seangp

Looks like I'll be returning to Sketch.

For me, the 3 key downsides to a single freelancer is:

* You’re totally dependent on a single point of failure. If they get ill, go on holiday or simply disappear, take on another project or go full time somewhere else, then you’re left in the lurch - particularly post-live when you may need additional support/amends/bug fixes.

* I’m yet to find a single freelancer that can project manage, UX, design, write copy and build to a high standard in all areas. You’ll probably need several freelancers.

* Lack of code review. Usually an agency will have several devs on their team, so there should be some form of code review whereas this is less likely with a single freelancer.

The only thing keeping me from cancelling my Netflix account is the fact that my parents use it. If they crack down on that, then of course I’m cancelling.

My son is 10, he started with scratch when he was about 6, moved to Lua/Roblox a couple of years ago and has since picked up C#/Unity. He definitely got the fundamentals of programming down by working with Lua. Key to his intrinsic drive was being able to code things he loved (games).

Thanks!

Nah, we're pretty clear about it right there on the homepage of the site. If we don’t register our tracks with YouTube’s Content ID, then malicious actors will register our music as their own and monetise our user’s videos.

Many of the people using our tracks are small YouTubers that aren't even eligible for monetisation. The bigger YouTubers who want to monetise are happy to buy a $39 license.

Friend and I have recently launched a side project where we give away high quality, royalty-free music. Early days but we’re making ~$800 per month from YouTube’s content ID payments alone.

https://bluefoxmusic.com

The author is actually female and, surprisingly, ends the article indicating that she is not out of the situation. The depression is still lurking but she has a better understanding of what’s going on.

Probably not, but governments need to start weaning themselves from China’s teat. It won’t be easy and it will take a while, but it can be done.

My son started learning to code at 6 years old. We started by playing fun games at bedtime where he would give me instructions for various things such as how to leave his bedroom and I would follow them literally - resulting in my bashing into walls, falling over etc. He soon got the hang of being accurate with his instructions. He then moved on to building simple games using Scratch but got bored with that pretty quickly. He started to spend a lot of time playing Minecraft and would watch YouTube videos showing him how to make redstone circuits etc. He wanted to make his own games and so he gave Unity a try but the learning material wasn’t quite accessible to a (then) 8 year old. About a year ago he started playing Roblox and within weeks had downloaded Roblox Studio (Roblox’s development environment) and had begun making his own games. I think Minecraft helped him a lot with his ability to create 3D environments within Roblox but they also have a library of free, pre-rigged and pre-scripted models which removes any barrier to entry. He started making his first games entirely out of free models. He learned to script in Lua by watching other kids Roblox scripting videos on YouTube. He’s just turned 10 now and has a firm grasp of fundamental programming concepts, released several games and has begun releasing his own coding tutorials on YouTube. He still has a lot to learn but he’s intrinsically motivated.

It’s common. I’ve always asked employers to amend this and they happily oblige.

There are plenty of free UI kits that you can download and print off for paper prototyping purposes which is essentially what this is. These are nice from an aesthetic point of view but I’m irrationally irked by these being called “flow cards”. In UX we typically think of user flows as journeys across pages and channels. What these cards are useful for is a collaborative exercise called paper prototyping to define page structure and content hierarchy.

My company was asked to make some health and safety induction software. Visitors to the client company would have to self complete the induction process in the reception area whilst waiting for their host to collect them. Client wanted us to present 38 slides worth of information and have them ‘acknowledge’ each point. Instead of doing this we turned it into a game whereby the user has to explore a simplified 3D version of the building and identify the health and safety risks themselves. Graphics were well designed, it had elements of humour and it worked. Our analytics showed that 94% of people who started interacting with the software completed the entire induction process.

Surprised to see all your text content is centre-aligned on mobile. Surely that’s not a UX best-practice as it degrades the “readability” of the content?

I love the affinity suite. Our entire studio has switched from Adobe to Affinity and we haven’t looked back - we’re very happy. Latest version of photo supports smart objects so we can now use PSD mockup templates which was the one thing we really missed in the previous version. We do use Sketch for UI work but they have really been dropping the ball lately. We’re now running several versions behind in Sketch because of all the bugs and poor UI choices. Might even switch to Affinity designer for all our UI in the near future.

Digbee | London, UK | Full-time | Remote

Digbee is a data and research platform for the mining industry. Our goal is to improve transparency and access to impartial risk analysis within the mining sector.

We're looking for a senior full stack developer experienced in Nodejs, React & MySQL to join our small and friendly team. Ideally you'd have knowledge of loopback framework and a continuous integration & deployment technology like Circle CI.

If you're interested and want to find out more, please email me at: sean@thedigbee.com

Thanks for the insight - that's good to know. If I remember correctly, the last time we looked into it, the solution for exporting was to detach all symbols. I wasn't aware of the feature you've mentioned. Will definitely give that a try!

I run a design studio and some of our designers are big fans. We've unfortunately had to disable Anima across the team due to compatibility issues between designers who have created UIs with the help of your Sketch plugin and those who don't have the plugin installed.

The latter group often spend quite a bit of time fixing broken alignments etc when picking up a Sketch file that's used Anima. This means everyone is forced to install the plugin. The other issue then is when pushing to Zeplin, many elements aren't aligned as designed regardless of whether we've got your plugin enabled or not.

It doesn't happen every time, but it's happened enough times to warrant a studio-wide disabling of the plugin. I don't know if it's possible to easily solve this dependency issue in a future release, but if you can, we'll certainly start using it again.

I wish more people saw this guy for the snake oil salesman he really is (edit: Ferriss that is).