We usually work with React and fetch to get responses and build states with these. But what happens if we need to remove a key from a state to send an updated object to the server?
Let's discover how we can achieve this.

We can remove a key from a state object in React following this pattern:

1. Store the state object with the useState hook.
2. Destructure the key of the object and the rest of the properties.
3. Set the state to the remaining properties.

import {useState} from 'react';

export default function App() {
  const initialState = {
    id: 1,
    name: 'Luca',
    cost: 5000,
    area: 'business',
  };
  const [employee, setEmployee] = useState(initialState);

const removeKey = () => {
    setEmployee(current => {
      // remove cost key from object
      const {cost, ...rest} = current;
      return rest;
    });
  };

return (
    <div>
      <button onClick={removeKey}>Click</button>
      <h4>{JSON.stringify(employee, null, 4)}</h4>

      <hr />

      <h2>Name: {employee.name}</h2>
      <h2>Area: {employee.area}</h2>
      <h2>Cost: {employee.cost}</h2>
    </div>
  );
}

To remove a key from a state object, we destructured the key and the rest of the properties and updated the state to the rest of the properties {…rest}. This way, we can easily remove unnecessary keys from our state object.

But here it is the first annoyance:

People assume we have no life because, hey, we work at home!

One of the biggest misconceptions of freelancers is that somehow we’re just sitting around waiting for a client to send work to be done immediately. Now, to a degree I guess that’s true. We’re here to serve the needs of our clients, right? But sometimes this can be taken to a whole new level of strange.

Invoices? No, thanks!

To me, a good comparison to this situation would be receiving your electric bill. How seriously would you treat that bill? Odds are you would probably want to pay it quickly so that the lights don’t get shut off.

Unfortunately, not everyone treats an invoice from a freelancer with quite the same seriousness. You might be seen as someone who is a hobbyist or without the resources to fight for your payment.

The good news here is that you can solve a lot of issues by having a contract that stipulates when and how you’re to be paid for your work. That will at least give you some leverage against someone who is either refusing to pay or is just exceptionally slow to do so. It also sends a message that you are a professional and deserve to be treated as such.

We have to schedule a meeting a.s.a.p!

While it’s pretty safe to assume that most people don’t enjoy pointless meetings, freelancers may have reason to dread them even more. Why? Well, consider that a solo freelancer is usually working on multiple projects at once. Meetings, while sometimes a necessity of doing business, can take already limited time away from getting things done.

There are situations when meetings make perfect sense. But there are many times when a simple phone call or Skype session will suffice.

Handle client’s expectations

You can set policies which clarify what a client can and should expect from your relationship. This can’t be the perfect solution for all the misunderstanding, but it really can cut down on those annoyances.

EdgeConf’s hundred-odd attendees were truly the heavy hitters of the web community. The average Twitter follower count in any given room was probably in the thousands, and all the major browser vendors were represented — Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, Opera. So we had lots of fun peppering them with questions about when they might release such-and-such API.

There was one company not in attendance, though, and they served as the proverbial elephant in the room that no one wanted to discuss. I heard them referred to cagily as “a company in California” or “a certain fruit company.” Their glowing logo illuminated nearly every laptop in the room, and yet it seemed like nobody dared speak their name. Of course I’m talking about Apple.

I think there is a general feeling among web developers that Safari is lagging behind the other browsers, but when you go to a conference like EdgeConf, it really strikes you just how wide the gap is. All of the APIs I mentioned above are not implemented in Safari, and Apple has shown no public interest in them. (Correction: actually, they have.) When you start browsing caniuse.com, the list goes on and on.

Even when Apple does implement newer APIs, they often do it halfheartedly. To take an example close to my heart, IndexedDB was proposed more than 5 years ago and has been available in IE, Firefox, and Chrome since 2012. Apple, on the other hand, didn’t release IndexedDB until mid-2014, and when they did, they unveiled a bafflingly incompetent implementation that was so bad, it’s been universally derided as unusable. (LocalForage, PouchDB, and YDN-DB, the major IndexedDB wrappers, all ignore Safari’s version and fall back to WebSQL.)

Now, after one year, Apple has fixed a whopping two bugs in IndexedDB (out of several), and they’ve publicly stated that they don’t find much value in working on it, because they don’t see “a huge use.” Well duh, nobody’s going to use IndexedDB if the browser support is completely broken. (Microsoft, I’m looking at you too.)

It’s hard to get insight into why Apple is behaving this way. They never send anyone to web conferences, their Surfin’ Safari blog is a shadow of its former self, and nobody knows what the next version of Safari will contain until that year’s WWDC. In a sense, Apple is like Santa Claus, descending yearly to give us some much-anticipated presents, with no forewarning about which of our wishes he’ll grant this year. And frankly, the presents have been getting smaller and smaller lately.

In recent years, Apple’s strategy towards the web can most charitably be described as “benevolent neglect.” Although performance has been improving significantly with JSCore and the new WKWebView, the emerging features of the web platform — offline storage, push notifications, and “installable” webapps — have been notably absent on Safari. It’s tempting to interpret this as a deliberate effort by Apple to sabotage any threats to their App Store business model, but a conspiracy seems unlikely, since that part of the business mostly breaks even. Another possibility is that they’re just responding to the demands of iOS developers, which largely amount to 1) more native APIs and 2) Swift, Swift, Swift. But since Apple is pretty good at keeping a lid on their internal process, it’s anyone’s guess.

The tragedy here is that Apple hasn’t always been a web skeptic. As recently as 2010, back when Steve Jobs famously skewered Flash while declaring that HTML5 is the future, Apple was a fierce web partisan. Lots of the early features that helped webapps catch up to native apps — ApplicationCache, WebSQL, touch events, touch icons — were enthusiastically implemented by WebKit developers, and many even originated at Apple.

