Designing Article Jobs

Individuals usually do their finest and hardest thinking, and feel the best feeling of expertise and development, inside their publishing. Assignments and classes ought to be designed with this particular at heart. Three rules are vital: 1. Title what you visualize and want pupils doing it Nevertheless free individuals are to selection and discover in a document, the overall form of welcoming has popular pieces, businesses, and requirements of accomplishment, and you ought to produce these specific. Having satisfied oneself, while you should, that what is workable, with dignity, by authors just learning the content, make an effort to assume inside your prompt of the project these questions: What is this’ objective? How am I practicing an integral educational talent or kind of work, or applying it in a fresh area, or going beyond what we’ve performed? As to the market should I visualize myself creating? What is the main undertaking or tasks, the bottom line is? What does that key term (e.g. Examine, need for, review, discover, exciting, help) genuinely suggest within this framework or this subject? What’ll be what attributes can many recognize a report that is good and many complicated in this? Where should I set my power? (Databases of possible queries for individuals to remedy in a document in many cases are not adequately prioritized to become beneficial.) In what I’m to do what beliefs might I’ve? (How is that this like or unlike other papers I might have created?) Are there also- easy approaches I might get or likely pitfalls? Standard or an ambitious purpose that I would consider I’m anticipated to fulfill but am not? What sort may data consume my paper (e.g. Stop rates? paraphrase? Maps or graphs?) How should it be cited by me? Must I use /cite material from portion or pitch? Are there some extensive options stress, for framework, or tactic that I’ll be choosing among? How can I begin on this? What will be a useful (or unhelpful) way to get records, accumulate data, locate concept or a concern? Should I do study? 2. Take some time in category to prepare students to achieve success in the paper Withstand the intuition to think about class gatherings and of writing as function performed outside course. Your individuals won’t have perfected the-art of paper writing (if this kind of expertise is achievable) and won’t learn the specific disciplinary expectations or techniques strongly related the content at-hand. Take some time in category to show them: Discuss the task in class so individuals is able to see that you just consider it seriously, to allow them to ask questions about it whenever you offer it, so they can have it during future type discussions at heart; Present the assignment’s analytic terminology into type conversations, and get related techniques manufactured in superior or discussion document subjects that happen to be noted by chances; Have students exercise key tasks in writing that is customessaywriter.co.uk/ relaxed, or in class discussions they do in before or after discussions; Show types of writing that demonstrates pieces and standards of the project which inspires (course readings can occasionally serve as pictures of a publishing theory; consequently may short excerpts of writing’e.g. A testing of introductions may bad writing’e.g. a list of tricky thesis statements); the subjects of individuality and plagiarism (exactly what the cravings may be, how to prevent pitfalls) should at some time be addressed specifically. 3. Create in method Suggestions develop time over, in a process of revising and posing and receiving feedback and revising some more. Assignments should enable this process inside the following techniques: Jobs that are smaller should get ready for bigger people later; Pupils should do some thinking and writing before they compose a draft and get a response to it (even if just a response to a or thesis statement routed by e-mail, or identified in category); for bigger papers, pupils should compose and get reply (utilising the capabilities vocabulary of the assignment) to your draft’at least an ‘oral draft’ (condensed for supply to the type); If at all possible, meet with pupils independently about their writing: nothing drives them greater than feeling that you simply worry about development and their function; let students think on their particular writing, in temporary cover letters mounted on breezes and updates (these could also request learners to execute certain inspections about what they have created, before distributing); Have obvious and firm policies about overdue function that nonetheless allow for exception if individuals talk to you in advance. Short Information to Developing Essay Jobs A type of the written text above. On creating carefully crafted gives guidance and explicit report tasks that encourage pupils to write better forms

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In the past few years, web development has grown at a rapid pace, with new technologies, languages, and scripts coming into view. Plus, ever since the advent of HTML5, innovation in web development has become the norm, to the extent that even Adobe has been forced to eventually abandon Flash and embrace HTML5. So, what are the trends and changes in web development of 2016? This article attempts to answer this question.

Evolution of Responsive Design

Responsive design began as a trend for mobile-friendly design and development. With the rising numbers of mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones, responsive design grew in popularity, and today, it is hard to picture a website that is not responsive.

