Archive for month: September, 2017

Original Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/09/building-inclusive-toggle-buttons/

Some things are either on or off and, when those things aren’t on (or off), they are invariably off (or on). The concept is so rudimentary that I’ve only complicated it by trying to explain it, yet on/off switches (or toggle buttons) are not all alike. Although their purpose is simple, their applications and forms vary greatly.

In this inaugural post, I’ll be exploring what it takes to make toggle buttons inclusive. As with any component, there’s no one way to go about this, especially when such controls are examined under different contexts. However, there’s certainly plenty to forget to do or to otherwise screw up, so let’s try to avoid any of that.

The post Building Inclusive Toggle Buttons appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

Original Source: http://inspiredm.com/searching-cleaner-searches/

Inspired Magazine
Inspired Magazine – creativity & inspiration daily

If there is one year for positive change, look no further, it’s 2017. Because there’s no better time than now to do something, but also because this world, on so many levels (well, you know, you’ve been there too) was seriously derailed in the past couple of years.

You are probably involved already, struggling with small or large steps to make a difference in the world, to have a positive impact, minimize your carbon footprint, leave the air breathable and the water drinkable for your kids and their kids. You probably cycle, volunteer, decided to run for office (yay!), sign petitions, enjoy the outdoors. But by the end of your life you will still have spent a few good years staring into a screen. Due to nature of work or for entertainment only, it’s gonna be years, trust me. They add up. Worry not though, you can make a difference even in front of a computer screen doing your daily searches.

I search, You search, We…

You’re online and irrespective of the tasks, you will search at least one time during the course of one working day. Am I right? Searching the www is high in the charts when it comes to spending time online. I mean, we even search for search. Spelling. Our own names. We search for pretty much everything. Everything included. And there’s a carbon meter attached to this daily routine too, as with most activities that need a source of power.

You can imagine our excitement when we discovered that some of those behind several search engines intend to tackle the carbon problem. While DuckDuckGo is more into protecting your online privacy, Google promises to run on 100% renewable energy by the end of this year, and Ecosia plants trees every time you search the web.

Online searches have been steadily growing into trillions since the dawn of the internet. The trend is on the rise and there are no signs of a slowdown.

Raising Awareness while Making Change Happen
Charming server error

No, you cannot literally plant trees by simply searching. At least not yet (have you seen the guy who emailed lemonade? Literally). Ecosia is the search engine that plants trees with its ad revenue. It’s a great example of social change applied to the most common online activity.

You search the web with Ecosia > Search ads generate income for Ecosia > Ecosia uses this income to plant trees.

They’ve planted over 7 million trees so far. Here’s how they decide where to plant them. On their website you can find details about their projects, videos, stories, and useful info on why trees are essential to life – if you ever had any doubts. You don’t have to be a full-time treehugger to get excited when your search for “sugar free” and just planted a tree. I mean, even when their server is down, they’ll put some trees up (see screenshot).

Using  Renewable Energy to Keep them Engines Running
Google: New Renewable Energy Projects via venturebeat.com

In 2015, Google bought 44% of its power from wind and solar farms, according to The Guardian, and they plan to go 100% renewable this year. It’s worth keeping an eye on them and see how and when they’ll reach their target. Just in case you were feeling guilty for using Google.

The renewable trend would be very hard to stop, hence similar companies are joining this common-sense challenge along sustainability programs. For the sake of your own carbon footprint, doing a quick search (ha!) to test their sustainability efforts should come in handy.

Search Engines with Renewable Goals Only

If you want to find out more about clean energy, then you should know that there are search engines only for this. Take reegle. It acts as a unique clean energy information portal, targeting specific stakeholders including governments, project developers, businesses, financiers, NGOs, academia, international organizations and civil society. Others, like Solar Search, specialize in searches related to mainly solar energies. You’ll probably come across some inspiring projects.
If you’re really committed to making a difference, don’t stop here, move beyond the search engine. See how clean your apps are. If you’re the techie-sustainable type and have ideas for a low carbon economy, take some time to put them into practice, pitch them, share them, spread the word. Go for it!

