Everything is moving towards speed and mobility. Many people, including designers are at least augmenting their desktop and laptop computers with mobile devices such as tablets. With this being said, more companies are focusing on apps you can use to increase your productivity.
Imagine sitting on the subway on the way back to your office and creating a mockup of a website along the way.
Imagine having an idea for a print poster, and getting the layout put together while you're in transit. When you get back, you can bring your idea into your more powerful devices for better design & development. In comes Adobe Comp CC, an app focused on creating quick prototyping on your iPad. Now, you can just right into your ideas and start fleshing them out.
The great thing about Adobe Comp CC is that it's free. Search for it on the App store, and download it without paying a penny. Then, install it and fire it up to get started immediately. When you start the app, you have three options to choose from. You can select Mobile, Print, or Web, and they have pre-made layouts set up for you.
You can draw your layouts with simple gestures. Everything is simplified, to make it quick and easy to draw even complex shapes and useful design objects. For example, you can draw a square with a circle in one of the corners to create a rounded rectangle. A circle or a rectangle with an x over it creates an image box or a circular image box. You can see the list of gestures, shown in the screenshot above.
The gear icon in the top right corner of the app gives you the option to choose from different document sizes. You don't have to simply remember common document sizes. Adobe has put together a lot of common options for you. You can start with a variety of iPhones, iPads, letters, and web sizes. It even lists the pt and pixel sizes below each option.
Moving around the canvas is as simple as swiping, pinching to zoom, and spreading your fingers apart to zoom out, just like any other app. It's even more important in an app like this, because of the simple refines you'll need to make. You also may have small elements in your design that you need to edit. You can tap an element to edit it, and hitting the + symbol below a premade layout allows you to make a copy. I'd make a copy before making any edits.
Once you're into the layout, you have several different options. You can select elements simply by tapping. Also, you open up more options, such as shapes you can make, as well as text, and photos. These menus open up even more options to work with.
You can choose from a collection of basic shapes such as circles, rectangles, and horizontal & vertical lines. You can also bring in any custom shapes libraries you have stored in the Creative Cloud.
Just like a typical design program, you can have presets for type. You can control whether certain text is in headline format, sub headline and paragraph text.
Continue reading %Rapid Prototyping Compositions with Adobe Comp CC (iPad app)%
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What the heck is a "WebSocket", exactly? Some of us have heard about the changes that are coming to Rails with regard to WebSockets (e.g. Action Cable in Rails 5) but it's a bit difficult to pinpoint exactly what WebSockets are meant to do. What problem do they solve and how do they fit into the realm of HTTP, the web, and Ruby? That's what we'll cover in this article.
Let's dial the time machine to the beginning of the web. Way back in the day, as we all know, websites consisted of static pages with a bunch of links between them. These pages are called "static" because nothing about them really changes on a per-user sort of basis. The server just serves up the same thing to every single user based on the path that the user requests. We quickly realized that this sort of thing was all well and good if all we wanted the web to be was the equivalent of an easily available book, but we could actually do a lot more. So, with input elements and CGI (Common Gateway Interface - a way for external scripts to talk to the web server), dynamic elements creeped into web pages.
Now, we could actually process input data and do something with it. As websites got busier, we realized that CGI was pretty terrible at scaling. Along came a slew of options such as FastCGI to remedy this problem. We came up with all sorts of frameworks to make writing back-ends a lot easier: Rails, Django, etc. All this progress happened, but at the end of the day, we were still serving up some HTML (through a variety of methods), the user was reading this mostly static HTML and then requesting some different HTML.
Then, developers realized the power of Javascript and communication with the server through AJAX. No longer were pages just blobs of HTML. Instead, Javascript was used to alter the content of these pages based on asynchronous communication with the server. Often, state changes that occurred on the server had to be reflected on the client. Taking a very simple example, maybe we want a notification to show up on the admin panel when the number of users on the server exceeds a certain limit. However, the methods used to do this sort of thing weren't the best. One common solution was HTTP long polling. With it, the client (i.e. Javascript code running in the browser) sends the HTTP server a request which the server keeps open (i.e. the server doesn't send any data but doesn't close the connection) until some kind of update is available.