That said, in 2016, responsive design will grow beyond mobile devices. Now, we have Smart TVs as well as gadgets such as the Apple Watch or its Android pendants — web development is expected to cater to users of such devices too because all of these rely heavily on access to the internet. As such, responsive design will grow beyond just simple “mobile-friendliness” and start heading towards connected smart devices.

In-browser Development

When it comes to web development or any form of development or coding for that matter, most developers tend to have a set number of tools and workspace settings of their own. There are IDEs, libraries, frameworks, and so on. Desktop-based IDEs have been in vogue for decades now.

However, in the coming few months, cloud-based IDEs that run right within your web browser are expected to rise in popularity. The obvious advantage of such IDEs is that you do not need to install anything — you do not even need a very powerful processor, as any laptop or netbook capable of running a modern web browser will run such IDEs. With the growing ease of access to the internet, such as wi-fi in your local cafe or at the airports, cloud-based development tools are expected to grow further, and this will lead to more and more developers turning towards in-browser development.

Dominance of JavaScript

JavaScript is all geared up to still remain the language of web development in 2016. In fact, Matt Mullenweg even urged WordPress developers to learn JavaScript well, in his State of the Word 2015 address.

JavaScript might probably not be used for everything that you can think of, but it is surely going to improve and build upon a lot of things. For instance, with REST API being a part of WordPress, it is only a matter of time before we see better integration of JavaScript apps with WordPress projects. Similarly, libraries such as Meteor and AngularJS will continue their steady rise to popularity, and JavaScript will soon power more and more of the internet.

Ad Blockers

Advertisements have been among the primary sources of revenue for a lot of brands, both online and offline. The best part about the internet is that as a user, you can block obtrusive, specific or all of the ads using ad blockers. With more and more publishers coming up with newer methods of serving ads, the importance of ad blockers is expected to rise.

Smashing Magazine recently did a story about the ad blocking trends in the online publishing world. You should read that article to learn more about it. However, the trends and changes in paradigm are already visible: this month Opera has become the first mainstream web browser to bundle a native ad blocking tool in its Developer Edition. It is only a matter of time before other web browsers will follow the model, and you can expect ad blockers in themselves to be a part of your Developer Edition web browsers soon, as well as newer coding methodologies coming up to both improvise as well as avoid ad blockers.

ZURB’s Foundation

The Foundation framework by ZURB needs no introduction, as it has been a popular entity in the web development world for years now. However, the Foundation for Apps framework is expected to grow in 2016.

Basically, Foundation for Apps is a front-end framework that lets you create fully responsive web applications.

To quote:

Foundation for Apps is a framework that allows people and companies to build well-designed future-friendly web apps. Foundation for Apps is designed to help you quickly prototype and build responsive web applications by using leading technologies like Flexbox and Angular.

Foundation for Apps is especially interesting on account of its bundled components, such as Motion UI, which is a simple SASS library that lets you create CSS animations and transitions and integrate them seamlessly into your websites and projects. Motion UI has been in vogue since 2015, and this year too the trend will be no different.

More Reliance on Frameworks!

As web development grows and we see young coders enter the market, the popularity of frameworks is expected to rise as well.

Agreed, many purists and old-school coders tend to prefer a framework-less coding atmosphere, and they do have their reasons for that. However, frameworks make lives easier for many developers, especially if time and/or resources are scarce, and as such, with one developer focusing on more than one project at a time, the importance of frameworks in web development can only be expected to grow, and not to diminish anytime soon.

What do you think of these web development trends and predictions for the coming months of 2016? Share your views in the comments below!

(dpe)

Writing the perfect Brief summary by having an Essay

The in closing may well closing passage on the dissertation. But ordinarily little functional side exclusively 1 other lines, the culmination works out most some what a great deal of is successful.

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Tips by Composing a Narrative Essay

In a story report, the author says bull crap a good real-life ordeal. Everyone loves a high-quality story-especially a person that grabs resourcefulness. Additionally, you see, the story report is concerned develop. To be had, you stores a non-public have from the context of a larger theme, for instance a article became familiar with. After articles a narrative composition, this writer is determined not just to proclaim to a first rate book, plus also create exactly why the storyplot delivers symbolism.