Around that same time, when WebSQL was deprecated in favor of IndexedDB, you’ll even find mailing list arguments where Apple employees vigorously defended WebSQL as a must for performant web applications. Reading the debates, I sense a lot of bitterness from Apple after IndexedDB won out. The irony here is that Apple nearly gave us the tools to undermine their own proprietary platform, but by rejecting WebSQL, we gave them an opportunity to rethink their strategy and put the brakes on any new progress in web APIs.

I find Application Cache, which will probably soon be deprecated in favor of Service Worker, to be a similar story. It gained wide browser support at a time when Apple was still interested in the web, but unfortunately it turned out to be a rushed, half-baked solution to the problem. I worry that Service Worker might suffer the same fate as IndexedDB, if Apple continues to lag behind the pack.

At this point, we in the web community need to come to terms with the fact that Safari has become the new IE. Microsoft is repentant these days, Google is pushing the web as far as it can go, and Mozilla is still being Mozilla. Apple is really the one singer in that barbershop quartet hitting all the sour notes, and it’s time we start talking about it openly instead of tiptoeing around it like we’re going to hurt somebody’s feelings. Apple is the most valuable company in the world; they can afford to take a few punches.

So what can we do, when one of the major browser vendors is stuck in the 2010 model, and furthermore has a total monopoly on iOS (because no, “Chrome for iOS” is not really Chrome), showing a brazenness even beyond that of 90’s-era Microsoft? I see three major coping mechanisms:

1. Stick with what worked in 2010, and use polyfills to support Safari. This is a strategy I highlighted in my opening talk for the frontend data panel, where I showed that you can get nearly the same features as Service Worker by using AppCache and PouchDB (which falls back to WebSQL on Safari). This approach should appeal to the vast majority of web developers, who tend to hit the snooze button on new technologies until they’re available cross-browser. On the other hand, it’s also a good way to coddle Apple and give them no incentive to step up their game.
2. Use technologies like Service Worker that don’t work on Safari, and consider it a progressive enhancement. Alex Russell made a great point about this during the “installable webapps” breakout, arguing that if we create a large body of free webapps that use Service Worker, and which work fabulously well on Android but only meh on iOS, then it will be in Apple’s interest to suck it up and support the API. Unfortunately, while this would be the best outcome for the web community as a whole, it’s going to be hard to convince developers to write code that only reaches half their audience.
3. Contribute to WebKit. The core of Safari is still, after all, an open-source project, so there’s no practical reason why anyone with the C++ chops couldn’t roll up their sleeves and implement the new APIs themselves. (The absurdity of giving free labor to the richest company on earth isn’t lost on me, but we’re talking desperate times here.) The major problem I see with this approach is that WebKit is not Safari, and Apple could still decide to not deploy WebKit features to their flagship browser. To circle back to IndexedDB again, it was fully implemented by Google well before the Blink fork, and for several years, Apple could have just flipped a bit in their build script to include Google’s implementation, but instead they decided to waffle for a few years and then replace it with their own broken version. (Update: see note on IndexedDB below.) There’s no guarantee they wouldn’t do the same thing for other outside contributions.

So in summary, I don’t know what the right solution is. I’ve engaged many of the WebKit developers on Twitter, and I’ve even done the hard work of writing reproducible test cases and trying out their beta software so I can give them early warning. (Yes, I fork over $200 a year to Apple, for the privilege of testing their own software for them.) And frankly I’ve grown bitter, because most of the bugs I’ve reported have languished, with little response other than a link to their internal Radar tracker.

I appreciate the work that many of the WebKit developers have been doing (Brady Eidson has been particularly patient and helpful), but at this point it seems to me that the best strategy toward Apple may be the stick rather than the carrot. So I’m inclined to take up Alex Russell’s solution outlined in #2 above, and to start promoting the adoption of new web technologies — Safari support be damned.

If we can start building a vibrant ecosystem of web applications where Apple is not invited, then maybe they’ll be forced to pull a Microsoft and make their own penitent walk to Canossa. Otherwise we’ll have to content ourselves with living in the web of 2010, with Safari replacing IE as the blue-tinged icon that fills web developers with dread.

Update on IndexedDB: I’m told by Ryosuke Niwa at Apple that Google’s IndexedDB was not so easily usable in Safari, even pre-fork. So it wasn’t a build flag. However, in a private discussion with a Google employee, I’m told that the IPC layer was abstracted to a degree that it shouldn’t have been too difficult for Safari to use. In any case, it’s true that Apple had something close to a fully working implementation years before they shipped their inferior version.

You can comment on Hacker News, on Ars Technica, and on Twitter. Thanks to Jan Lehnardt, Dave Myers, Beckie Choi, and Julian Applebaum for providing feedback on a draft of this blog post.

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Originally published at nolanlawson.com on June 30, 2015.

I barely played for five minutes but when I finished I was so excited I could feel my heart beating in my throat. Final Fight was a hell of an experience.

Side-scrolling Japanese beat-em-up Final Fight was a SNES favourite

Throughout the years working in the interactive industry, I have felt that same excitement several times; when checking out some of the so called ‘interactive experiences’, checking regular content sites and lately playing GTAV online.

However as time goes by I realized my expectations in the interactive field are getting lower and lower. Everyday I visit tons of sites that promise me an EXPERIENCE or urge me to EXPLORE. They always intend to INSPIRE ME and ask me to LEARN MORE and SHARE their content but I rarely do. I don’t often feel rewarded by any of these sites, they all over promise and fail later on.

Could it be due to the fall of Flash? The increasingly tight budgets? The spread of parallax, long scrolling, grids or one pagers promo sites? The current mainstream design trend? Or the fact that Chrome Experiments are just that: experiments?

Many ‘interactive music videos’ end up being a video with no story where you move your mouse to see a flashy effect. An immersive experience ends up being a video played full screen or a bunch of 3D models and hotspots to ‘learn more’ and the broad act of ‘exploring’ ends up meaning scrolling down through a long page while playing a video in slow mo or seeing a grid of pictures.

So now think for a second and try to answer this… When was the last time you felt immersed in an online experience?

Let me tell you, in a browser that was a long time ago for me. Since the death of Flash the whole industry has taken a step back. We still continue overusing all these meaningless call to actions and vague promises but more and more they are losing their significance and killing my expectations.

