Learn Figma, Microsoft and Nightmare

OpenGraph images are the images you see when you paste a link into a social platform and it "unfurls" into an image, title, and description. This happens on Twitter, Discord, Slack, and many other platforms. This collection goes over everything from designing OpenGraph images in Figma, to implementing them in CodeSandbox, to returning headless browser screenshots from Netlify Functions, and finally using Cloudinary as a write-through cache. 

You will come away from this collection with the ability to ship an API that you can use on any of your sites, and also on-demand, that can generate images for not only OpenGraph unfurls, but also for Instagram, GitHub, and more. Using headless browsers with playwright to generate our images means we get full access to all the responsive power of CSS and all the logical power of JS to handle layout, importing assets like pngs, choosing different fonts, and more.

The image below is generated via the project you'll build and deploy in this course

![An example opengraph image](https://relaxed-payne-d1bfbe.netlify.com/opengraph?title=Building%20an%20OpenGraph%20image%20generation%20API%20with%20Cloudinary%20Netlify%20Functions%20and%20React&tags=figma,netlify%20functions,playwright&author=chrisbiscardi)

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

Building an OpenGraph image generation API with Cloudinary, Netlify Functions, and React

Figma is a collaborative prototyping tool that allows you to responsively design your applications, with resolution presets for all of the most popular devices. In this course, we will explore the fundamentals of Figma’s toolset that you can use for various design functions. 

We will start from scratch, then walk through scenarios you may encounter when designing a website or application. We will cover building reusable designs — known as “components” in Figma — all the way up to prototyping your designs to show screen transitions and animations between state. 

By the end of the course, you will understand the basics of Figma so you can use it to your advantage when building your next app or website.

Design, prototype, and gather feedback all in one place with Figma.

figma

The Beginner's Guide to Figma

Figma is a powerful design tool built with web technologies. Using the same technologies you can extend it with plugins.
You can use Typescript and/or javascript, you can load your favorite UI frameworks like Vue.js or React.js and build powerful plugins.

Using a plugin you can:

* Load Real Data from your server and visualize it 
* Change elements in your design programmatically 
* Convert your design to JSX or HTML, the sky is the limit

Learning these skills will help you make your design workflow faster by making Figma doing exactly what you want





JavaScript® (often shortened to JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions, most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic, and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

javascript

Create a Figma Plugin Using Typescript

Learn VSCode with Ahmad Awais (Open Source JavaScript DevRel ❯ Google Dev Expert ❯ Author of 3rd most popular VSCode theme called 🦄 Shades of Purple).

VSCode

Microsoft Windows is a group of several graphical operating system families, all of which are developed, marketed, and sold by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry.

microsoft

Learn the various ways to access and enable High Contrast Mode on Windows.

Enable High Contrast Mode on Windows

We should not use color alone as the only visual means of conveying information, indicating an action, prompting a response, or distinguishing a visual element.  Users may not be able to see/understand the differences in color and require additional indicators.

Along with color, use additional indicators such as:
* typography
* shapes
* grids
* spaces
* and/or allocate more weight to important elements

## References:
* http://www.particletree.com/features/interfaces-and-color-blindness/
* https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/10/color-contrast-tips-and-tools-for-accessibility/

Use More than Color Alone to Convey Information in a Web Page

Just about every tool in our accessibility auditing toolkit can help us identify any issues with sufficient color contrast ratio on a web page.  The react-axe library and axe browser extension both report findings on all elements with insufficient contrast ratios.  The tota11y browser extension will annotate any elements with their contrast ratios and color those that are insufficient in red.  

Additionally, we need to use our experience tools to see what some of our users out there may we seeing.  We need to test with high contrast browser extensions as well as the display settings in Windows and Mac.  If our users with visual impairments are using these tools we need to see what our application looks like using them because we may find that under a certain mode some things may suddenly be harder to read or virtually invisible.

