Archive for year: 2017

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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Original Source: http://inspiredm.com/cloud-storage-cdn-option/

Inspired Magazine
Inspired Magazine – creativity & inspiration daily

If you have a slow site, probably on shared server that receives a lot of traffic, you may be able to speed things up a bit by hosting some of your content on a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Unfortunately traditional CDN is often priced out of reach for a small business website, but the good news is there is a way to set up cloud storage drives to act as your own personal CDN systems. In this article we’ll discover some methods for doing that.

Cloud storage CDN emulation vs pure CDN

The main difference is cost and volume. Pure CDN usually works out cheaper for high traffic volumes and more expensive for low traffic volumes. Because a typical small business isn’t likely to see the kind of traffic that would make pure CDN worth it, emulating CDN functionality with cloud storage is generally a more affordable and simple solution.

Choosing a cloud storage provider

Using cloud storage for CDN requires that you can make individual files available for direct public access, so this rules out zero-knowledge encryption services, because they’re not designed for general public access.

Second, you don’t want a provider that puts limits on resource access, or at least the limits should not be too strict.

Distributing content you want to get paid for

There are then different options depending on what kind of content you’re hosting. If you’re wanting to host specialist content, for example video, music, or other artistic works, checking out DECENT would be a good idea.

DECENT is a highly specialized blockchain based decentralized content delivery network. It allows you to self-publish anything without dependency on a middleman.

Utilizing peer-to-peer connections, DECENT traffic is very difficult to disrupt or block, which also makes it potentially able to circumvent censorship. It is more oriented toward commercial transactions, and blockchain technology makes these transactions easy to secure.

What it’s not very good for is distributing ordinary files like JavaScript, CSS, and XML files. For that, you’ll need a more regular cloud storage provider. The two biggest players in this field are Google and Amazon. Both are giants, but there are considerable differences between them.

A quick comparison: Amazon vs Google

Amazon comes in two flavors: Amazon S3 and Amazon Drive. The Amazon S3 system is an enterprise level system with all the complexity that you’d expect from such a system. It’s designed for big websites that get a lot of traffic, and the pricing structure is really complicated.

You may never need to worry about the pricing, however, if your needs are reasonably modest. Amazon S3 offers a free deal with 5GB of storage, 20k get requests and 2k put requests.

The problem here is that many of those get requests are not coming from humans, but from robots, so you can quickly burn through 20,000 requests before the month is up if your site is good at attracting robots. When your site does go over the limits, it doesn’t get suspended. You just have to pay up.

Amazon Drive is like Amazon S3 with training wheels. It comes with a much easier to use interface, requiring less technical ability. There’s a subclass called Prime Photos where you can get unlimited photo storage, and 5GB of storage for videos and other files, but it’s only free if you subscribe to Amazon Prime. The next step up provides 100GB of storage for $11.99 per year, and for $59.99 per year you can get 1TB of storage.

The standout thing here is the pricing is much simpler than Amazon S3. You know upfront what you get and what you’re expected to pay for it. It’s not really intended for using as a CDN, but it’s still possible to do it.

If you’re a WordPress user, you may prefer to use Amazon S3 because there are tools especially designed to help you do that through Amazon CloudFront. The complexity of setting that up is going to be beyond the scope of this article, so look for a dedicated article on exactly that topic coming up soon.

Google also has two options available: Google Cloud Storage and Google Drive. If you’re a Gmail user, you already have Google Drive.

Google Cloud Storage is intended for enterprise level use, and as such it requires a certain amount of technical ability to configure it and fine tune it. Google Drive is consumer-grade, but very easy to use with its simple web interface.

Google Drive starts you off with a generous 15GB of free storage, which is way more than most average small business websites will ever need. Should you find you need more, you can upgrade to:

All is not as it seems with these storage limits, however. Google Docs, photos other than full resolution (if stored using Google Photos), and any files shared with you by someone else don’t count toward your storage limit. Unfortunately emails (and attachments) do take up space if you’re actively using the Gmail account.

To give you an idea of how much you can store in 15GB, that is approximately 30 to 40 videos (m4v / mp4) at 1080 x 720 and 90 minutes duration, or about 88,235 photos at 800 x 600 and optimized for the web. It would be unusual for the average small business to need that much for its website.