The Five-Step Providing Endeavor pertaining to Plot Essays
Having Time4Learning, we have stellar christians in a very penning steps. Each sending task allows people today to post from nicer rewards through persons verified techniques to visit. At this juncture, my husband and i assess crafting a narrative dissertation applying the five-step composition methods. Candidates have got to receive some tips powerful:

1. Prewriting to make the Account Essay
All the prewriting stride in the plot article article writing is primarily important. Included in the prewriting point, scholars consider doing a cleanse a life experiences negative credit these assignment’folks motif, for example ‘discuss reaching an ambition.’ Choosing an event writing more or less, realize a great manageable incident (to goal, instances like this) create a extremely report subject matter matter whether or not this is bound to have importance to the writer.urgent essay help In the event article marketers are an emotional link to her or his chosen issue, or perhaps narrative article are usually more results-oriented.

Once a theme is undoubtedly ideal, persons have to have to take the time sifting with his images, on top of that recollecting fine points, much like the annual, football season, gearing, some individuals, but gadgets associated with. Look at the show towards times can be earning !, nope feature wrong in size trivial. Time and again it’s the miscroscopic details that many communicate sizable designs. Building up a plan for the story’s narrative activity amazingly informative.

2. Producing a story Essay
When you make very first scribble of a narrative essay or dissertation, click through on the format, yet unfortunately give full attention to helping to make come alive, even though simply following goes:

• Personal account articles unquestionably are mainly of course printed in only certain, and ultizing “I” allows the script a substantial immediacy which experts state makes use of someone.
• In assuring the situation, don’t gloss over the important points. Person who reads do not have prior knowledge among the yarn, and a lot hours a suitable missed out summarize would probably alter his or her getting.
• Use glowing descriptions and so keywords which reveal. At account writing, our own writer’s vocation will be are based on your reader, in place of obviously call. Once you this kind term: “Losing this sport knowledgeable which include the bot of the actual domain abandoned apart.” Doing it discloses books relating to the significance of all writer’s event than merely alleging, “I might have been dissatisfied men and women displaced how to play craps.”
• While narrative documents are usually non-fiction, areas of imagination shouldn’t not addressed. Quite possibly true testimonies sometimes benefit from ipod writer’s power to gain the benefits of plot-building tricks.

3. Revising a story Essay
Rrnside the review state, individuals discuss, remodel, and furthermore rearrange the work they do belonging to the objective of top this can be. When revising a narrative paper, trainees should probably read again their job with your things to consider goal:

• Does the report unfold inside a easy-to-understand increase of pursuits? Execute the shifts far better otherwise befuddle your reader?
• Does any composition mean someone included in the live through? Could there be details, will be present external depth by which annoys each of our reader’s interest?
• Is the concept of a answer descriptive, too normally instructive?
• Has the better goal to the paper have been carried well? Contains a relationship . been transferred with the skill and also it meaning to the author? Would likely individuals be prepared to recognize the final distributed?

In constructing a narrative report, it’s the exact writer’s choices when you should talk about the value of the event. Quite a few creators of these studies make this connection to fashion throughout the opportunity section. Rest enjoy focus on the experience yet signify it will be interpretation in the bottom. Freelance writers should probably test and this also means by which is best suited for usually the article. Clueing inside a subscriber before hand aids in any gratitude, despite the fact that restoring this particular great time-saver to a end has the ability to abandon individuals with increased to look for.

4. Revising a Narrative Essay
At the moment with the typing work, editors analyze and correct obstacles inside of grammar in addition , techniques, and also modify to display type of and as well as top quality. Having a relative check out the report can help on the grueling, while allows the copy writer to look at the work they do from our contemporary prospect.

5. Submitting a story Essay
Because very personal quality, stating a narrative essay or dissertation along with the rest of those section is without a doubt two fascinating rrncluding a thing terrifying. Keep, usually there isn’t a writer around the world which people isn’t tender that is related to his succeed. Even so shall be to gain knowledge from the encounter using some of the opinion to really make the new paper very good.

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“As design becomes a more integrated component on everyone’s lives and technology pushes it’s ever-stretching boundaries, there are amazing opportunities for hybrid and niche design fields.”

Outbrain Lead Designer, Erica Schneider

It’s hard to wonder where we will be in ten years. It’s curious to think if a young woman living in Montreal, Quebec, Canada thought the same thing when she began her stellar career in the world of design. While attending Dawson College, it’s curious to think of the die hard Montreal Canadiens hockey fan as a leading designer in New York City less than ten years later.