You might be wondering: Why do we do this waiting stuff if the client could somehow just ask the server to tell the client when an update comes along? Well, unfortunately, HTTP doesn't really let us do that. HTTP wasn't designed to be a server-driven protocol. The client sends the requests, the HTTP server answers them. Period. Long polling isn't really a great solution since it causes all sorts of headaches when it comes to scaling, users switching between Wi-Fi and cellular, etc. How do we solve this problem of letting the server talk to the client?
Continue reading %WebSockets in the Ruby Ecosystem%
Ever thought of setting up a website where you could exclusively sell your digital and downloadable products? This series covers a plugin that lets you do just that: Easy Digital Downloads (abbreviated as EDD).
This plugin is built on top of WordPress, which allows you to set up a "digital store" to sell items like eBooks, themes, tutorials and so on. It is lightweight and easy to install, and you can instantly start selling your products by listing them in order. Today I am going to make sure you know what Easy Digital Downloads is all about.
Nowadays Easy Digital Downloads, commonly known as EDD, is considered to be the most effective WordPress plugin to set up an easy-to-use website for selling digital products. EDD can go a long way to helping you manage your digital products.
This plugin was developed by Pippin Williamson and a long list of other contributors. Like other WordPress plugins, EDD is free and open-source. It was introduced in April 2012 and is considered to be a revolutionary addition in WordPress's eCommerce space.
At the time of writing this article, Easy Digital Downloads has a user base of 522,509 downloads, which clearly justifies the popularity of this plugin. EDD keeps track of the license keys and the copies of the customer's products which are purchased by them. The versatility of this plugin can be explained from the fact that you can also provide activation, license key generation and a checking system to your customers.
Not only this but the team at Easy Digital Downloads provides you with dedicated support and subscription facilities, which keeps you well informed about all the updates. EDD maintains a large set of different languages for your use, like English, German, French, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish, Russian, etc.
The main reason why EDD was developed was the need for a framework which could help focus and sell only digital products. There are many people like teachers, vloggers, singers, developers, etc. who make downloadable products but do not have the expertise to code their own website to sell them.
EDD has a user-friendly interface and super-simple operations, which helps you do just what you want, i.e. sell digital stuff. EDD is easy to install and manage. Even if you are not a code nerd you can make any kind of changes to configure it the way you want, again without any hassle. You can even export data out of EDD. There is no limit on the size of data you export which is stored in Excel or Google Docs.
Let's talk a little about the important features of Easy Digital Downloads.
A versatile cart system is pretty much the best thing about EDD. It helps your customer to purchase multiple digital products just in a few clicks. The shopping cart system provides you with a complete track of the orders placed so far. It comes powered with AJAX so you don't even need to load a new page to add something to the cart. More on this later.
EDD offers several payment gateways. Manual payments and PayPal are offered as the default gateways at the time of plugin installation. However, you can get several add-ons as well, like PayPal Pro, Stripe, PayPal Express, etc. There are whole bunch of them.
The functionality of EDD can be defined as "simple yet powerful" as it allows you to take several actions at one time. You can categorize your downloads and introduce various filters. There are no complications in the registration process, and license restrictions are very simple to understand.
With EDD installed, your store's performance is less of a worry than it used to be. You can enjoy all the information being stacked at one point. Details like payment history, user purchase history, sales, etc. are all displayed with the help of beautiful graphs, statistics and charts. You can even generate customizable purchase receipts and export your data locally in the CSV or PDF format.
The discount feature in this plugin is amazing. It helps you to convert your leads into sales at a good pace. This way you can encourage your customers to look forward to new products.
EDD is highly secure and your customers' personal information is under strict check. Pippin does a great job of keeping EDD up to date, which ensures a strong reputation and credibility.
EDD is applicable to many things. You can sell items like:
To wrap up this entire discussion, I think Easy Digital Downloads has many interesting and intuitive features which can help you to set up your digital downloads store in no time. This plugin is equally beneficial for customers, who can freely download any digital or virtual product. In the upcoming articles of this series I will start explaining the configuration of its settings in detail.
