The Ampersand is loved by all types of creatives! Its shape has evolved into a variety of styles since it was conceived as a ligature of the letters ‘e’ and ‘t’ from the Latin ‘et’ for ‘and’. You can find a range of ampersand designs across different fonts and typefaces, from cursive script variants to […] The post Art of the Ampersand: 35 Creative Examples of The '&' Character appeared first on Spoon Graphics.

Material Design is Google's design language for creating digital experiences. Initially developed in 2014, Material Design is a subset of flat design, or minimal UI design, while also flirting with skeuomorphism with its rules for surfaces and interaction. The latest iteration of Material Design, Material You was unveiled in May 2021 and is expected to […] The post The Mind-Bendingly Difficult Material Design Quiz first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

No man (or woman) is an island - and this statement can’t be any truer if you’re a designer or developer. Though paid/subscription services like Basecamp and Zimbra are great, individuals strapped for cash have a ton of alternatives that provide similar (if not better) features. In this article, you’ll find 15 free tools to […] The post 15 Free Tools for Web-based Collaboration appeared first on WebFX Blog.

An experimental typography animation based on a kinetic type design by Domagoj Strok where words get duplicated several times. The post Repetitive Typography Animation appeared first on Codrops.

I wrote a Tiny Virtual Operating System for a 300-level OS class in C# for college back in 2001 (?) and later moved it to VB.NET in 2002. This is all pre-.NET Core, and on early .NET 1.1 or 2.0 on Windows. I moved it to GitHub 5 years ago and ported it to .NET Core 2.0 at the time. At this point it was 15 years old, so it was cool to see this project running on Windows, Linux, in Docker, and on a Raspberry Pi...a machine that didn't exist when the project was originally written. NOTE: If the timeline is confusing, I had already been working in industry for years at this point but was still plugging away at my 4 year degree at night. It eventually took 11 years to complete my BS in Software Engineering. This evening, as the children slept, I wanted to see if I could run the .NET Upgrade Assistant on this now 20 year old app and get it running on .NET 6. Let's start:$ upgrade-assistant upgrade .TinyOS.sln-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Microsoft .NET Upgrade Assistant v0.3.256001+3c4e05c787f588e940fe73bfa78d7eedfe0190bdWe are interested in your feedback! Please use the following link to open a survey: https://aka.ms/DotNetUASurvey-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[22:58:01 INF] Loaded 5 extensions[22:58:02 INF] Using MSBuild from C:Program Filesdotnetsdk6.0.100[22:58:02 INF] Using Visual Studio install from C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio2022Preview [v17][22:58:06 INF] Initializing upgrade step Select an entrypoint[22:58:07 INF] Setting entrypoint to only project in solution: C:UsersscottTinyOSsrcTinyOSCoreTinyOSCore.csproj[22:58:07 INF] Recommending executable TFM net6.0 because the project builds to an executable[22:58:07 INF] Initializing upgrade step Select project to upgrade[22:58:07 INF] Recommending executable TFM net6.0 because the project builds to an executable[22:58:07 INF] Recommending executable TFM net6.0 because the project builds to an executable[22:58:07 INF] Initializing upgrade step Back up project See how the process is interactive at the command line, with color prompts and a series of dynamic multiple-choice questions? Interestingly, it builds on the first try, no errors. When I manually look at the .csproj I can see some weird version numbers, likely from some not-quite-baked version of .NET Core 2 I used many years ago. My spidey sense says this is wrong, and I'm assuming the upgrade assistant didn't understand it. <!-- <PackageReference Include="ILLink.Tasks" Version="0.1.4-preview-906439" /> --> <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration" Version="2.0.0-preview2-final" /> <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.Extensions.Configuration.Json" Version="2.0.0-preview2-final" /> <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection" Version="2.0.0-preview2-final" /> <PackageReference Include="Microsoft.Extensions.Options.ConfigurationExtensions" Version="2.0.0-preview2-final" /> I also note a commented-out reference to ILLink.Tasks which was a preview feature in Mono's Linker to reduce the final size of apps and tree-trim them. Some of that functionality is built into .NET 6 now so I'll use that during the build and packaging process later. The reference is not needed today. I'm gonna blindly upgrade them to .NET 6 and see what happens. I could do this by just changing the numbers and seeing if it restores and builds, but I can also try dotnet outdated which remains a lovely tool in the upgrader's toolkit. This "outdated" tool is nice as it talks to NuGet and confirms that there are newer versions of certain packages. In my tests - which were just batch files at this early time - I was calling my dotnet app like this:dotnet netcoreapp2.0/TinyOSCore.dll 512 scott13.txt This will change to the modern form with just TinyOSCore.exe 512 scott13.txt with an exe and args and no ceremony. Publishing and trimming my TinyOS turns into just a 15 meg EXE. Nice considering that the .NET I need is in there with no separate install. I could turn this little synthetic OS into a microservice if I wanted to be totally extra.dotnet publish -r win-x64 --self-contained -p:PublishSingleFile=true -p:SuppressTrimAnalysisWarnings=true If I add -p:EnableCompressionInSingleFile=true Then it's even smaller. No code changes. Run all my tests, looks good. My project from university from .NET 1.1 is now .NET 6.0, cross platform, self-contained in 11 megs in a single EXE. Sweet. Sponsor: At Rocket Mortgage(R) the work you do around here will be 100% impactful but won't take all your free time, giving you the perfect work-life balance. Or as we call it, tech/life balance! Learn more.(C) 2021 Scott Hanselman. All rights reserved.     