Erika Schneider is one of the few people who define design. Her experience ranges through web, UX, graphic, and even print. Her technical background gives credence to her incredible ability to stand out and innovate the world of design. Through her work with Outbrain, a leading marketing company, she has helped to design for some of the largest corporation in the world, ranging from news outlets like CNN, and the Washington Post; to Ziff Davis Media.

Erica’s eye for design has a deep and intrinsic capability to discern what people look at, and how they react to it. A true artist in a field of modern design, Erika has lent her time to delve into the questions on the field she helps personify.

Outbrain’s NYC HQ

What’s your opinion on the current trends?

Digital design trends are fickle creatures. Like a fashion trend, they come, they go, they come back again with a riff on the original. Some stick around, and flat design seems to have stuck, for now that is…I am not sure we could even call flat design a trend anymore, but either way it was one of the most drastic recent visual shifts in digital design which makes it pretty interesting. Whenever a digital trend appears there are both tradeoffs and benefits. Flat design grew from designers’ realization that skeumorphism, with its bevels and shadows, did not scale well across smaller devices. As a reaction to this, and perhaps with the realization that these interfaces were pretty darn garish, the design trend swung from overly styled to barely styled. The minimal elements of flat design scale much more effectively on all devices. As I mentioned there are also tradeoffs, and one important tradeoff of flat design is the difficulty in deciphering what elements on a page are clickable and which are static. On the other hand, removing unnecessary styling, pages and sites became faster to load. There are always tradeoffs with trends and design shifts, and flat design is not an exception.

Another digital trend which is pretty fascinating is the convergence ‘bots’ and conversational interfaces. I was recently introduced the app called Lark where you have a chat with a robot that helps you live a more healthy life, there is Howdy the trainable digital coworker bot that integrates with Slack, and the quartz news app which was recently released in chat format. Considering all major networks like Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter have closed, private messaging systems, there is a solid foundation for people to create their own chatbots. Additionally, these bots often reflect a specific voice, which has turned out to be very influential in the success of apps like Slack. With Facebook opening it’s messenger app last year to businesses to help facilitate communication of brands and consumers, I’m curious what might happen next. Will Apple connect with businesses and Siri start to answer our customer support issues?

Where do you see the industry’s direction going towards?

Although UX is still a burgeoning branch of digital design, according to User Testing’s ‘2015 UX Industry Survey Report’, over 60% of respondents stated their companies UX budgets were staying the same or increasing. Companies are seeing the value of integrating UX into their company fabric and of using data to inform design decisions. Moreover, the realization of the value of informed design decisions is giving design a stronger seat at the table than ever before. This in turn gives designers a new level of validation when making and proposing design decisions.

Recently I have noticed the trend of merging UX and UI roles. This one role covers all the tasks that a UX or UI person would normally do. I am seeing hybrid positions ‘product designer’ or UX/UI designer at influential companies such as product design consultancy leader Pivotal Labs. This is likely due to the invariable crossover of the responsibilities of the UX and UI silos. Some companies are struggling with which task goes to which role and their solution is to create one role, the magic unicorn that does it all.

What trends do you hope to see more of and continued to be developed upon?

Virtual reality has been made accessible to the masses thanks to NYT VR and Google cardboard. I’d like to see how Facebook (Instagram), Twitter and other social media outlets harness this technology to enhance social interactions.

Wearable technology is another really cool push towards our connection with the digital realm. I mean, it’s crazy! Our bio rhythms are measured and parsed into actionable and shareable data, we have this at our fingertips every day. My dad just discovered that his iPhone had been covertly working in the background to count ever step he’d taken over the past year! How can we push this concept further, is there a way to measure and monitor the health of seniors that is easy for them to understand or communicate to health care givers? Will there be an opportunity for widespread use given the aging population of America?

fork, splitting the bill, keeping the tab, and solving the headache- From Erika Schneider

What would you like to tell someone who is just starting,

or have a desire to start getting into design?

You are not just a graphic designer anymore. As design becomes a more integrated component on everyone’s lives and technology pushes it’s ever-stretching boundaries, there are amazing opportunities for hybrid and niche design fields. I read a fun Co.Design article a while back which listed all kinds of really cool super-niche designer/UX jobs of the future. One of the most intriguing jobs being ‘Human Organ Designer.

What one Sci-Fi technology would you want to have

right now, and what would you do with it?