I don’t want to spend time in your ‘immersive experience’ and, unless you give me something truly awesome, I won’t share your content.

As part of a digital agency I try to fix this as much as I can. Being able to feel a rush when diving into an interactive piece and to provoke that same rush in users is the only reason why I go to work everyday. Here are a few learnings I’ve found myself discussing during the last five years when approaching a new project…

What’s the point of being on the web if you don’t take full advantage of its interactivity?

The internet is interactive. TV is not — and that’s why it is fading out. Users visiting your site are trusting you to amaze them expect more than sitting back and staring at the screen. If you promise them an ‘experience’ you have to work up to the expectations. Engage them through interactions, make them part of the ‘experience’, play with their expectations and surprise them after all.

Many of these features were inherited from the world of videogames. However ‘game’ is a dangerous word to use during a brainstorming session. Most of the people will jump up on their seats: “We can’t do a game!”

Surprisingly, whether you call it a game or something else, the reality is that the gamification processes are actually pretty useful when it comes to engaging users.

Creating a sense of achievement through small challenges, comparing users’ behaviours or guiding them through a small, step by step walkthrough are only few examples of how gamification processes can improve your work.

Everyone and every brand has a story to tell — so tell it

Personally, I have experienced every kind of emotion while reading books or watching movies. I’ve reread paragraphs in books that made me feel great all of a sudden, full of energy. At other times ,a sad dream will make me feel blue in the mornings. Stories are all around and when transmitted well, they can take you through a rollercoaster of emotions.

We need to make sure we have a story to tell. When given the chance we need to make the user feel something, take something out of our work. Considering we work on an interactive platform it should be even easier to get the user involved in a story. Brilliantly executed ‘interactive experiences’ that lack a story are a waste of time.

The need for a story doesn’t just apply to the big productions — Google Chrome Experiments kind of sites. Even smaller, purely functional sites can tell a story. Startup sites, banks, and even iPhone apps promo sites can tell a story as well.

A pretty design layout with a massive jumbo mambo iPhone is not enough anymore. Ask yourself, what do you want users to feel when checking out your site? And now create a narration around that.

No one’s going to look at your website if it just looks like a copy of someone else’s

Have you realized how many websites look similar these days? iPhone App promo sites are so similar that you can even download templates to do your own with few assets. From a design perspective many people took the flat trend the wrong way and now you don’t know whether you are looking at accounting software, a marketing site, or a weather app. Same thing happened with the trend of using parallax scrolling. Agency websites, police departments and fashion portals adopted this trend blindly.

While trends will keep you up with the mass of sites being produced out there, it will also kill your message and will distract the user from its real purpose. The ideation of your work should come from the message you want to communicate instead of from the current trend in the industry.

If you look at it from an advertising or communication perspective, by adjusting your work to the current trend you are killing what could make your work memorable. You are playing it safe. Your work will be processed by the audience like part of that mainstream trend, and its message will be ignored.

In a few words, be disruptive, trends will make you normal and forgettable.

If people have taken the time to visit your site, they should be rewarded

Make it count. Make your interactive experience worthy of the user’s time. Take the chance to impact users in one way or another.

Thinking about the amount of websites a normal user sees everyday online, we don’t really have much of a chance to make a huge impact on those users. With their limited attention span they will probably scan our site and engage only if either its content and or functionality is perceived as useful for them.

If your work is not perceived as engaging because of its content, how this content is treated, or its functionality and how this is displayed, that’s a failure.

So think about it like two sides of the same coin. First I’ll state the obvious, we all want our work to be successful, to be liked by users. And secondly, being a bit selfish now, how would you feel knowing you spent X weeks working on something that doesn’t work? Something that doesn’t add value to your career, isn’t it a waste of time?

A happy note to boost your stamina level…

Project schedules are shaped by the amount of constraints around it. Low budgets, limited time, limited resources or client vision can make you give up sooner than later and become a Zombie Designer that only follows orders. However these are the limitations that should push your work even further.

Today’s constraints will fade out through time, your work won’t. Constraints are normally misused as an excuse for an average work performance. But in reality the memory of those constraints will fade away quickly while the project will still be around.

Don’t ever miss the chance to make a great project, for you and for your users.

Great sites are are always being done. From time to time something comes up that just feels right. Great sites that ‘wow’ me recently are Lifesaver: A Revolutionary New Way To Learn CPR by Unit9 and USA Today by F-i.

Take this article as a few of many learnings. The internet has been an amazing place from its beginning. A place where you can potentially EXPERIENCE, EXPLORE and GET INSPIRED by content from around the world. It’s our responsability to keep it that way.

It’s time to ‘wow’ users again.

Have you had an immersive experience online? If so, please do let us know in the comments.

Words: Claudio Guglieri

Claudio Guglieri is design director at @F_i and some other experiments. He’ll be speaking alongside David Navarro at Generate London this September — buy your ticket today!

Originally published at www.creativebloq.com on July 1, 2015.

Good landing page design isn’t just about pretty pictures — it’s about structuring your page to guide users toward the goal. Image by Baldiri via Flickr.

Some of us have the luxury of having talented graphic designers on staff.

For those of us who don’t, designing a landing page that doesn’t get in the way of conversion can be a real pain in the butt.

I’m not just talking about a pretty page. I’m talking about everything that goes into effective landing page design: directional cues, font usability best practices, color theory, layout tricks and more.

If design isn’t your forte, this article’s for you. I’ve scoured the web for the best blog posts on how to make deliberate design decisions that will impact the performance of your landing page — from color psychology to typography to more subtle visual tricks.

Let’s get started!

1. The Psychology of Color by Quick Sprout

This post comprises the fourth chapter in Quick Sprout’s comprehensive guide on understanding consumer psychology. It starts by reviewing color theory, including the different emotional impacts created by pure colors, shades and tints, as well as the science of picking colors that work together.

