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

Raspberry Pi ships camera module

Raspberry PI’s camera module is now shipping.

The five megapixel fixed-focus shooter — which only measures 25 x 20 x 9mm — can snap 2,592 x 1,944-pixel images and capture video at 1,080p (30fps), 720p (60fps) and VGA (60 or 90fps).

And yes just for $25 from RS Components or from Premier Farnell/Element14

Example command prompts to activate the camera:

Capture an image in jpeg format:

raspistill -o image.jpg

Capture a 5s video in h264 format:

raspivid -o video.h264

Capture a 10s video:

raspivid -o video.h264 -t 10000

Capture a 10s video in demo mode:

raspivid -o video.h264 -t 10000 -d

Here’s a video on setting it up the camera hardware

For more exhaustive documentation head over to the Pi Forums here.

Source: raspberrypi.org

BBM comes to iOS and Android as a standalone messaging app

True that.

Question is - is it too late in the day ? For Blackberry?

Messaging services have been slowly funneling traffic away from social media platforms for a while now and the mobile phone is truly starting to reflect what it always was - the most effective social network of them all.

Blackberry is late. 

But it does give credence to another rising trend out there. 

Doesn’t matter whose mobile OS you are on. Even if it is a competitors, if you have a good product/ service, make sure its available on all mobile OS platforms, so that you get all those users on all those platforms to at least have the option of using your product/ service.

Exclusivity (in an open age) on products of mass consumption especially on mobile platforms is a tricky bet and needs a huge ecosystem to succeed.

So code. Hack away. Understand your competitors mobileOS, UI and UX and deliver your product on that OS with a superlative user experience.

And you will benefit.

Ask Google.

Their Search app ( with Google Now), Map’s app and YouTube App on iOS are used more by Apple users than Apples own products in the same category. They even created an IOS app for Google Plus so that people could use Google’s Social Network on the iPhone.

All this just increases usage of your product/ service. And when people use your product more, you end up making more money.

From more avenues.

Because, users only care about services and products they use. Not about Operating Systems.

ESPNs relation with Twitter- Twitter’s march into TV

Twitter’s march into the television kingdom continues unabated. WSJ’s new article announces the details of an expanding partnership between ESPN and Twitter.

You can read the details here.

But from a digital trend perspective here are the interesting parts one needs to think about.

The symbiotic connection:

The closer ties spotlight the symbiotic business needs of Twitter and the television industry. For the TV networks, Twitter tie-ins provide new ways to make money beyond 30-second TV commercials likely to be skipped or ignored

 

The rise of the hashtag:

Nielsen says 40% of people who use a smartphone in the U.S. visit a social network while watching television. Twitter wants to ensure it is making money from all the posts about TV broadcasts, and from the ways TV networks use Twitter to promote their shows.

 

The pie in the offing:

Twitter and the TV networks are going after the same prize: a slice of the roughly $350 billion annual spending on world-wide TV advertising, according to Nielsen. Some research shows social media is boosting viewership of live television, and the TV networks and Twitter are eager to capitalize.

Now if one could analyse the data from all those engagements and drive more meaningful insights, that can forecast ad rates, programming content, time slotting for programs et all -

That’s something that would have a huge market demand.

Can big data analysis structure all this unstructured data into cohesive bundles of market insight based on mathematic frameworks of demand forecasting? 

That would be something.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

About Dropplets

Hat tip to Arvindh Sundar for this.

Recently he moved his entire blog from Wordpress on to Dropplets, a simple markdown blogging platform. It’s database less and so can install on any server in just about 30 seconds.

Now I have been vocal about my quest for a simpler blogging platform for a while, because most blogging platforms have metamorphosed into complicated CMS full of feature creep where I end up spending more time on managing plug ins and features than writing.

I moved away from Blogger and Wordpress almost a couple of years ago, because I needed a simpler platform that let me blog, curate, post images, video’s in the simplest, least time consuming way both from a desktop and a mobile.

So I ended with Tumblr.

However, the cleanliness and simplicity of Dropplets impressed me.

Take a look here. Pretty neat.

Very close in look and feel to Svbtle, which i love because of its invitation only community feature and extreme high quality of writers.

You can download the latest version of Dropplets on GitHub and then extract the downloaded zip file.

With Dropplets, you have to write your posts offline (using the text or Markdown editor of your choice) in Markdown format. Here’s a handy syntax guide if you need a little help with your Markdown skills. All posts for Dropplets MUST be composed using the following format:

# Your Post Title
- Post Author Name (e.g. "Dropplets")
- Post Author Twitter Handle (e.g. "dropplets")
- Publish Date in YYYY/MM/DD Format (e.g. "2013/04/28")
- Post Category (e.g. "Random Thoughts")
- Post Status (e.g. "published" or "draft")

Your post text starts here.

Check out all the other documentation here on GitHub.

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

LivIcons

For web designers out there, this would be an interesting place to spend some time.

LivIcons is a project dedicated to animated icons with the power of scalable vector graphics. 

You can download the entire set from Code Canyon here.

Some features worth mentioning are

  • LivIcons are based on SVG (scalable vector graphic) in all modern browsers and on VML (Vector Markup Language) in IE6 - IE8. So these icons can be any size with good look at any devices. And, of course, any color can be applied too.
  • The main feature is LivIcons are animated, but they can be static like any other icons too.
  • LivIcons support two types of events: ‘click’ and ‘hover’.
  • Animation can be repeated infinitely if appropriate. 
  • Matches to different icons with traditional colors, such as browsers,social networks etc
  • With power of jQuery and Raphael LivIcons (live icons) bring a fresh look of your site.
  • LivIcons were created with keep in mind aboutperfect look at 16 px (Not in IE6 - IE8).
  • Just one <div>, <span>, <li> or <i> with class .livicon and some data- attributes
  • LivIcons currently support Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, Chrome 5.0+, Opera 12.1+, Internet Explorer 6.0+, iOS Safari3.2+, Android Browser 3.0+, Blackberry Browser 7.0+
  • For webkit browsers you can apply css filter ‘drop-shadow’
  • LivIcons are vectors, which mean they are presented perfect on high-resolution displays.( eg Retina)

Source: livicons.com

The postal data conversion operators - curtain call

Wonderful feature story by Ron Nixon in the NY Times on the US Postal Service’s data conversion operators, a techie title for someone who deciphers unreadable addresses. 

You should read it here.

It envelopes you with a sense of nostalgia and a sense of loss, as in September, the post office plans to close one of its two remaining centers where workers try to read the scribble on envelopes and address labels that machines cannot. Compare it with the fact that at one time, there were 55 plants around the country where addresses rejected by machines were guessed at by workers aided with special software to get the mail where it was intended.

It’s an amazing story of human will to go to any length to solve a problem and slowly losing relevance to automation taking over human processing capabilities.

Read through -  

“Over the years, the Postal Service has become the world leader in optical character recognition — software capable of reading computer-generated lettering and handwriting — sinking millions of dollars into equipment that can read nearly 98 percent of all hand-addressed mail and 99.5 percent of machine-addressed pieces.

That was not always the case. In the beginning, people sorted mail. As the volume and variety increased, the post office turned to automation. But the machines could read only about 35 percent of the mail at first and had trouble with handwritten addresses. So the Postal Service set up the centers, using people to supplement the scanners. At the height of the program, in 1997, the centers processed 19 billion images annually, about 10 percent of all mail at the time, the post office said.

In the last year, this center, and the one in Wichita, Kan., that will close in September, deciphered just 2.4 billion images, or a mere 1.5 percent of the mail, the post office said.”

Kudos. You Guys. 

Source: The New York Times