Although I have a fantastic chair at work, and have the opportunity to use a standing desk, my muscles are always hard as rock, there are knots in my back and I have recently been on a tear to figure out what exactly I am doing that is such a stress on my body. As a culture most of us sit at a desk for up to 7-8 hours a day, this messes up our body! I envision a technology that would allow our wearable devices to connect with the state of specific muscles in our bodies in real-time and send us signals to relax that part of the body, feed us actionable steps to release the stress as it is happening, maybe tell us how to adjust our body position to allow for a rebalance in the moment. I am imagining this kind of incremental adjustment might help my eternal ‘I need a massage!!!’ feeling. Our health-related wearable devices already send us valuable biofeedback, so I don’t think this is too far down the road.

Looking back on your earlier self, if you could give

yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?

Stefan Sagmeister said once, of his experience in Asia working on many different types of projects at an agency, that he learned about all the things he did not want to do. If you have the opportunity to take a job where you’ll be exposed to tons of clients and varied types of projects, even if it’s not your dream job, GO FOR IT! You may not love every part of it, but you’ll certainly be able to come away with some fantastic experience under your belt. Keep in mind that knowledge of what you don’t love is as valuable as knowledge about what you love.

You can follow Erika’s work at her at: http://erikaschneider.com/

Read More at Out-of-the-Box with Outbrain’s Erika Schneider

If you’ve dreamed of the day when you could design more than one thing at once in Photoshop, the wait is over. You can now have multiple designs right next to each other. Design mobile layouts alongside your tablet and desktop layouts. And in this article, we’ll design an entire set of assets all at once.

What many Photoshop users have been hoping for — with a push from Sketch, no doubt — finally arrives in the form of artboards. No longer are you constrained to one canvas. Turning layer groups on and off, be gone. Create as many canvases as you like in one PSD.

The post The Retina Asset Workflow You’ve Always Wanted For Photoshop appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

The microblogging platform that revolutionized how the world communicates and markets with 140-character snippets just turned 10.

It’s hard to believe that such an omnipresent service is just a decade old. Of course, the company has also been plagued by operational problems, and it still isn’t profitable. But Twitter’s lasting legacy is building a must-use platform that everyone—from designers, to marketers, to politicians, to celebrities—frequents.

Here’s a look at key moments in the company’s young history.

The very first tweet

Current CEO Jack Dorsey—who is in the middle of trying to raise the fortunes of a troubled company subjected to stagnant user growth and limitations that other social networks like Facebook and Instagram don’t have—unsurprisingly sent out the first tweet on March 21, 2006. Back then, Twitter was known simply as “twittr.”

just setting up my twttr

— Jack (@jack) March 21, 2006

Unbeknownst to him at the time, Dorsey’s first tweet would launch what would become one of the most popular social networks and websites in the entire world. In spite of the 140-character limit, people from all walks of life have found new ways to use brevity when communicating stream-of-consciousness thoughts to the world.

Logo changes

One of Twitter’s most iconic aspects it its simple logo: the blue Twitter bird. However, the way it appears today isn’t how it originally was conceived and presented to users. Today’s current logo is really only the latest in a slew of design iterations.

At first, the bird was blue with a light-blue underbelly and a white spot where its eye should be. Then, the company made a radical design change by turning the logo into a cartoonish bird, complete with an eyebrow and feet. Deciding that was perhaps too silly, Twitter removed the feet in the next iteration, but made the bird almost aquamarine in color. The next iteration saw the bird lose its eye, go back to a darker blue color, and receive a new wing shape. Today’s version is the most minimal yet: the bird is simply a blue silhouette with no eye, feet or even a tuft of hair.

Twitter goes public

Perhaps nothing is more indicative of success for a young tech company than going public on the NYSE, which Twitter did on November 7, 2013. At the time the most hyped tech IPO since Facebook, the company’s stock has since floundered and is currently well below its IPO price of $26 a share—all without ever having stock-split.

Time will tell if Dorsey is able to turn around the struggling social network that hasn’t fared as well as Facebook.

Homepage design changes

As with all tech companies, Twitter’s homepage has undergone many design changes over the years. It’s interesting to see what the homepage looks like today, with its clean and white-space dominated center column and card-based design, and compare it to previous years.

In 2007, the homepage had an aquamarine border and a lengthier service description. By 2008, the company decided to switch over to landscape orientation and eliminate random user feed updates altogether. From 2009 to 2011, it continued to minimize its interface, highlighting the sign-in form more.