Colors come with social and cultural connotations, and this guide includes a chart that explains how the meaning of color varies for different social groups (colors that entice in North America are different from those that entice in India, for example).

The guide also looks at:

• The relationship between gender and color preferences
• Studies that show how color impacts conversions
• How to create designs that are more friendly to people with disabilities

Top takeaway

A common mistake made by designers is using too many colors on the same page.

An overload of colors can wind up conveying too many emotions or messages at once, which can potentially confuse the person viewing your design.

Instead, test using one prominent color that is offset by a neutral color like white, gray or black.

2. Color Usability Optimization: 4 Keys to Harnessing Physiology for More Conversions

Most resources on the relationship between color and conversion focus on the psychology of color; that is, the emotions and qualities that are ascribed to various colors.

But Angie Schottmuller of Three Deep Marketing developed a system for boosting conversions that focuses on how humans process colors physiologically. In other words, what the human eye does to color and how this impacts a user’s behavior when visiting a site.

In this really detailed post, you’ll learn:

• Her “Clockwork Conversion Color Model,” which centers on strategic use of complementary colors to boost conversions
• The four scientifically-based color principles that make up the model, and how you can employ each on your landing page

Top takeaway

Use pure colors for your primary CTA and neutralize the other colors on the rest of the page by mixing in white, grey and black.

This helps you avoid the overuse of pure colors, which can distract and exhaust the eye.

3. Choosing the Right Font: A Guide to Typography and UX

There are a lot of conflicting opinions about what kinds of typography are optimal for the web, and the truth is that it depends entirely on the context for which you are designing.

But UserTesting’s guidelines will give you all the information you need to make an informed, thoughtful decision about how you use type on your landing page. You’ll learn things like:

• The number of optimal characters per line for desktop and mobile
• How to think about the contrast between your text and background
• The differences in the way readers respond to serif and sans serif fonts

Top takeaway

The purpose of any text on your page is to help your users accomplish their goals. Always keep this in mind when choosing typography for your landing page.

Ask yourself questions like:

• What kind of experience are my users expecting when they land on my page?
• What devices are they using?
• What do they want to accomplish on my landing page (shop, learn, be entertained)?

The answers to these questions will help you decide which style and color are right for the type on your webpage. And, like any good landing page designer, don’t rely on gut instinct: make sure to test, test, test.

4. A Non-Designer’s Guide to Typefaces and Layout

Once you’ve chosen all the right colors and fonts, how can you arrange them all on the page in a way that just looks right?

This post by Adam Dachis on Lifehacker breaks it all down for you. It’ll teach you all about typeface and layout best practices:

• How to emphasize various elements on your page with proper sizing, color and spacing
• Why you should only use two typefaces max (and when it’s okay to break that rule)
• How to format your text and images to better communicate your message and have compelling (read: high-converting) visual impact

Top takeaway

Picking poor color combinations can make a page look messy and turn off prospects — so what’s a color blind marketer to do?

Dachis shares the really cool Adobe Kuler tool which helps you discover color combinations that work well together (without having to rely on your gut).

5. 8 Effective Web Design Principles You Should Know

As CRO expert Peep Laja eloquently puts it in this article:

Design is not just something designers do. Design is marketing.

If you’re a marketer who doesn’t really have an eye for design, that statement might intimidate you — which is why Peep provides a breakdown of eight web design principles that will help you create better landing page experiences.

Though many of the examples he provides are for websites rather than landing pages, this post is a must-read.

You’ll learn:

• How you use mathematical ratios and sequences to create web design that looks pleasing to the eye
• How you can take a page from photography’s playbook and use the rule of thirds to select (or crop) images that will look good on your landing pages
• Tons of other psychological and scientific tricks that can subtly affect your prospect’s perception of your landing page.

Top takeaway

The Law of Proximity dictates that elements that are close together on a landing page will be associated together in the prospect’s mind.

Don’t place elements together in your design if they don’t go together thematically. Alternatively, use this law to your advantage if you want to indicate that certain elements do go together!

6. Why These Ugly Designs Convert Beautifully

Now that you’ve got your share of design knowledge and know how to make things look good, let’s flip the script and check out an article that explains that beauty really is only skin-deep.

In this tongue-in-cheek landing page examples post, Mattias Guilotte looks at three not-so-pretty landing pages that convert remarkably well. He shares surprising conversion stats and takes a guess at why each page performs well in spite of being hard on the eyes.

This post is a cautionary tale about why you should always test before blindly following design “rules.”

…Just like the ones you just read in this post.

Wrapping things up

There’s a lot of great information in these articles that will keep you busy for a while. Read through and find hints of where your landing page design may be falling short.

And then run tests to validate your assumptions.

Finally, never forget that only solid copy can give way to beautiful and comprehensive landing page design.

P.S.: Know of any great blog posts about design theory that I didn’t include? Post them in the comments!

– Chloe Mason Gray

Originally published at unbounce.com on March 14, 2015.

This trick will give you get a faster site. But be warned, it isn’t always appropriate.

Blurred areas lend themselves well to how JPEGs compress images, and increasing these blurred areas will help slim images and achieve higher rates of image compression.

This can be done using tools such as JPEGmini and ImageOptim. This optimisation is normally applied in subtle peripheral areas but can be used for larger areas when it is editorially appropriate (i.e. when doing so won’t change the context in which you want to present the main subject).

Consider some different possible contexts for the stock photo shown above, where we see a group of people stood behind a man reaching out to greet us.

• If the image is to promote the man at the front who is a politician, then blurring the features and identities of the other people won’t dilute that message. It could even help emphasise the message by putting focus on him and affirming that the image is about the individual and not the group.
• Conversely, if the image is to be used to represent the staff at the local branch of your bank, and welcome new customers, this approach wouldn’t be appropriate. It would be harmful to the bank employees’ efforts to build a personal relationship with you if you couldn’t recognise their inpidual faces.

These are both extremes, but hopefully serve to demonstrate the technique, its effect, and the kind of trade-offs you have to consider when deciding whether to apply it.