## Resources
* https://www.scottohara.me/blog/2019/02/12/high-contrast-aria-and-images.html

Test for Insufficient Color Contrast Accessibility Issues

In this video, you will learn how to bootstrap a Basic Figma plugin using the Figma app

Bootstrap a Figma Plugin

In this video, you will learn how to send and receive data from Figma to use it in your plugin

Communicate between the plugin and Figma 

In this video, you will learn how, in your plugin, to change the text value of a selected text node in Figma 

Change the text value of a select node

Now you have your plugin built and ready it's time to publish it.

In this video, you will learn to publish your Figma plugin to the public

Publish a Figma Plugin

Figma is a web-based collaborative interface design tool that we can use to prototype the look and feel of our OpenGraph cards. We dive into a few of the basic features using [Ryan Warner's](https://twitter.com/ryanwarnercodes) community [social branding templates](https://twitter.com/ryanwarnercodes/status/1239578329340170240), such as text placement, using the eyedropper and color tools, as well as pulling in gradients as images to fit our working area.

* [Social Branding Template](https://www.figma.com/community/file/820337605519256142)
* [Gradient Magic](https://www.gradientmagic.com/)

Designing OpenGraph unfurls in Figma

Figma Auto Layout gives our designs superpowers. By adding auto-layout to our button component, we can change the text within the button while automatically maintaining consistent horizontal and vertical padding, just like we would in code.

Build an Adaptive Button with Figma Auto Layout

Keyboard shortcuts speed up our workflow, and make us aware of some features we didn't know existed. Figma has an awesome in app menu for exploring the keyboard shortcuts available to us.

Figma Keyboard Shortcuts

React Native lets you build mobile apps using only JavaScript. It uses the same design as React, letting you compose a rich mobile UI from declarative components.

react-native

How to create an app icon from scratch, generate the required sizes, and add to your iOS app.

Image editing - [Figma](https://www.figma.com/) is a free online design tool used in the video. You can use any design tool you like, such as Photoshop, Sketch etc, as long as the output is a 1024x1024 .png image.

Asset generator - [Iconizer](https://raphaelhanneken.com/iconizer/) is a free mac app for generating the correct sized assets from your icon.

Design and Add a Custom App Icon with Figma to Your React Native iOS App 

Nightmare is a high-level browser automation library.

The goal is to expose just a few simple methods, and have an API that feels synchronous for each block of scripting, rather than deeply nested callbacks. It's designed for automating tasks across sites that don't have APIs.

nightmare

Many pages you'll want to grab data from will require you to log in first. This video demonstrates how to log in and grab whatever data off the page you will need.

Scraping Data from Sites with Login Forms with Nightmare

Many websites have more than just simple static content. Dynamic content which is rendered by JavaScript requires browser to be able to scrape data. This video demonstrates how to use Nightmare (which is a wrapper around Electron) to launch a url and scrape dynamic data.

Scraping Dynamic JavaScript Websites with Nightmare

For a production Windows server it makes sense to run NodeJS applications as a Windows service.  This way they can be automatically restarted if the server is rebooted.

It also makes it easier to use monitoring tools like datadog to detect if there are issues with the service which is critical for production systems.

Install a Node.js Application as a Windows Service

Express is a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features for web and mobile applications.

express

To replicate your production application its helpful when developing a local NodeJS Express application is running under SSL. 

There are some web technologies which do not play nicely with standard http and its likely to become more common e.g. Web Push Notifications.

This lesson will show you how to create a local SSL certificate for localhost and then convert it into a format that will work with Express.  It will also show you how to make sure that Chrome will trust it.

This lesson is for Windows as it uses a powershell command, as well as the Microsoft Management Console (MMC)
 

Create Local SSL Certificates for an Express App on Windows

In this video, you will learn how to create frames (i.e. layouts) in Figma using the "frame" tool. This will allow you to get up and running quickly using pre-defined sizes.

Create a Mobile, Tablet and Desktop Frame in Figma

In this lesson, you will learn how to build a component in Figma, which is the equivalent to a "symbol" in Sketch. It's essentially a reusable piece of design. This will allow you to work more efficiently when designing your app.

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