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React Global State Management: A Brief History and a Quick Guide

Level of difficulty Easy
Reading time 9 min
Views 847

If you’re a React developer, you know how important state management is. State is the data that powers your UI, making it interactive and dynamic. But managing state in React can be tricky, especially when you have to share it across multiple components or deal with complex and asynchronous logic.

That’s why over the years, React developers have come up with various solutions for state management, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the most popular ones and how they evolved. We’ll also review some of the current state-management libraries and how to choose the best one for your app.

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Total votes 3: ↑3 and ↓0 +3
Comments 0

The mystery of Telegram

Level of difficulty Easy
Reading time 12 min
Views 1.8K

This article was originally posted at Product Identity.

What comes to your mind when you hear the word Telegram?

I wouldn’t be surprised if drugs, sex, or crypto are your first associations. Throughout the years, Telegram earned a shady reputation, perhaps not strategically, but for a “good” reason.

I feel like Telegram is a mystery. On the outside, it might be perceived as a platform designed for drug traffickers, crypto scammers, and sexual abusers.

I shared this feeling when I joined the early team of Bancor in 2016, as I also joined its internal group chat, needless to say, on Telegram.

However, the app was quickly removed from my list of stigmas. Instead, I started to appreciate Telegram for its well-crafted product and care for design. From its meticulous attention to small details to have a unique brand — it stands as a dogma of an opinionated product (and a company) in many aspects. In addition, it helped me recognize the benefits of separating my private and professional lives early on.

After using Telegram extensively over the past 7+ years, I feel the urge to write about it, but this time not in the spirit of its typical news headlines.

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Total votes 2: ↑2 and ↓0 +2
Comments 1

Typography in UI/UX Design

Level of difficulty Easy
Reading time 5 min
Views 1.2K

This article is about how to properly work with typography when developing websites and interfaces. In my work with Junior and Middle designers I often come across the fact that guys make very simple mistakes when working with text. And today I will try to show by examples how not to make these mistakes.

Main topics:
Font as a tool
Choosing a font
Contrast
Accentuation and typesetting
Line length
Vertical rhythm
Caps and Axes
My top Cyrillic fonts

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Total votes 1: ↑1 and ↓0 +1
Comments 1

Modular grids in UX designer's work

Level of difficulty Easy
Reading time 8 min
Views 1K

Most novice web designers at the beginning of their journey still in the courses hear such a concept as modular grid, and wonder what it is and how to properly customize and use this tool.

From personal experience, I know that in many courses with titles "web designer from zero to pro" or " IU / UX designer in a month" this topic is either skipped, or give instructions, where they say everywhere to use a grid of 12 columns with margins of 80 to 100 pixels. And, as a result, it turns out that after taking these gore courses, a person sees beautiful works, thinks to repeat them, but the grid does not work, and the student, simply, does the work without a grid and completely forgets about it.

That's why I want to help beginners to understand this really voluminous issue.

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Rating 0
Comments 1

UX Copy: Writing for Non-Readers

Reading time 6 min
Views 1.8K

Getting a task from a client, UX designers tend to pay attention to the design goals, not the contents of the website/app itself. There’s something completely wrong with it because the visual part might be superb, but when it frames a vague or wordy message, the client's goals won’t be reached.

To avoid this, a UX designer should dive deeper into the content, analyze it, and restructure it in an interface-friendly way. It doesn’t mean doing the copywriter’s job, it means collaborating. The reality is that sometimes the writing team is used to praising the product (because clients like that), or there is no copywriter involved in the project at all.

Provide proof instead of opinion

An impression is more powerful when the customer can conclude the product’s benefits on their own. Instead of a colorful line of adjectives like “ultimate” or “leading” you should aim at what exactly makes the product that cool. The trick is to be precise, preferably with an example.

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Total votes 5: ↑4 and ↓1 +3
Comments 6

Show me your settings and I will tell you who you are

Reading time 5 min
Views 1.5K
Today we will discuss the silver bullet of software development: the program settings.

Everybody understands what settings are, more or less. Every computer user is going to stumble upon them, eventually. But the user does not always end up a winner in this encounter. There are 3 major problems to tackle: it's hard to find the right setting, the required setting does not exist, and it's unclear what this or that setting's responsible for.

To understand this, let's first think about the origin of settings. In theory, settings provide a way for the developer to adapt a program to a certain use case. The users are different though, one wants it his way, another demands her own, and even though the differences are miniscule, the decision is left up to the user. As a result, you must know about user tasks and their goals to create the right settings window.

That's the theory so far. What about the practice?
Continuing is optional
Total votes 5: ↑5 and ↓0 +5
Comments 0

How To Open Control Panel On Windows

Reading time 3 min
Views 5.6K
Quite often, I write the following phrase in my articles: ‘Open Control Panel and click Programs’ and then it appears that many users do not know how to open Control Panel in Windows. Moreover, the Programs option is not always available. Let’s close a gap and commit to memory the way you can do it.

In this article, I want to show you 5 ways of opening Control Panel on Windows 10 and 8.1. Some of them even work on Windows 7.