Google Drive is much less expensive than Amazon Drive. In terms of performance, Amazon may have a bit of an edge, and the documentation with Amazon is better. Head to head, Google is offering better value overall.

Which should you choose? It depends whether you consider performance to be more important than cost.

Hosting images, CSS and JavaScript from Google Drive

This is not a lot more complicated than hosting video. In fact, it may even be easier. Here is what you need to do:

1. In your Google Drive, create a special folder that will store the files

2. Make sure the name you give it helps it stand out from other drive folders

3. Upload all the files to that folder (you can also create subfolders)

4. Select the folder that will be shared and click the share button

5. When the sharing dialog appears, select “Advanced”

6. On the more advanced Sharing Settings dialog, select “Change”

7. Now change the setting to “On – Public on the Web”

8. You will need to repeat the above process for every individual file as well

9. Copy the link for each resource and paste into a text editor

10. Delete everything except the file id

11. Now add text “https://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&” in front of the file id

12. Now you can modify your HTML. For CSS:

For JS:

For an image:

13. Upload the a test version of the HTML file and speed test this vs the original file

Original:

Updated test version with CDN from Google Drive:

Something very important you need to notice here is that with CDN enabled, the performance was actually degraded. This happened because my own web server automatically compresses everything, but the resources transferred to Google Drive are not automatically compressed.

That’s a topic for another day, but the real lesson here is that CDN isn’t always going to be an improvement for page loading time. Where it can still be useful, however, is by reducing disk space and bandwidth on your own server, allowing Google to shoulder the load for you. In most cases, that’s not going to hurt your loading times too much.

Streaming video: Google Drive vs YouTube

Google is the owner of YouTube, so either way you are using the same technology. Performance will be about the same, and the quality will be exactly the same, so why bother comparing? There are some small differences between streaming from either of these two sources.

When your video is hosted on YouTube, it doesn’t cost you anything, and doesn’t take up any storage space you personally own or rent. Videos on YouTube are ad-supported, allow viewers to comment by default, and show a bunch of links to other videos at the end of the video. Users can also find a link to view an embedded video on YouTube instead of on your site. Both of these behaviors are highly undesirable.

Hosting videos on Google Drive means there are no ads, no suggested links at the end of the video, and no option to view the video on YouTube (since it’s not hosted there). Otherwise there are no visible differences.

Hosting on YouTube can lead to greater exposure, if that’s what you’re after. Hosting on Google Drive gives you more control, more exclusivity, and helps keep the viewer on your site without the temptations offered by YouTube.

Both are better than alternatives such as Vimeo, because it is easier to include subtitles and the streaming quality can be adjusted by the viewer to suit their connection speed.

Streaming video from Google Drive and from YouTube uses very similar processes.

1. Upload the video to your Google Drive or to YouTube.

2. Upload or create any required subtitle files.

3. Test your video. Don’t skip this important step.

4. While the video is open, select the three vertical dots in corner of screen, then select “Share” from the menu.

5. Click on the “Advanced” link in the dialog that appears.

6. Click on the”Change” link.

7. Select “On – Public on the Web”

8. Then copy the link location and follow steps 9 to 13, except you’ll be using video HTML instead of image HTML, so your could will look something like this example:

The cc_load_policy property determines whether subtitles / closed captions should be visible by default. It’s good practice to set this to on, but Google applies the policy inconsistently anyway, possibly due to cross-platform complications.

Make sure you really need CDN

Most of the time CDN works fine, but there can be times when a page hangs up because it’s trying to fetch a remote resource that simply won’t load. Google fonts, and certain other Google APIs, are notorious for this.

If you’re hosting your site on servers located in your own country and most of your traffic is local, using CDN may create more problems instead of less.

In any case, always check the results of modifications you make and be sure they’re really beneficial. If they’re not, rewind back to the point where your site was operating at maximum efficiency or try another strategy.

Using a CDN lets you create smaller websites, so even if there’s a slight performance price to pay, it may still be to your advantage if you host multiple sites from a single hosting account.

header image courtesy of Alexandr Ivanov

This post Cloud Storage as a CDN Option was written by Inspired Mag Team and first appearedon Inspired Magazine.

Original Source: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/rellaxjs-parallax-script/

Parallax scrolling looks incredible when done right. It’s not a feature you’ll want on every website but for creative sites and landing pages, parallax elements grab attention fast. There…

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