In most cases you should be able to use your judgement to identify inconspicuous areas to help boost compression in some small way.

Words: Jamie Mason

Jamie is a front-end developer specialising in JavaScript. This article was originally published in net magazine.

Originally published at www.creativebloq.com on May 21, 2015.

It’s refreshing to see two cross-platform tools from Microsoft this month, a code editor and an educative development environment that enables complete beginners to get started with coding mobile apps.

Also exciting is the news that whiteboarding tools have been added to Paper, the painting app for iPad, so now you can use its wonderful interface to draw diagrams as well as sketches. Let’s dive in

HTML Arrows

HTML Arrows is a beautifully designed cheat sheet for HTML symbols that takes its inspiration from the minimalist Swiss aesthetic. All of the most useful symbols are displayed in an ordering of your choice along with their unicode, hex code, HTML code and HTML entity values so you can get all the information you need at a glance.

We’re excited about this one. Painting app Paper has added whiteboarding tools so that you can draw diagrams using straight lines, shapes and fills. You can draw objects such as circles and triangles freehand and the ‘Intention Engine’ will recognise and correct them. It’s a great way to capture your ideas using your iPad when you’re out and about, when collaborating or when working with clients.

CSS Dig

This handy Chrome Extension provides an alternative way to analyse your CSS and find fixes and improvements. It displays all of your CSS properties with their frequency and variations, so you can easily spot if you’ve somehow ended up with too many shades of a colour. It also displays selector length and specificity so you can resolve specificity wars and consolidate your code.

This one creates something akin to a Dulux paint shade chart based on an initial colour that you specify. Whether or not this type of colour presentation actually helps you arrive at a decision is down to you, but this tool provides a nice progression of shades in a convenient form. Just click on a colour to copy it to the clipboard.

Visual Code Studio

Visual Code Studio is code editor from Microsoft for building modern web and cloud applications. You might think that means it’s for Windows only, but remarkably it’s a cross-platform offering that works on Linux and Mac OSX as well. It supports multiple languages and you get rich code assistance and navigation without having to use a full IDE.

TouchDevelop

Microsoft is on a roll this month. TouchDevelop enables beginners as well as experienced programmers to create apps using their phone, tablet or a desktop environment. You can choose from one of three skill levels ranging from beginner, which provides a drag-and-drop interface for app development, up to expert, which provides more powerful features for programmers.

It’s designed to tempt people into learning to code by making their first steps into app development easy, and interactive tutorials are provided to smooth the transition from dragging and dropping into writing code. Like Visual Studio Code, this is a cross-platform offering that works on Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows, Linux and Mac.

ES Feature Tests

ES Feature Tests enables you to determine the best code to deliver to each browser so you can load native ES6+ code in ES6+ compliant browsers, and transpiled code in older browsers. Instead of using caniuse data for this purpose, this method performs feature tests for each browser — which is likely to be more reliable.

Vorlon.js

Remotely test and debug your JavaScript with this tool powered by node.js and socket.io. You can connect remotely to up to 50 devices simultaneously and run your code on all of them to test performance and fix errors. It’s a way to debug your code on nearly any platform, and it’s open source and free to use. There are also plugins for adding extra features.

Ionic Framework

It’s been around for a while in beta form, but this month the Ionic Framework went official with the final release of Ionic 1.0.0 ‘uranium-unicorn’. Ionic is a free and open source SDK for building hybrid mobile apps with AngularJS. It offers mobile-optimised components and is designed with performance in mind. If you’re used to using native SDKs it should hopefully be fairly familiar to you as it’s been designed to work in a similar way.

RightFont

If you have a ton of local fonts to deal with on your machine, this handy app for OS X might be useful. RightFont gives you fine control over your fonts, providing access right from the menu bar and integrating with both Photoshop and Sketch 3. Fonts can be organised according to whether they’re TypeKit or Google, serif or sans serif, width, weight and more.

Words: Tanya Combrinck

Tanya Combrinck has been writing about the web for over four years, and the internet is actually her preferred method of interacting with humanity. You can find her on Twitter at @tanyacombrinck.

Originally published at www.creativebloq.com on May 19, 2015.

We are going to create a simple interface with a text field to enter some text, a label to display text read in from a file and two simple buttons for saving and reading the file.

Create a new application

First create a new Xcode iOS application with a single user interface making sure to select the Swift language. Device can be anything, it does not matter for this project, I went with iPhone just to get the screenshots to fit … those Retina resolutions can be troublesome on a MacBook Air

Create the interface

1. Add a new textfield object for entering text.
2. Add a button below the text field and change the label to ‘Write’.
3. Add another button and change the label to ‘Read’.
4. Below the read button add a label object. I left my one saying ‘Label’ so I could clearly see the text change occurring.

Hook em up!

Using the method you prefer create two @IBOutlets for the text field and label, and create two @IBAction’s for the buttons in the ViewController.swift file.

@IBOutlet weak varentryField:UITextField!

@IBOutlet weak vardisplayField:UILabel!

@IBAction func writeButton(sender:UIButton)

@IBAction func readButton(sender:UIButton)

So the entire viewController code should look like

// ViewController.swift

// ReadWrite Example

// Created by Peter Witham on 5/13/15.

// Copyright (c) 2015 Peter Witham. All rights reserved.

import UIKit

classViewController:UIViewController{

@IBOutlet weak varentryField:UITextField!

@IBOutlet weak vardisplayField:UILabel!

override func viewDidLoad(){

super.viewDidLoad()

// Do any additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib.

override func didReceiveMemoryWarning(){

super.didReceiveMemoryWarning()

// Dispose of any resources that can be recreated.

@IBAction func writeButton(sender:UIButton){

@IBAction func readButton(sender:UIButton){

Saving the text

I am not going to cover validation of the entry field or any of that in this article, I’m just going to get down to the important parts of writing. However we will check to see if the file was written successfully or not using a simple console statement for this example. I mention this because it is important to handle all out comes when writing and reading files. Unless you like awkward program crashes and angry users!

