSS feeds. Watch more at: iOS SDK and SQLite: Building Data-Driven Apps.

RSS

RSS Rich Site Summary (originally RDF Site Summary, often dubbed Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship.

RSS feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favorite websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place.

RSS feeds can be read using software called an “RSS reader“, “feed reader”, or “aggregator”, which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based. The user subscribes to a feed by entering into the reader the feed’s URI or by clicking a feed icon in a web browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds. RSS allows users to avoid manually inspecting all of the websites they are interested in, and instead subscribe to websites such that all new content is automatically checked for and advertised by their browsers as soon as it is available.

Feed Reader Applications

Feed aggregation clients are applications installed on a PC, smartphone or tablet computer, designed to collect web feed subscriptions and group them together using a user-friendly interface. The graphical user interface of such applications often closely resembles that of popular e-mail clients, using a three-panel composition in which subscriptions are grouped in a frame on the left, and individual entries are browsed, selected, and read in frames on the right.

Software aggregators can also take the form of news tickers which scroll feeds like ticker tape, alerters that display updates in windows as they are refreshed, web browser macro tools or as smaller components (sometimes called plugins or extensions), which can integrate feeds into the operating system or software applications such as a web browser. Clients applications include Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Office Outlook, iTunes, FeedDemon and many others.

Web-based Feed Readers

Web-based feeds readers allow users to find a web feed on the internet and add it to their feed reader. Online feed readers include Bloglines, Feedly, Google Reader (discontinuing July 1, 2013), My Yahoo!, NewsBlur and Netvibes. These are meant for personal use and are hosted on remote servers. Because the application is available via the web, it can be accessed anywhere by a user with an internet connection.

More advanced methods of aggregating feeds are provided via Ajax coding techniques and XML components called web widgets. Ranging from full-fledged applications to small fragments of source code that can be integrated into larger programs, they allow users to aggregate OPML files, email services, documents, or feeds into one interface. Many customizable homepage and portal implementations provide such functionality.

In addition to aggregator services mainly for individual use, there are web applications that can be used to aggregate several blogs into one. One such variety—called planet sites—are used by online communities to aggregate community blogs in a centralized location. They are named after the Planet aggregator, a server application designed for this purpose.

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Dreamweaver Tutorial: Setting up Media Queries

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Darlene Tate

This Dreamweaver and WordPress tutorial shows how to set up media queries for tablet and phone-sized screens—a big component of any responsive web design. Watch more at: Dreamweaver and WordPress: Core Concepts.

This tutorial is a single movie from the sixth chapter of the Dreamweaver and WordPress: Core Concepts course presented by lynda.com author Joseph Lowery. The complete course is 5 hours and 45 minutes long and shows how to combine the utility of WordPress and the power of Dreamweaver to transition existing designs to the WordPress platform

Introduction
1. Setting Up WordPress
2. Exploring a WordPress Site in Dreamweaver
3. Creating Content
4. Working with WordPress Themes
5. Extending WordPress Editable Pages
6. Using WordPress Plug-Ins
7. Integrating WordPress Database Content into Dreamweaver Pages
8. WordPress Administration
9. Publishing a WordPress Site
10. Extending the User Experience
11. Integrating WordPress Database Content into Dreamweaver Pages
12. WordPress Administration
13. Publishing a WordPress Site

Media queries

Logo of CSS3

Media Queries is a CSS3 module allowing content rendering to adapt to conditions such as screen resolution (e.g. smartphone vs. high definition screen). It became a W3C recommended standard in June 2012, and is a cornerstone technology of Responsive Web Design.

Using media queries

A media query consists of a media type and one or more expressions, involving media features, which resolve to either true or false. The result of the query is true if the media type specified in the media query matches the type of device the document is being displayed on and all expressions in the media query are true. When a media query is true, the corresponding style sheet or style rules are applied, following the normal cascading rules.

Here is a simple example:

@media screen and (min-width:500px) { … }

The following table contains the media features listed in the latest W3C recommendation for media queries:

Media Queries Table

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Web Design Tutorial: Planning for Typefaces

Posted on May 9, 2013 by Darlene Tate

This responsive design tutorial discusses the role of typography in web design and the current options available, from @font-face font embedding, to web font licensing agreements. Watch more at: Responsive Design Workflows.

This tutorial is a single movie from the first chapter of the Responsive Design Workflows course presented by lynda.com author Justin Putney. The complete course is 1 hour and 20 minutes long and shows how to evolve your current workflow to incorporate responsive design practices, without adding too much complexity or overhead

Introduction
1. Aspects to Consider
2. Job Roles and Communication
3. Design Considerations for Developers
4. Development Considerations for Designers
5. Client Communications
6. Design Solutions
7. Team Integration

Typeface

In typography, a typeface (also known as font family) is a set of one or more fonts each comprised of glyphs that share common design features. Each font of a typeface has a specific weight, style, condensation, width, slant, italicization, ornamentation, and designer or foundry (and formerly size, in metal fonts). (e.g. “ITC Garamond Bold Condensed Italic” is a different font from “ITC Garamond Condensed Italic” and “ITC Garamond Bold Condensed,” but all are fonts within the same typeface, “ITC Garamond.” However, ITC Garamond is a different typeface than “Adobe Garamond” or “Monotype Garamond.”) There are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly.

The art and craft of designing typefaces is called type design. Designers of typefaces are called type designers and are often employed by type foundries. In digital typography, type designers are sometimes also called font developers or font designers.

The term typeface is frequently confused with the term font. Before the advent of digital typography and desktop publishing, the two terms had more clearly understood meanings.

Style of typefaces

Illustration of different font types and the names of specific specimens

Because an abundance of typefaces have been created over the centuries, they are commonly categorized according to their appearance. At the highest level (in the context of Latin-script fonts), one can differentiate Roman, Blackletter, and Gaelic types. Roman types are in the most widespread use today, and are sub-classified as serif, sans serif, ornamental, and script types. Historically, the first European fonts were blackletter, followed by Roman serif, then sans serif and then the other types. The use of Gaelic faces was restricted to the Irish language, though these form a unique if minority class. Typefaces may be monospaced regardless of whether they are Roman, Blackletter, or Gaelic. Symbol typefaces are non-alphabetic.

Web-safe fonts

Web fonts allow Web designers to use fonts that are not installed on the viewer’s computer. Web-safe fonts are fonts likely to be present on a wide range of computer systems, and used by Web content authors to increase the likelihood that content will be displayed in their chosen font. If a visitor to a Web site does not have the specified font, their browser will attempt to select a similar alternative, based on the author-specified fallback fonts and generic families or it will use font substitution defined in the visitor’s operating system.

Licensing FAQ

Visit: Adobe Web Fonts to learn more about licensing for web fonts and Font Squirrel a web font generator.

Typekit

Typekit is a service which allows subscribers to embed fonts into online documents. Unlike Edge Web Fonts, Typekit requires a subscription, which provides access to the font library. The system was initially developed by Small Batch Inc., and purchased by Adobe in October 2011. A free subscription is available to the service, with a more comprehensive option costing an annual fee.

Adobe Edge Web Fonts

Edge Web Fonts provides access to a collection of online fonts, available for use in web documents. These fonts are provided by Adobe, Google, and independent contributors. The service is integrated with the other Edge suite applications, allowing for a larger catalogue of fonts to be used in web development, whilst remaining compatible with all devices. It is also accessible via the Edge Web Fonts site, which generates the code necessary for inclusion in other sites. It is powered by Typekit, but does not provide the same service, and is completely free.

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