Please note that most articles provide you with a Control Panel guide with a ‘View By’ option set to icons. However, Windows offers you a Category view by default. For this reason, I recommend that you take into account and change the filter option to Category. It is located in the upper right corner of Control Panel window.


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Total votes 12: ↑4 and ↓8 -4
Comments 2

Content Localization Strategies

Reading time 7 min
Views 1.5K


Setting up the content localization and, thus, configuring the interface language of the product in such a way that the right language is rendered to the right user is extremely important for each digital platform. That’s why we have decided to translate and share with you this expert article by Nicolai Goshin from Hellicht Medien.


And we strongly hope that some strategic points would be valuable for your localization projects!


Background and preliminary considerations


Digital projects targeting audiences in different countries or different language areas are doomed to take advantage of localization strategies. So we must answer the following question: which users should be given which content in which languages? The question at the first sight seems simple. But later in this article we will point out why this topic is, in fact, complex. And, of course, we will also address how to deal with this complexity.


Let's assume a scenario in which content (for example, an online magazine) is available in three languages: German, English, and Arabic. The goal is ideally to provide content to each user in their native language. If this is not possible, the content should be provided to the user in the language that they best understand apart from their mother tongue.

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Total votes 8: ↑8 and ↓0 +8
Comments 0

Modern Presentation Format?

Reading time 7 min
Views 3.2K

Nowadays, when VR helmets have become part of our reality and Tesla cars fly in space, you can use all the power of browser engines to create truly interactive, cross-platform and stylish presentations, rather than make a set of PPTX pages or, even worse, a PDF document in "illustrative material for explanatory and calculation report" style.



Since 2015, I have been trying to find the optimal presentation format for myself (apart from graduation projects). And now I think I have almost succeeded. It all started with PowerPoint, and ended with web frameworks based on JavaScript.


There are several JavaScript engines which can be used to create cool presentations: Marp, Reveal, landslide, hacker-slides, slidify and others. In some engines, you can use Markdown, some are embedded in an IDE, and some have their own editors. I have tried the first two engines.


As a demonstration, slide examples and video are available.

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Total votes 9: ↑8 and ↓1 +7
Comments 0

Tutorial: Update interfaces with default interface members in C# 8.0

Reading time 5 min
Views 1.3K

Beginning with C# 8.0 on .NET Core 3.0, you can define an implementation when you declare a member of an interface. The most common scenario is to safely add members to an interface already released and used by innumerable clients.


In this tutorial, you'll learn how to:


  • Extend interfaces safely by adding methods with implementations.
  • Create parameterized implementations to provide greater flexibility.
  • Enable implementers to provide a more specific implementation in the form of an override.

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Total votes 10: ↑9 and ↓1 +8
Comments 0

Generating multi-brand multi-platform icons with Sketch and a Node.js script — Part #1

Reading time 10 min
Views 2.2K


TL;DR


Using a custom build script in Node JS, it is possible to manipulate a series of Sketch files, and then, using an internal Sketch tool, automatically export their assets, to generate multiple icon libraries, for multiple platforms and different brands, that support dynamic colourisation of the assets via design tokens, and also AB testing of the assets via naming convention. Easy peasy :)


Well, actually it’s not that easy, but it can certainly be done. This post is a detailed explanation of how we did it, and what we discovered along the way.

The problem we were trying to solve


At Badoo we build a dating app. Actually, multiple dating apps. For multiple platforms (iOS, Android, Mobile Web, Desktop Web), across multiple teams.

We use hundreds of icons in our apps. Some of them are the same across different apps, some are very specific to the brands the apps reflect. The icons are continuously evolving, in sync with the evolution of the design. Sometimes completely new icons are added, while others get updated, and still others get dropped (although, they often remain in the codebase).
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Total votes 30: ↑29 and ↓1 +28
Comments 0

Weak UI, weak programmer

Reading time 2 min
Views 3K

UI facepalm


Why do so many programmers hate UI work? Because it is tedious. Especially, for the Web, but other types of UI are only slightly easier. Layouts, margins, paddings — neverending stream of little tweaks to make it look OK on all sane environments, and somehow this freaking button sometimes overlaps that input field. Rrrr! And yes, it should not hang on button clicks, which means a lot of asynchronous programming, which is a nightmare.


And don’t even speak about aesthetics and usability! Choose right colours, element sizes and locations, find/draw images and put them where they fit, think about user workflows — isn’t it a designers’ or Ux specialists’ job?! Leave me alone, I’m a programmer. I work with backend layers, where everything is straightforward and linear, there are no buttloads of different environments to adjust to, and design is guided by mere logic without pesky fussing with ‘user friendliness’ and ’beauty’!

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Total votes 14: ↑10 and ↓4 +6
Comments 5

Manifest of Smart Home Developer: 15 principles

Reading time 12 min
Views 4K
Today I’d like to speak about Smart homes and IoT devices. But it is no ordinary article. You won’t find description of hardware, links to manufacturers, batches of code or repositories. Today we’ll discuss something of a higher level — principles that are used to organize “smart” systems.

image



Smart home is a system that can do some everyday routines instead of a person. It leads us to the first and the main principle:
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Total votes 29: ↑27 and ↓2 +25
Comments 1

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