Inside the func writeButton First create a constant with the value of the text field

let myTextString=NSString(string:entryField.text!)

Now we will create a constant that holds the path to the file, we will take advantage of NSTemporaryDirectory() which returns to us the current user directory, when creating a proper application I recommend storing elsewhere but this keeps thing simple to get the idea across. We will append a file name to the location.

let destinationPath=NSTemporaryDirectory()+”my_file.txt”

One last variable, we need to create one to hold any errors that might occur.

Now we will attempt to write the file using writeToFile(path:atomically:encoding:error) which is available through our myTextString constant.

A little explanation of the arguments.

path:String is where we will save the file

atomically:Bool gives the option to save to a temporary location and then copy to our final location, which is good should our application crash or something bad happen during the process.

encoding:UInt is the encoding we store the file in.

error:NSErrorPointer will hold any errors that might occur so we can access them and deal with the problem(s) gracefully.

let written=myTextString.writeToFile(destinationPath,atomically:true,encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding,error:&error)

Finally we will check and see if the file wrote successfully or not and do something based on the outcome. For this example we will simply write to the console using println

ifwritten{

println(“We wrote the file to \(destinationPath)”)

}else

println(“There was a problem: \(error)”)

That is the saving part completed and the entire writing function should look like

@IBAction func writeButton(sender:UIButton){

let myTextString=NSString(string:entryField.text!)

let destinationPath=NSTemporaryDirectory()+”my_file.txt”

varerror:NSError?

let written=myTextString.writeToFile(destinationPath,atomically:true,encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding,error:&error)

Now on to reading the file in when performing the “Read” button action.

Read the file contents in and display

To do this is not that dissimilar to writing the file, we create a path to the file and use contentsOfFile to read it and assign the results to a constant. We then unwrap and check that constant to see if the loading was successful or not. If the answer is yes then we display the string in displayField and if not we write to the console.

Inside func readButton First we create the path (there is a reason I created two paths to the file, you will see later)

let path=NSTemporaryDirectory()+”my_file.txt”

Now we read the file into a constant

let readFile:NSString?=NSString(contentsOfFile:path,encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding,error:nil)as?String

Finally just like before we check the constant by unwrapping it and doing something with the results (or lack of).

iflet fileContents=readFile{

displayField.text=fileContents asString

}else{

println(“Opps there was a problem reading the file contents”)

The contents of the read func should look like

@IBAction func readButton(sender:UIButton){

let path=NSTemporaryDirectory()+”my_file.txt”

let readFile:NSString?=NSString(contentsOfFile:path,encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding,error:nil)as?String

iflet fileContents=readFile{

displayField.text=fileContents asString

}else{

println(“Opps there was a problem reading the file contents”)

Testing time

And that is all you need, go ahead and run the application, enter some text and hit the “Write” button. The console should show whether or not the save was successful. Now try the “Read” button, the text you entered and saved should now appear in the label, if not look to the console.

Hopefully everything worked, but let’s force an error reading the file back so you can check that it handles the problem without crashing the application. Remember that we created a path for reading the file back in? Change the readButton function so the path points to a different file.

let path=NSTemporaryDirectory()+”my_other_file.txt”

Now try the “Read” button again, this time it should fail to find the file and write to the console!

Wrap up

Whilst this is a super simple example and not something you are likely to want to do in practice it does give you a basic understanding of reading and writing files. In the future we will look at a more practical example where you might want to save complex objects and read them back in.

Originally published at peterwitham.com on May 13, 2015.

As Google has cracked down on these practices and as consumers have moved to other avenues of finding content (social media sites, blogs, aggregators, etc.), SEO has been swallowed whole by a much broader set of necessary considerations.

Jackson readily admits that many legitimate SEO best practices are still not only relevant but are highly effective with the rising importance of all forms of content.

Instead of simply declaring SEO dead, Jackson argues that it should be incorporated into a new, more comprehensive framework for outlining the necessary approach content marketers should take to promoting and building content effectively — a framework he dubs OC/DC, or optimizing content for discovery and conversion.

OC/DC is a more holistic and goal-driven approach to content marketing. SEO’s narrow focus not only does not address all the avenues through which consumers now discover content, but its tight constraints also can negatively influence the content creation itself.

The rest of this article will highlight various strategies and guidelines, showing you how to optimize website content for SEO, discovery and conversion in the coming year.

Readers First, Algorithms Second

Google has made it crystal clear that it will always favor content that is valuable to people over content that is written primarily to rank for Google. Not only have they emphasized this over and over on their blog, they’ve made dozens of changes to their search algorithm that reflect this decision.

There are certain SEOs (the ones who don’t seem to heed Google’s warnings) that live in constant fear of the next Google algorithm change. The reason for their concern is that the content they produce and the SEO tactics they use, in large part, pander to Google’s algorithm changes instead of actually suiting and serving real readers.

Creating quality content is hard, and these workarounds and hacks can seem like tempting avenues to high search engine rankings. However, constantly having to pick up the pieces when Google penalizes your efforts is probably more costly in the long run.

That’s because creating quality content from the outset might require more initial effort, but will all but guarantee that you will be immune from Google’s constant updates and very well might be helped by them. That’s because your content will be the material that Google hopes to promote instead of the keyword-stuffed spam their engineers look to punish.

As we will discuss later, many SEO best practices are still very much necessary in ensuring your quality content gets discovered, but these optimization considerations are much better reserved for after you focus on creating high-quality, targeted content created to serve your audience.

What Is Quality Content?

Before you even begin strategizing on how to make quality content, you need to pin down exactly what constitutes high-quality content in the first place. This is a daunting task, but luckily Google provided a wonderful outline of what they see as indicators of quality content.

The format of the linked blog post is a series of questions, as seen above. The one question of particular relevance to this discussion is:

“Are the topics [on your site] driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?”

This question is so important because any rubric for judging quality content will be intimately linked to the readers and audience you are attempting to reach and appeal to. The first stage of content planning and strategy should be to seriously consider your audience and their genuine interests.

