Crunchy News - September 28, 2015 - October 4, 2015

Every week the world of design and development shifts in many directions leaving us designers and developers to discuss best tactics to handle this new information.

Here’s a compilation of the latest happenings to help keep you up to speed. Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to get this type of content and more delivered straight to your inbox every week.

CodePen Redesign

CodePen got redesigned. The famous online social network / code editor tool was overhauled by Sparkbox and the CodePen team themselves. Read more about it on CodePen’s blog or on Sparkbox’s blog.

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Adobe Project Comet

Adobe fires back at the UX and UI designer community giving a first peek at a new tool called Project Comet. The tool is geared for UI designers who want to design as well as prototype within the same app. Adobe listened to its audience by introducing a new application rather than extending Photoshop further which is a great move in my own opinion. I’m excited to see what comes of it. Expect to see something in early 2016.

N1

A new open source email client called N1 launched recently giving developers the ability to finally customize their own email experience. The application features wonder UI components as well as the ability to be extended easily as it is built on more common programming languages.
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Microsoft Surface Pro 4

Microsoft recently announced the all-new Surface Book and Surface Pro 4. With tons of power and performance you can expect from Microsoft the new lineup features great new technologies. The Surface Pro 4 can be a laptop or tablet in the flip of a switch. Use a stylus, fingers, or the good ole trackpad to navigate your way to getting more things done.
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Adobe Portfolio

Portfolio from Adobe comes free with any Adobe Creative Cloud plan. You can quickly and simply build a website to showcase your work, so you can get back to doing what you do best. Benefits of this model are eliminating the time and sometimes frustration of branding your own portfolio. Often times designers and developers struggle to work on their own work. Adobe Portfolio makes this easy and fast.

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Your UI isn’t a Disney Movie

Sophie Paxton, a freelance UX and interaction designer from Texas writes about how UI has become similar to a Disney movie. “Animation for animation’s sake is (almost always) poor design.” Sophie discusses how animations are taking over a user’s experience for the sake of animating and not to improve any part of the experience overall. Sophie demonstrates in her post what methods are common and why they are overly poor ways of designing.

The Startup Framework To Validate Your Idea Before You Spend $1

Mitchell Harper, the co-founder of Bigcommerce writes about a new project he is working on but not specifically the project but more of his process in doing it right. Mitchell offers a checklist for other product people to follow to make sure they hit the ground running before launching a product that doesn’t solve a problem for users.

Webflow CMS

As I write this list I was notified of WebFlow’s new CMS being launched. At first glance, it looks like a well thought out CMS that features a visual CMS, meaning you can edit in real time rather than writing code or managing databases.