Many folks have installed X servers and X410 on their Windows 10 machines and hacked together very nice X Server set ups with WSL over the years. However, that support is now official and coming to Windows very soon. It's already in Windows 10 Insiders Dev and is in builds 21364 or higher. (Run winver to see what version of Windows you have.) If you want to try it out, all you have to do is run "wsl --update" from and command line and you're set. If you have 21364 already but you don't have WSL installed, it's even easier to get started now. (Full details on GitHub as the whole thing is open source as well!)wsl --install -d Ubuntu The best part of all this is that you just install Linux GUI apps in your distro with apt install like you would already, and they'll show up automatically in the Windows Start Menu! Even better, if you have a nice GPU, you can run WSLg on a system with virtual GPU (vGPU) enabled for WSL so you can benefit from hardware accelerated OpenGL rendering. You can find preview driver supporting WSL from each of our partners below. AMD GPU driver for WSL Intel GPU driver for WSL NVIDIA GPU driver for WSL Here's the Dolphin Emulator running on my Surface Book 3 laptop on the NVidia vGPU at ~60 fps. You can even run Chrome, Edge, or Teams under Linux on Windows 10 with WSLg. This is more than just X Server support. The community is moving towards Wayland as a simpler X, but there's also Weston to consider as a great compositor to build on. Weston already had a RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) backend and could use with with FreeRDP. But windows already has Windows Virtual Desktop that uses RDP RAIL (Remote Application Integrated Locally) as well as VAIL (Virtualized Application Integrated Locally) for optimizing transport over VM (local) boundaries vs network ones. There's an amazing blog post on WSLg Architecture here by Steve Pronovost. All this means more than just X apps, WSLg works with OpenGL apps and works amazingly on systems with a GPU that supports WDDMv3.0. The preview drivers linked to above will eventually ship in Windows Update automatically when all this is generally available. Finally, interesting stuff is cooking at Canonical (Ubuntu) with their custom WSL2 specific distro for Ubuntu on Windows! It's in preview for now: The Ubuntu on Windows Community Preview will only be available through this link to the Microsoft store. You will not be able to find the Community Preview just by searching in the Microsoft Store. And finally, here's some answers to some of your "ya but you can do THIS?" questions about running Linux GUI apps on Windows 10. Can you run The Gimp under WSLg? Yes. Do know that things in WSLg look best under round number DPI scaling. I'm at 200 here. It'll look back at 175% or something fractional unless you explicitly turn on WESTON_RDP_DISABLE_FRACTIONAL_HI_DPI_SCALING=true in your /mnt/c/ProgramData/Microsoft/WSL/.wslgconfig. But trust me, stay with round numbers. Can you run Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) to run Windows under WSLg under Linux under Windows? Absolutely. Here I'm running Internet Explorer (after installing Gecko) under Wine under WSL in Ubuntu on Windows. Why not? How fast is it? Here I'm running Windows 3.1 emulated within Javascript using PCJS under WSLg within Edge for Linux on Windows 10. It's very fast. Does PulseAudio work? Totally does. Out of the box. The genius of the architecture is that there's an already setup WSLg System Distro (this means it's more robust and you can't mess up the settings and accidentally break something) that has everything prepped and working. Conclusion If you don't like this or you think this is silly to you, then you likely don't have a problem that this solves for you. For me, this just makes my Windows machine an amazing Linux desktop on top of being a great Windows 10 desktop machine, without the overhead or hassle of a Linux VM. WSLg will let you run other IDEs such as gedit, JetBrains based editors, gvim, etc., to test, build, and debug your Linux applications in a high performance manner. You can also run VS Code on Windows like I do and use VS Code Remote to talk to WSL/Linux. Go read about WSLg and check it out for yourself! Also be sure to check out the work that Pengwin Linux and the folks at Whitewater Foundry are doing as their distro works with WSLg out of the box already! Sponsor: Build your apps where your customers are. Oracle for Startups delivers enterprise cloud with no lock-in so you can go after any customer -- confidently. Learn more.(C) 2021 Scott Hanselman. All rights reserved.     

Pagination is one of those little design necessities that often gets overlooked. But for blogs and other content-heavy sites, it provides an important means of navigation. A well-crafted menu can... The post 8 Code Snippets to Make Your Pagination Pop appeared first on Speckyboy Web Design Magazine.

In the run-up to Christmas, there is a tradition across the web design and development community to produce advent calendars, typically with a new article or resource for each day of December. In this article, I have rounded up all those that I have found to be running this year, along with RSS feeds where they can be located, and Twitter accounts to make it easier to follow along.

Your brand story is an essential component of your content strategy, but brand storytelling is an art form. Get it right with these 8 simple steps.

So much of what we do at work has to be measured. There is a sense that, if something cannot be measured, does it even really exist? Certainly, if a project or function can not demonstrate how it is being measured in a clear, understandable manner, its ability to secure approval or signoff is dramatically … continue reading The post Are your metrics right for a remote workforce? appeared first on SD Times.