These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.
Shields.io provides a large collection of badges that you can use in your project documentation (like README.md over at GitHub or BitBucket), which shows a variety of metrics for the project – latest version, number of downloads, build status, and more. Pretty much anything that you’ve seen used by any project on GitHub is supported (I couldn’t think of a badge that wasn’t).
Now, if only there was a way to insert these things automatically somehow …
composer-git-hooks looks awesome! From the project page description:
Manage git hooks easily in your composer configuration. This package makes it easy to implement a consistent project-wide usage of git hooks. Specifying hooks in the composer file makes them available for every member of the project team. This provides a consistent environment and behavior for everyone which is great.
PHPQA all-in-one Analyzer CLI tool. This project bundles together all the usual PHP quality control tools, and then some. It simplifies the installation and configuration of the tools and helps developers to push up the quality control bar on their projects.
The tools currently included are:
php-enqueue – enterprise queue solutions for PHP. There is a number of GitHub repositories for the project. PHP Enqueue supports a number of transports – ampq, stomp, filesystem – and it provides a flexible collection of classes to deal both with the queue manager, as well as a client. If your project needs a message queue, definitely check this one out.
Via this article (in Russian), I came across this blog post discussing the differences between the design of the UI (user interface) and the UX (user experience).
In many cases, the incorrect expectation is that an interface designer by default understands or focuses on user experience because their work is in direct contact with the user. The simple fact is that user interface is not user experience. The confusion may simply be because both abbreviations start with the letter “U”. More likely, it stems from the overlap of the skill-sets involved in both disciplines. They are certainly related areas, and in fact many designers are knowledgeable and competent in both.
However, despite the overlap, both fields are substantially different in nature and – more importantly – in their overall objectives and scope. User interface is focused on the actual elements that interact with the user – basically, the physical and technical methods of input and output. UI refers to the aggregation of approaches and elements that allow the user to interact with a system. This does not address details such as how the user reacts to the system, remembers the system and re-uses it.