Know Thy Niche

Every business or product has something unique about it. Even if you are competing in a crowded space, if your business has enjoyed any kind of success it’s because you’ve offered something that no one else has. Whether it’s a focus on cost-savings, or a quirky sense of humor, or an emphasis on professionalism. Any one of a variety of factors can be identified as part of your brand’s true story.

As a content marketer, your goal is to create content that appeals to your audience in a way that mirrors the appeal of the product this content marketing is calling attention to. In fact, a smart content strategy can naturally lead to conversions if it is appropriate to your product.

The more you can narrow down the unique appeal of your product or service, the more likely your content is to appeal to the “genuine interest of your readers.” Considering these are the very words that Google used, any content marketing that makes good on this goal will likely be favored by Google’s current and future algorithms.

The Quicksprout blog has put together a wonderful step-by-step guide to developing a content strategy based on a unique set of customer interests. This guide is quite in-depth but the main ideas are fundamentally simple.

• Find a niche that is narrow enough to be unique, but broad enough to meet your business objectives.
• Locate your ideal customer within this niche and discover what blogs they read, what social sites they use, what kind of events they attend, etc.
• Create a persona reflecting this average customer and try to gain an understanding of their demographic makeup as well as their psychology, beliefs, etc.
• Use this persona as a guideline for focusing your content marketing efforts.

What makes this approach so powerful is that it makes discovering and appealing to you customer’s genuine interests a central focus. This aligns your content with the goals of Google and other search providers.

So even though this is not “SEO” in the sense that the term has come to be understood, creating content from a plan that looks like this will certainly go a long way towards optimizing your content for discovery by search engines.

Semantic Search and Concepts Over Keywords

Further reinforcing the importance of this kind of content creation strategy, and the SEO benefits it can translate into, it’s important to understand Google’s recent focus on something called semantic search.

Semantic search takes the often fragmented, non-specific search terms people naturally use and attempts to parse them and extract a more robust meaning. In simpler terms, Google has begun to focus on taking a string of basic, broad keywords and teasing out the core concept they all belong to.

This is important for content marketers because it diminishes the overall importance of isolated keywords in determining search rankings.

As Google’s algorithms move to favor concepts, this gives content creators more freedom to tailor content to their audience’s genuine interests without having to worry about this content being buried under results that rank highly for isolated keywords searchers commonly use when they are looking for content.

Instead, focus on covering a few key issues of importance to your audience with each piece of content you’re creating.

“The search results are now showing fewer individual pages for similar results,” said Murray Newlands, marketing expert and author of “How to Get PR for Your Startup: Traction.”

“The reason behind it is that Google is trying to work out the meaning of pages and favoring pages that answer several questions a person may have,” he added.

“The implication of this new approach is that, as a marketer, you need to produce longer content that answers several possible search queries, queries that include data points would feed Google’s desire to understand details about the topic,” said Newlands.

Since the incorporation of Google+ and personally tailored search results, a focus on keywords, links, and anchor text has become less important than making sure your overall site, and each piece of content on your site, addresses and has authority on certain concepts — especially multiple topics within your niche.

Building Authority and the Four Vs

Now that I’ve highlighted the importance of defining your niche for SEO, and how to develop and plan quality content tailored to that niche, there is one important piece of the puzzle remaining. The aim of all your separate pieces of content, as well as your overall content strategy, should be to ultimately build authority for your site in a certain topic.

Authority has always been a component of Google’s search. Even in the most rudimentary iterations of Google’s PageRank algorithm, outbound and inbound links were used to gauge authority.

However, as Google has moved more toward personalization and semantic search, authority on a narrower subject has become not only more important, but actually has become a lot less difficult to achieve. Especially if you define a niche well enough and choose this niche appropriately for your business.

In his book “Google Semantic Search,” David Amerland argues that the “four Vs” that govern big data processes can also be used to inform SEO and content marketing decisions (if you think about it, understanding Google’s search engine is nothing but a big data problem).

The four Vs are:

• Volume. This is the simplest of the four, but the amount of material you put out about your topic of choice will be a big indication to Google of your authority on the subject.
• Velocity. The overall frequency of your content will also give Google a hint as to your expertise. Posting once a week for a year, likely looks better than posting once a month over the course of four years.
• Variety. While you don’t want to venture too far with your content’s subject, covering a variety of areas within your niche of choice will signal to Google that you have authority on the topic.
• Veracity. Having content that is received well by readers (that is shared, talked about, etc.) is perhaps the strongest indication to Google that they should serve content from your site to readers interested in the concept you chose to focus on.

Focusing on making sure your broader content strategy satisfies the conditions of these four ideas will ensure that your individual quality pieces of content end up constituting search benefits that are greater than the sum of their parts.

“Traditional” SEO as the Final Step

Once you have ensured that you have identified your audience, understand what interests them, are producing quality content for your niche, and are doing so in a way that is establishing your site’s authority, then you can start thinking about “traditional” SEO considerations.

Traditional SEO is kind of like rainbow sprinkles. On a vanilla ice cream cone, sprinkles can improve the whole experience and can actually offer people additional value. But if you give someone just a pile of rainbow sprinkles, you won’t be giving them anything they really want and will likely just leave a bad taste in their mouth.

In much the same way, legitimate SEO best practices such as linking to other relevant posts within your blog, providing accurate keywords within headlines and anchor text, and properly tagging and categorizing your content can really offer a lot of additional value to readers.

If these best practices are followed in addition to providing quality content that people want to read, then they will not only enhance the user experience, they will make this great content easier to find. However, if best practices are not incorporated into a broader content strategy they will likely do more harm than good.

In fact, this is exactly what Sean Jackson was saying when he claimed “SEO is dead.” It doesn’t mean that these practices are dead, but if you’re not creating awesome content, they’re essentially useless.

How do you incorporate key SEO tactics when creating content for your business? Share your experience in the comments below.

Read Next: How to create consistently great content

The post was first published on digitalcurrent.com

Image credits: Digitalcurrent.com, Shutterstock

Comments

Originally published at thenextweb.com on May 12, 2015.