Switch it Off and Other Such Details

Saving energy at home and at work matter. Just as low energy consuming applications and power saving system matter. And no, standby is not as friendly as you think.
University of Cambridge has its own green challenge in an attempt to prevent unnecessary energy use. They are committed to reducing carbon emissions energy-and-carbon, and they compiled Facts & Figures to help you find out how much energy you can save from simple actions such as switching off lights and equipment.

“Leaving a computer on overnight for a year creates enough CO2 to fill a double-decker bus.” (Carbon Trust)

“Reducing your PC monitor brightness from 100% to 70% can save up to 20% of the energy the energy the monitor uses.” (Harvard)

A true activist should consider all his actions, and change or adapt as many of his habits as possible, including his virtual ones. Your virtual life has an impact in real life. And not necessarily yours.

More Than Clean Searches

This article does not enourage online activism only. Don’t forget to increase the efficacy of offline activism. These days online and offline have to come together. Entangling your daily virtual existence with meaningful clicks does sound like a powerful tool, a quiet form of activism pushing change in the most unexpected places. Direct action, changing your daily routine, less waste, more awareness in your life, every bit will make a difference in the big scheme of life.

You might not save the world with this, but you’ve certainly made a step in the right direction.
Leave the right footprints. Your grandchildren will be grateful.

This post Searching for Clean(er) Searches was written by Anca Rusu and first appearedon Inspired Magazine.

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/how-react-makes-your-d3-better/

D3 is great. As the jQuery of the web data visualization world, it can do everything you can think of.

Many of the best data visualizations you’ve seen online use D3. It’s a great library, and with the recent v4 update, it became more robust than ever.

Add React, and you can make D3 even better.

Just like jQuery, D3 is powerful but low level. The bigger your visualization, the harder your code becomes to work with, the more time you spend fixing bugs and pulling your hair out.

React can fix that.

You can read my book React+d3js ES6 for a deep insight, or keep reading for an overview of how to best integrate React and D3. In a practical example, we’ll see how to build declarative, transition-based animations.

A version of this article also exists as a D3 meetup talk on YouTube.

Is React Worth It?

OK, React is big. It adds a ton of code to your payload, and it increases your dependency footprint. It’s yet another library that you have to keep updated.

If you want to use it effectively, you’ll need a build step. Something to turn JSX code into pure JavaScript.

Setting up Webpack and Babel is easy these days: just run create-react-app. It gives you JSX compilation, modern JavaScript features, linting, hot loading, and code minification for production builds. It’s great.

Despite the size and tooling complexity, React is worth it, especially if you’re serious about your visualization. If you’re building a one-off that you’ll never have to maintain, debug, or expand, stick to pure D3. If you’re building something real, I encourage you to add React to the mix.

To me, the main benefit is that React forces strongly encourages you to componentize your code. The other benefits are either symptoms of componentization, or made possible by it.

The main benefits of using React with your D3 code are:

componentization
easier testing and debugging
smart DOM redraws
hot loading

Componentization encourages you to build your code as a series of logical units — components. With JSX, you can use them like they were HTML elements: <Histogram />, <Piechart />, <MyFancyThingThatIMade />. We’ll dive deeper into that in the next section.

Building your visualization as a series of components makes it easier to test and debug. You can focus on logical units one at a time. If a component works here, it will work over there as well. If it passes tests and looks nice, it will pass tests and look nice no matter how often you render it, no matter where you put it, and no matter who calls it. ?

React understands the structure of your code, so it knows how to redraw only the components that have changes. There’s no more hard work in deciding what to re-render and what to leave alone. Just change and forget. React can figure it out on its own. And yes, if you look at a profiling tool, you’ll see that only the parts with changes are re-rendered.

Using create-react-app to configure your tooling, React can utilize hot loading. Let’s say you’re building a visualization of 30,000 datapoints. With pure D3, you have to refresh the page for every code change. Load the dataset, parse the dataset, render the dataset, click around to reach the state you’re testing … yawn.

