RANGER – Blog

Front end development is moving fast these days. Things like CSS3, HTML5 and ever improving browser features are leading to wonderful new user experiences. While the user experience is most important in the end, there are also huge gains being made for the developer. Two relatively new tools which are rapidly growing in popularity are Grunt and Bower. Grunt saves the day by automating monotonous tasks that used to drive developers crazy. Bower makes it easy to keep track of all the project's front end dependencies so that you don't need to bloat your version control while still maintaining confidence that your project has all the files it needs to work as it should. RANGER is always looking to make our workflow more efficient. Grunt and Bower are some of the tools helping us to streamline our workflow and produce better products in less time!

We’ve expanded again! This time with a recent Seattle emigrant, Dax Borges, our newest Senior Developer leading front-end development.

Dax holds RANGER’s mantra at heart as an avid climber, skier, and all around general lover of the outdoors. He is a connoisseur of healthy snacks and as such has since internally been dubbed the de facto Director of Snacks.

After 16+ months of work we are proud to announce the launch of the newly designed and developed SoulCycle site. In collaboration on design with Ideo, the newly launched site reimagines the entire online SoulCycle experience. As Julie Rice, SoulCycle’s co-founder described, it “revolutionizes” the way that riders book classes.

RANGER handled the development of both front and back end of the web-app, manager system, and point of sale, all built upon Directus. During the build up we also assisted with UX flows, designed many of page templates, and help train over 600 members of client staff in using the new system.

I am pleased to welcome the newest member of the RANGER team, Jason El-Massih. As our very first Developer Intern Jason will be aiding in many of our back-end heavy projects as well as developing some new RANGER Experiments!

We are proud to announce the launch of the newly designed and developed Josef and Anni Albers Foundation site. In collaboration with the Foundation as well as designer Daphne Geismar the site was re-built from the ground up.

The new Albers Foundation website is built on a combination of static and dynamic pages. Utilizing the Slim Framework for handling routes and rendering Twig templates, it was seamlessly integrated with Directus, our in-house built and open-source CMS. Albeit the minimal look and feel of the new Albers Foundation website, the front-end spectrum is full of sophisticated cross-browser functionality. We wrote custom JavaScript code and built jQuery plugins specifically catering to the plethora of interactive components, such as deep-linkable Art galleries, zoom/panning, content type swapping, pages with multiple types of tabbed content, and smooth in-page scrolling for the more text-heavy sections such as Exhibition History and Chronology.

Altogether, the Albers Foundation website runs on several dozen templates, each optimized for their unique requirements. The "LESS" CSS preprocessor was utilized to the fullest extent with reusable mixins, namespacing, variables, intelligently nested selectors, and so forth. The handful of custom jQuery plugins can operate standalone, or in combination with one another where functionality is stacked to create a single wholesome experience.

Today we awarded one of our Senior Developers with a one-of-a-kind <!--DOMinator--> shirt for all of his hard work on recent projects. The shirt was designed in house and printed as a one-off for this special occasion.

Suite #318 – Lounge and Conference Room

The newest expansion to the RANGER office, these photos were shot for the Real Sliding Hardware photo competition; additional shots of the new room will be uploaded soon.

A big thanks to IDEO for hosting such a fun Holiday Party this year! Hope you liked our post-card.