The Web is a dynamic place. What worked a few years ago might be obsolete now or have developed into a more sophisticated version. A few years back, apps were introduced changing the web landscape once again. Nowadays, as the world lean towards the digital as well as into social media, the rules and the landscape are shifting once again. Because of this, it is not surprising to hear someone declare that the Web is dead.

That declaration that something or someone is dead is not unfamiliar territory. When Nietzsche declared the death of God during the 18th century, it has become one of the most widely used quotes to declare the demise of something that is becoming irrelevant. So is the Web dead or is it going to die because of the emergence of these new technologies and ecosystems?

The Web is the Standard

Brent Weaver, the president and founder of Ugurus and the popular 10K Boot Camp, believes otherwise. He has been in the business quite long enough to see and discern which predictions and claims have substantial evidence in order for them to come to pass.

What he said makes much more sense than the naysayers. He said that there is not yet a technology that is as standardized and prolific as the Web. It may look like the app is dominating the tech and web design world nowadays, but it has its limitations compared to the World Wide Web.

Just take for example the app ecosystem which is divided into two — the Apple ecosystem and the Android ecosystem. This limits how you use your phone because it is dependent on what ecosystem you are in. The Web, however, does not have any limitations, you can access it in any way using any kind of phone or device you’re on.

Because of that standardization and unification, the Web has become so prevalent that it is not going away. In fact, statistics say that in the year 2000 alone, there are more than 300 million people connected to the Internet. And now in 2015, there are more than 3 billion people in it — that’s ten times the increase in just a matter of 15 years. Because of this, web designers are not going anywhere. On the contrary, there are more opportunities for web design professionals more than ever, especially in the area of digital marketing. Companies and organizations are looking for digital consultants who are well-versed in the intricacies of the Web and Internet marketing.

Overcoming Insecurity Caused by New Technologies

Aside from the doomsday sayers, web designers also feel threatened by the emerging technologies, especially app development, which they feel are drawing more money than web design. That is why more and more designers often find themselves asking the question — how the future of the web affects web designers?

Brent, however, brushes off these fears, saying that web designers should not feel threatened or insecure about these new trends because, in the first place, they’ve been around even before the Web came to be. He explains that when he thinks of an app developer, he does not just think of someone who builds mobile apps, but also of someone who develops software application. And software development has been around even before the Web existed.

He further added that developing software applications for mobile phones or as web applications are already high level stuff, specifically for software engineers. And software engineers have been one of the top paid positions for years because of the kind of work they do. Therefore, if you want to make more money as a developer, you have to become more and more of an engineer.

However, websites these days do not require a high amount of development. What they do require is for somebody to understand the Internet as an ecosystem of many different technologies and to understand what their customers ultimately need for their websites.

Do they need more customers? Do they need more donors? Do they need more volunteers? What they want is to access those 3 billion people on the Web.

When you begin to have that kind of perception when you design your clients’ websites, landing pages, funnels, opt-ins, and lead magnets and they get the end results they desire, you will be able to get more money with the work you do.

Will Facebook Pages Replace Websites

Another reason why a lot of people predict the demise of websites is the emergence of Facebook. Why not when you can almost do anything on it — from promoting your latest products and services to creating buzz.

Brent was quick to counter this saying that relying mostly on a Facebook page and putting all your content there is like you setting up an office in a place you didn’t own. Sure, you may use all the amenities, but the bottom line is, it’s still not yours.

When you have your own website, it’s yours — it’s your own office, your own hub. Most importantly, it’s in your servers. No matter what you do with it, you can do it without answering to anyone.

Facebook, however, can do anything with your asset, like it’s their own. The moment you put your content to Facebook, you’re agreeing that they can do anything with it. They can or cannot drive traffic to your page without your permission. In short, you are bound by Facebook rules and its ecosystem.

For a little exercise, try to go out and ask someone if they are willing to give their website up for a fan page. That would be just like asking someone to give up their rights in their own homes.

We have seen the catastrophic results of such move in a smaller scale in terms of the App ecosystem. We have seen business models that have been killed overnight because of the changes to the Apple rules and regulations. We’ve seen businesses killed overnight when Apple decided to launch their own flashlight app. It’s not really a big problem, but we still see it happen.

Whereas, with the Web, you can do anything with your website because it’s your property. You can do anything with it as long as you’re not doing something illegal. You can keep it running 24/7 and do anything with it.

If you get an opt-in on your website, you own the marketing rights to that email address. On the other hand, if somebody like your page on Facebook, you don’t know that. If somebody buys your app in the App store, you don’t own the customer.

The dynamic of who owns the platform, the customers, or the data, will always have a drive. So make sure you have that ownership of some aspect of your business.

But You Can Use It to Your Advantage

One thing that Facebook has been really good at is democratize traffic. It has taken billions of people into its platform and started to categorize them according to their likes, interests, activities, what time of day they log on, and more. So when you think about traffic, Facebook has the people.

Because of that, it has made the job of a web designer or a marketing specialist a lot easier. You can go to Facebook and buy traffic that is extremely demographically targeted in a matter of ten minutes. You can even go to Facebook now and target 500 males anywhere in the world.

What Facebook has done, according to Brent, was to provide a very reliable traffic source for web designers. So if you have a piece of valuable content, if you have an offer, if you have a company or client you’re building a website for, and you’re telling them that you need to drive traffic to their website in order for the things that you’re building to bring value to their business, you can always go to Facebook. Within an hour, you will be able to target humans going to that website that you’ve just built.

Conclusion

So if you’re a web professional, you should not be afraid of what Facebook, or Google, or the apps are doing. These things are not threats, but are rather complements to what you are creating. They have gotten people to spend more time online. Add to that the crazy amount of people who log into the Web every hour, every day. With these basic factors alone, you can clearly say that the Web isn’t dying nor is it going anywhere. On the contrary, it is growing and expanding giving you more and more opportunities.

Originally published at www.1stwebdesigner.com on May 8, 2015.