With React -> no reload, no waiting. Just immediate changes on the page. When I first saw it in action, it felt like eating ice cream while the crescendo of 1812 Overture plays in the background. Mind = blown.

Benefits of Componentization

Components this, components that. Blah blah blah. Why should you care? Your dataviz code already works. You build it, you ship it, you make people happy.

But does the code make you happy? With components, it can. Components make your life easier because they make your code:

declarative
reusable
understandable
organized

It’s okay if that sounds like buzzword soup. Let me show you.

For instance, declarative code is the kind of code where you say what you want, not how you want it. Ever written HTML or CSS? You know how to write declarative code! Congratz!

React uses JSX to make your JavaScript look like HTML. But don’t worry, it all compiles to pure JavaScript behind the scenes.

Try to guess what this code does:

render() {
// …
return (
<g transform={translate}>
<Histogram data={this.props.data}
value={(d) => d.base_salary}
x={0}
y={0}
width={400}
height={200}
title=”All” />
<Histogram data={engineerData}
value={(d) => d.base_salary}
x={450}
y={0}
width={400}
height={200}
title=”Engineer” />
<Histogram data={programmerData}
value={(d) => d.base_salary}
x={0}
y={220}
width={400}
height={200}
title=”Programmer”/>
<Histogram data={developerData}
value={(d) => d.base_salary}
x={450}
y={220}
width={400}
height={200}
title=”Developer” />
</g>
)
}

If you guessed “Renders four histograms”, you were right. Hooray.

After you create a Histogram component, you can use it like it was a normal piece of HTML. A histogram shows up anywhere you put <Histogram /> with the right parameters.

In this case, the parameters are x and y coordinates, width and height sizing, the title, some data, and a value accessor. They can be anything your component needs.

Parameters look like HTML attributes, but can take any JavaScript object, even functions. It’s like HTML on steroids.

With some boilerplate and the right dataset, that code above gives you a picture like this. A comparison of salary distributions for different types of people who write software.

Look at the code again. Notice how reusable components are? It’s like <Histogram /> was a function that created a histogram. Behind the scenes it does compile into a function call — (new Histogram()).render(), or something similar. Histogram becomes a class, and you call an instance’s render function every time you use <Histogram />.

React components should follow the principles of good functional programming. No side effects, statelessness, idempotency, comparability. Unless you really, really want to break the rules.

Unlike JavaScript functions, where following these principles requires deliberate effort, React makes it hard not to code that way. That’s a win when you work in a team.

Declarativeness and reusability make your code understandable by default. If you’ve ever used HTML, you can read what that code does. You might not understand the details, but if you know some HTML and JavaScript, you know how to read JSX.

Complex components are made out of simpler components, which are made out of even simpler components, which are eventually made out of pure HTML elements. This keeps your code organized.

When you come back in six months, you can look at your code and think, “Ah yes, four histograms. To tweak this, I should open the Histogram component and poke around.”

React takes the principles I’ve always loved about fancy-pants functional programming and makes them practical. I love that.

Let me show you an example — an animated alphabet.

Continue reading %Building Animated Components, or How React Makes D3 Better%

Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2017/09/what-3d-uis-will-probably-look-like/

Okay WDD readers, this one is going to get real conceptual. I’m here to talk about leaving two-dimensional user interfaces behind. Ditching the screen. Going 3D in the real world. Well, you know what I mean. You know, the stuff of science fiction that always ends up looking sort of fun, but really tiring and impractical. And that’s before the holo-deck malfunctions and Picard starts shooting the Borg with hard light.

Anyway, everything I’m writing about here has little to no practical application outside of VR… for now. Most of this won’t be applicable to web design for a little while. We’ll get there. And in the meantime, it’s fun to speculate on what it will look like…

The Challenges
Display

We don’t have true 3D user interfaces right now, because the tech just isn’t there yet. It’s getting there, but we don’t have anything commercially ready for UI designers to obsess over. Holograms are getting better, and easier to produce. Motion input is also getting better and better, but it’s not as precise as we’d like it to be, yet.

