A few years back, we made it possible for users of our products, such as Bounce, to capture website screens with a URL. Since then, we tried several different services over the years, trying to find a solution that worked. Some were OK, but that wasn't good enough. A screen capture has to accurately represent what is actually present, and our current service has become unreliable. So we recently pushed to find something that snagged accurate screenshots.

Here's what happens when a URL is entered: screenshot URLs are sent to our server, which then takes a screenshot of the site and sends it back to our apps. Our current implementation uses wkhtmltoimage to capture screenshots, but that's a bit defunct now.

While looking for new solutions we learned that there had been a bit more activity in this area than when we started a few years ago — but not much. However...
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Apple's new iOS7 is a great step forward full of useful innovations and a great visual refresh, but their work has been marred by the design details that people simply can't look past.

Tim Cook unveiling iOS7 to the WWDC audience. (Image from Apple)

The other day Apple unveiled a series of updates to their products and operating system to a room full of designers and developers, as well as to those clever enough pull up apple.com on Safari. While the updates to OSX, Mac Pro and Apple Air were met with open arms, the highly anticipated iOS7 wasn't. Some people welcomed the change. However, there was an overwhelming amount of people who told it to go back home (and they made sure to echo that sentiment via Twitter.)

iOS7 doesn't need to revert back; rather, it needs to take what it has and do some refinements before it launches this fall.

A Much Needed Evolution

iOS needed to...
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We've learned a lot over the years about how we can better connect with people. We've come to realize that we reach people in many different ways. We talk with customers every day, utilizing chat to answer quick questions or hop on a call to dig deeper into a person's problem. Whether it's through email, communities such as Forrst or face-to-face, we like talking to people and finding solutions to their needs.

A mosiac of our Twitter fans whom we reach every day.

As our Customer Advocate, you'll be the voice of ZURB and, more importantly, the voice of our customers. You'll play a vital part in the development of our product suite because of the valuable insights you'll receive from our customers. At the end of the day, you'll help the product designers who use our tools to achieve great things. Connecting with customers isn't limited to emails or chats. You...
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We've been doing a lot of arithmetic around ZURB HQ lately. So much that we've lost count of the number of new ZURBians we've brought on board. That's why we added an accountant to the team to help us keep count and help us calculate the last digit of Pi. All kidding aside, we brought her on to make sure our numbers added up.

So without further ado, please welcome …

Afton Giles, A Redhead for Numbers

Afton has lived most of her life in Palo Alto, but she was actually born in Tehran, Iran. She's got a knack for crunching numbers, holding a degree in Finance and spending her career in one accounting role or another. But numbers aren't the only things that gets her jazzed. She's really fascinated by technology and how fast its changing.

Before becoming one of us, Afton worked with IT geeks and engineers who she thought had much better toys to play with — like...
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Remember when our class of 5th graders stopped by the office last week? We can't stop thinking about how much they grokked design thinking, showing us how it's never too early to learn those concepts. It's also never too late to learn those concepts. That's why every year we hold a 24-hour marathon to help out one lucky nonprofit over a design hump.

We're happy to announce that we've opened submissions for our sixth ZURBwired, which will take place Aug. 8, 2013. We'll help one nonprofit solve a design problem from start to finish in 24-hours. We'll work side-by-side with the members of the nonprofit and go through every step in the design process from ideation to prototyping to implementation.

From our work with dozens of nonprofits over the years, we've seen the kind of operational paralysis that can stymie an organization. Many are programmed to get every...
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We've been working in the responsive realm for a while now and one of the most painful parts of the process is dealing with images. Large images can cause extremely long load times on small devices that might not have a huge data bandwidth. There have been many "best practices for now" movements to deal with this.

We would typically just hide the images with CSS and offer new images for smaller devices. But those hidden images would still load behind the scenes, leading to slower load times. As of today, however, we can now easily load up the right image based on the screen size, orientation or pixel density and not worry about the DOM getting clogged with too many requests.

Interchange, as part of our Foundation 4.2 release, offers a flexible and lightweight approach to responsive images. Your site's visitors will only download the images that are appropriate...
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We get a lot of visitors at our ZURB Command Center. Today, however, we got a special visit from Miss Phillip's 5th grade class from Sacred Heart School in nearby Saratoga. They've been designers-in-practice thanks to Miss Phillips, a good friend of ours who's been teaching them how they can use design to solve problems. So we were happy to have them drop by for a visit.

We took them on a brief tour of our HQ, then through a quick history of design. They asked us about what it was like to work with clients, what our favorite projects were and even what we liked to watch on TV. It was great showing them how we work, but we learned something from them too. Their field trip reinforced something that we've always known — it's never too early to learn product design and design thinking.

Design Thinking Prepares Kids for Today's Challenges

Miss Philipps has...
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We've been doing a lot of exciting stuff here in our little ol' command center in Campbell, CA. We're looking to expand out efforts for World Domination and are looking to add a brand new Business Developer to help us do that!

We're passionate — we work hard and play hard. We're looking for an equally passionate person who is excited about new emerging technologies, rapid prototyping and connecting with people to join our team. As Business Developer at ZURB, you're one of our first points of contact to the outside world. You are so much more than a closer. You're an educator!

Startups and grownup startups are excited about ZURB and seek us out to help them with their product design problems. We use special tactics to solve problems. We listen and ask questions. We're dedicated to helping clients fill their gaps, provide an educational experience and, of...
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Pattern Tap Code will be the destination to find code patterns that work seamlessly into your site.

Bryan explained the other day how Pattern Tap fits into the larger aspects of our educational channel, Expo, and the overall larger business. As we mentioned, we wanted to expand on what Matthew Smith originally built. However, we didn't immediately redesign the site once we took over a year ago. We only did small tweaks at first.

Why wait?

We wanted to learn. Before we could start changing things wholesale, we needed to understand how everyone used it as a resource. That way we could build upon it. Our first goal was to seed it with content and be consistent about doing so. Since we acquired the site, we've added over 750 app and web patterns to its ever-growing library.

But our second goal was born out of the success of our Foundation templates. The canned...
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Today, we launched the new Pattern Tap with code patterns. Since acquiring the site last year, we've been adding new patterns to the library everyday and learning from how people use it. It's exciting to expand on Matthew Smith's vision and introduce code patterns to the library. It's an amazing resource.

Introducing Code Patterns

The new code patterns will help product designers use Foundation more effectively in their workflow. The code patterns are great for prototyping and building responsive websites. The introduction of code patterns came as an evolution of the success of our templates on Foundation, an add-on page that quickly became one of the most popular pages within ZURB's network. We're excited about the possibilities and look forward to evolving the site.

The new Pattern Tap fits nicely into our Expo, a resource for product designers to learn, practice and...
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