Chartkick- load your JS chart graphics faster

We all love nice looking colourful charts ( 3d) on our web and mobile platforms. But most of these make the page load slower.

3d Visualizations of Pie Charts, Graph Charts, Bar Charts. Column Diagrams from web databases are generally rendered over standard JS using jQuery which sometimes can cause timeouts or may not be rendered properly if the page doesn’t load fast.

Chartkick aims to solve that problem by simplifying your admin dashboard and giving each chart its own endpoint.

With Chartkick you can create beautiful Javascript charts using one line of Ruby.

Example of a Column Chart

<%= column_chart Task.group_by_day_of_week(:created_at).count %>

 

Example of  a Pie Chart

<%= pie_chart Goal.group("name").count %>
 

So how do you install it ?

Start by downloading Chartkick here

Add this line to your application’s Gemfile:

gem "chartkick"

And add the javascript files to your views. chartkick.js runs as a Rails engine - no need to install it.

Note: These files must be included before the helper methods.

For Google Charts, use:

<%= javascript_include_tag "//www.google.com/jsapi", "chartkick" %>

If you prefer Highcharts, use:

<%= javascript_include_tag "path/to/highcharts.js", "chartkick" %>

Head over to GitHub to read the rest of the documentation or if you are wiling to fork it.

Source: ankane.github.io

Jony Ive on Design

Ben Thomson recollects a personal experience from a talk show and gives an amazing write up on Jony Ive’s philosophy of Design down at Stratechery 

One of the things that’s interesting about design [is that] there’s a danger, particularly in this industry, to focus on product attributes that are easy to talk about. You go back 10 years, and people wanted to talk about product attributes that you could measure with a number. So they would talk about hard drive size, because it was incontrovertible that 10 was a bigger number than 5, and maybe in the case of hard drives that’s a good thing. Or you could talk about price because there’s a number there.

But there are a lot of product attributes that don’t have those sorts of measures. Product attributes that are more emotive and less tangible. But they’re really important. There’s a lot of stuff that’s really important that you can’t distill down to a number. And I think one of the things with design is that when you look at an object you make many many decisions about it, not consciously, and I think one of the jobs of a designer is that you’re very sensitive to trying to understand what goes on between seeing something and filling out your perception of it. You know we all can look at the same object, but we will all perceive it in a very unique way. It means something different to each of us. Part of the job of a designer is to try to understand what happens between physically seeing something and interpreting it.

I think that sort of striving for simplicity is not a style. It’s an approach and a philosophy. I think it’s about authenticity and being honest. Not just taking something crappy and styling the outside in an arbitrary disconnected way.

Source: stratechery.com

They say that one shouldn’t scroll too much

But I think it’s a “Meh” argument.

I hate tabs and the entire multil-tab, sub-tab architecture. It’s ugly.

For ages I have heard experts counsel on how all the links should be in the viewing area, so that we can maximise hits, but it’s kinda lame.

If a person is not interested in your content, he wont click even if he has a 100 links to click on.

I love the one page , responsive design. It kind of guides me on a journey. I swipe and tap on whatever and that section slides up and am within this journey where am traveling through a story. 

In each part of the journey there are only one or two highlights( buttons) where i can tap/ click and it keeps me in a direction. There is less of redundancy. (I don’t still understand why websites cram in all sorts of useless information in the hope of cross selling and up selling.) 

Most importantly, the one page responsive design never hinders my content discovery flow. It’s a unified approach in one single flow which tells me exactly the story that I want to hear.

One great example that comes to mind is the Tesla webpage. They do have tabs, but to tell the story of their car models, they use the one page design very very neatly. It tells the story of a car in a single continuous flow.

Take a look.

The other example is Apple.

Matchstick Men

Patrick Acton uses matchsticks to make art. Using glue with specialist non-sulphur tip matches he crimps and bends individual sticks into curved shapes using needle-nosed pliers, thereby creating fascinating replicas of architectural monuments across the world.

An example of just how meticulous he is, can be summed up from this piece of statistical data. To create the replica of the Notre Dame Cathedral, he spent eight years in research and then used 298,000 MATCHSTICKS, 55 litres of wood glue and 2,000 toothpicks to recreate the historical edifice.

Incredible.


This 600,000 matchstick model of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is on permanent display at the museum The House of Katmandu in Majorca, Spain

Source: Daily Mail

Of Palettes and Knives- The story of how a painter used eBay to ship

Leonid Afremov is a Linchpin. Not because he does amazing impressionistic work using palettes and knives, but because he is one of the very few self-representing artists who promotes and sells his work exclusively over the internet with very little exhibitions and involvement of dealers and galleries.

His is a wonderful story. A story of never giving up. Of being a Jewish Russian who had to move away from his hometown in Vitebsk near Chernobyl in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster; of having to move to Israel as a immigrant and facing enormous persecution to be recognized for his work; of having to sell paintings door to door because galleries would not accept his work.

Talk about being a Russian. Jewish. Immigrant.