This is because holograms usually require multiple sources of light. The ones that don’t use reflective surfaces to simulate those sources. Both of these restrictions tend to work against the free form physical interactions people want out of a hologram. Basically, we’re waiting until we can form holograms from particles that are easier to manipulate.

The closest we can get right now is VR. But, well, it’s virtual. It’s a simulation of a 3D interface on a pair of flat screens. So it only half counts. That said, VR will probably end up being our 3D UI mockup tool of the future.

Input

Okay, everybody watched Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies wave his hands around and yell at Jarvis to do stuff, and it looks awesome. The only problem is that waving your arms around like that for long periods is actually really tiring. Ask any actor who has to pretend to interact with these systems. It’s not practical for long work sessions.

The part that the movies got right was the inclusion of voice input. Sure, we don’t have AIs yet, but voice commands are coming along. Any interface that would otherwise require us to stand and reach across the table is going to get a lot of use out of voice commands.

People don’t even use really big touch screens if they don’t have to. Small ones, yes. Big ones only get used if they’re lying at a semi-horizontal angle for drawing purposes.

Organization of Information and Buttons

Technical diagrams and blueprints may look great in 3D. Maybe even movies, too, one day. However, plain old two-dimensional text is still one of the most efficient ways of conveying a lot of information. It’s cognitively efficient, and byte efficient. We may develop a 3D language one day, but as of now, text looks best on a 2D plane.

Look at VR. Look at the menus in apps and games. They’re all represented on 2D planes. So are most of our buttons. I mean, I don’t want to walk across the room to press a button either.

My Predictions

The mouse is still the most precise input tool we have, for now. The keyboard is still the fastest way to input text with minimal editing required. I don’t think they’re just going away. In fact, a sort of 3D mouse that turns small movements of the hand into a cursor that moves about the larger 3D interface might make more sense than stretching your arms the whole width of your projector-screen-thing to manipulate information.

Those sorts of peripherals would also get us around the problems that prevent us from taking a literally hands-on approach, such as light emitters, reflective surfaces, and so on. The actual visual part of the UI might look something like the one featured in Iron Man, but with more context for the information presented.

In the Iron Man examples, all information being presented to the user is brought to the fore by Jarvis, on request. It’s also organized with lots of (completely transparent) white space, with a noticeable lack of a window metaphor. Without Jarvis, we’ll need a more deliberate way to contextualize everything we see in a UI.

For 2D information, the window concept might very well remain in play. For information displayed in three dimensions, it might simply become a “box” metaphor, with translucent lines showing where one 3D app ends, and where the next one begins. Input will have to be contextual, with the cursor constrained to two dimensions when editing text, and freed up under other circumstances.

Going beyond anything possible with today’s tech, another good example of a practical holographic interface is the Omni-tool from the Mass Effect franchise. Goodness knows how they get the holograms to work when the device is implanted into you (usually in the non-dominant wrist, like a watch), but let’s ignore the science for a bit.

The Omni-tool is a purely practical device, used for communications, data analysis, and interacting with unfamiliar hardware. Oh, and stabbing people. Look, we’re ignoring the science!

The point is, it’s a practical interface because the UI is entirely contextual, and adapts to whatever it is you’re doing. It’s also operated with the fingers of one hand. No huge gestures required. Note that every other UI in the Mass Effect universe is either on a flat surface, or activated by voice.

Conclusion

Hollywood artists like to envision a world of completely unusable interfaces. Real 3D UIs will probably look more familiar than most of us seem to want to believe.

And I haven’t even touched on accessibility. How do people who can’t speak, or easily move their arms due to arthritis, interact with a huge holo-table UI? What if multiple people try to interact with it at once?

These are the kinds of questions we’ll have to answer before we embrace arm-waving as the future.

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