But it all changed when in 2004 Afremov’s son Boris introduced him to eBay. 

The painter found his gallery and the exhibition never stopped.





Source: afremov.com

Experience anywhere

Businesses today understand digital. They understand the hits and clicks and views and the re-tweets and the likes and the dislikes and the emails that lead people to fill forms that ultimately somewhere get translated as leads.

Businesses understand ROI and business numbers and sales value. They understand search and SEO and SEM and CRM. They willingly buy thousands of words without thinking about the content. Without wondering ever to find out ” how do people really search these days? How do they discover content?”

Businesses are also silently skeptical. They view digital through a lens of mirth dipped in sarcasm. They do digital tactics but believe it’s hogwash because they were born and learnt their trade in an era where a TV ad and an event with some branded collateral would do the trick. But they indulge in it , because of peer pressure. Because everyone else is doing it.

But they do it without the most critical ingredient of it all.

Belief.

Yes businesses get it. 

Very few businesses though get the fact that it’s more about adapting to making their brand be experienced in the same way across any display, anywhere. Very few get it that to connect you need to be where the people are in an unobtrusive manner and leave the rest. Let your experience speak for you. Not your bluster. Let your service and response speak for you than your one way corporate tweet feed. Very few get it that it’s more about intuitive technology and design than anything else.

Very few get it that being social on digital mediums is a replica of being social in real life. Only the medium and channel have changed. Very few actually converse but spend precious time doing more of spam. Very few spend time and effort in creating remarkable content that compels people to see and share and recommend. They spend a lot more time in creating long winded yarns which reek of corporate language  and jargon and less of authenticity. To give a parallel example compare the efficacy of creating a great presentation around a wonderful compelling story  in a pitch that compels a client to sit down and listen. Would jargon’s and artsy english really get you behind that door of authenticity? 

People use digital mediums and displays from a  utility point of view. But very few digital communication pieces are tailored to fit that utility requirement. More often than not it’s social and mobile to tick a box in the list of boxes to tick in a go to market plan. 

Very few understand that social media is one tiny part of what we today experience as digital. Social is just a layer. Like a wrapping paper. 

Very few understand that what was born of the web can never be mobile completely. 

Very few understand that pulling an API is not the answer, because when the API licensing rules change it will end up making you look really silly.

Very few understand that making an app is easy. Distributing it is much harder. Understanding human psychology and usage pattern to fit that app is infinitessimaly more difficult and until there are specific answers to these it is a waste of time, money and effort irrespective of the number of downloads you drive.

Very few businesses understand that creating an end to end digital system is what matters. Designing a system where experience and utility come together layered with intuitive technology, ease of use and creative design appeal. 

It has to answer a need. And it needs to study human behaviour more than statistics sheets and analyst papers.

The world has changed in the way we consume information and content. It has changed in how we spend our leisure time. Digital technologies have disrupted the pattern of our consumption. 

For a business to adapt to this change, you have to try and give total access to every facet of your brand.

Anytime.

Anywhere.

Across any device. 

And do it in a way so that they take back the same unified experience  wherever they came in contact with. 

The experience lies in design

Facebook did not become famous because it was a great idea. It wasn’t. It was an old idea. The difference was that it was just led by a guy who executed on an old idea better than anyone else. 

The difference was simple factors like the news feed, which made people find the network more relevant for their use and conversation. 

The difference was user interface and DESIGN.

Design which helped maximize signal over noise (at least during those early days).

Conceptually we were still connecting with our friends, but the design allowed us to know what our friends were doing and how they were reacting to what we were doing - in real time, thereby making conversations spontaneous. The design allowed us to replicate our offline social network into an online one.

And Facebook keeps pushing the design envelope every now and then even after almost a billion users. 

Similarly when Google came, search was not a new idea. It was an old idea, but Google’s algorithms coupled with their groundbreaking sparse home page design changed the world of search forever.

2007- and the iPhone changed the world of smartphones forever. Building a mobile phone was definitely not a new idea. 

In each case it was design and application of that design to human psychology and behaviour that changed the game.

The best apps today work because they are designed to appeal to certain activities or call to actions that human beings NATURALLY gravitate to. The brand just rides on that by connecting it’s product or key message.

Yet, majority of people pay so little attention to it. Millions of dollars are spent on creating apps, websites, blogs and other digital platforms which don’t deliver because the design and human behaviour is never thought through.

Every other day I get to meet digital media experts, novices and checklist markers who pitch digital platforms or application ideas, without pitching the design, look and feel and user experience of how it would actually work. Everyone pitches the idea- very few circle back to connect it to one simple question - Would he himself use it without being forced to or paid? Is it organic enough and self sustaining enough and engaging enough for someone to just play ? 

The technology of creating a social application is known to a web 2.0 coder. The design however,needs a complex combination of understanding of human behaviour, graphical interface, and artwork. 

The IDEA is the aspiration to which technology is the enabler.

The EXPERIENCE humanizes it,  to foster adoption.

The DESIGN connects the dots to build the experience .