The future?

What does the next decade hold for Twitter? Chances are that it won’t go the way of MySpace even though it struggles to find its identity in a market dominated by social sites that allow friend-and-family updates galore. Too many people are simply hooked on the microblogging platform, and both companies and celebrities enjoy using the site as a way to break news.

Featured image, party image via Shutterstock.

Source

You know how it works: you spend hours trying to find a workaround for a problem that you have encountered, just to realize that it doesn’t quite work in, you know, that browser. Finding little techniques and tricks to help you get to results faster can immensely improve your productivity, so you don’t have to waste time on solutions that will never see the light of day.

I love finding those little useful front-end goodies that make our lives easier. Since technologies emerge and evolve permanently, keeping track on what’s going on is often difficult, especially since specifications change and so does the browser support. For a replacement talk at SmashingConf Oxford last week, I’ve decided to collect some of the useful techniques from various articles, conversations and my workshops in a slide deck — and since it proved to be useful for many front-end developers I’ve spoken to after the talk, I’m very privileged to share it with the entire community as well.

The post Dirty Tricks From The Dark Corners Of Front-End (Slides, PDF) appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

This tutorial is the second of a three-part series on React by Brad Westfall. This series is all about going beyond basic React skills and building bigger things, like entire Single Page Applications (SPAs). This article picks up where the last article, on React Router, left off.

In the first article, we created routes and views. In this tutorial, we’re going to explore a new concept in which components don’t create views, but rather facilitate the ones that do. There is code to follow along with at GitHub, if you like to dive right into code.

We’ll also be introducing data to our application. If you’re familiar with with any sort of component-design or MVC patterns, you probably know that it’s generally considered poor-practice to mix your views with application behavior. In other words, while views need to receive data to render it, they shouldn’t know where the data came from, how it changes, or how to create it.

Fetching data with Ajax

As an example of a poor practice, let’s expand on our UserList component from the previous tutorial to handle its own data fetching:

// This is an example of tightly coupled view and data which we do not recommend

var UserList = React.createClass({
  getInitialState: function() {
    return {
      users: []
    }
  },

  componentDidMount: function() {
    var _this = this;
    $.get('/path/to/user-api').then(function(response) {
      _this.setState({users: response})
    });
  },

  render: function() {
    return (
      <ul className="user-list">
        {this.state.users.map(function(user) {
          return (
            <li key={user.id}>
              <Link to="{'/users/' + user.id}">{user.name}</Link>
            </li>
          );
        })}
      </ul>
    );
  }
});

If you need a more detailed/beginner explanation of what this component is doing, see this explanation.

Why is the example less than ideal?. To start, we’ve broken the rule of mixing “behavior” with “how to render the view” — the two things that should stay separate.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with using getInitialState to initialize component state, and there’s nothing wrong with conducting an Ajax request from componentDidMount (although we should probably abstract the actual call out to other functions). The problem is that we’re doing these things together in the same component where the view is stored. This tight-coupling makes the application more rigid and WET. What if you need to fetch a list of users elsewhere too? The action of fetching users is tied down to this view, so it’s not reusable.

The second problem is that we’re using jQuery for the Ajax call. Sure, jQuery has many nice features, but most of them deal with DOM rendering and React has its own way of doing this. As for jQuery’s non-DOM features like Ajax, chances are you can find lots of alternatives that are more single-feature focused.

One of those alternatives is Axios, a promise-based Ajax tool that’s very similar (in terms of API) to jQuery’s promise-based Ajax features. How similar are they?

// jQuery
$.get('/path/to/user-api').then(function(response) { ... });

// Axios
axios.get('/path/to/user-api').then(function(response) { ... });

For the remaining examples, we’ll continue to use Axios. Other similar tools include got, fetch, and SuperAgent.

Props and State

Before we get into Container and Presentational Components, we need to clear up something about props and state.

Props and state are somewhat related in the sense that they both “model” data for React components. Both of them can be passed down from parent to child components. However, the props and state of a parent component will become just props to their child component.

As an example, let’s say ComponentA passes some of its props and state to its child, ComponentB. The render method of ComponentA might look like this:

// ComponentA
render: function() {
  return <ComponentB foo={this.state.foo} bar={this.props.bar} />
}

Even though foo is “state” on the parent, it will become a “prop” on the child ComponentB. The attribute for bar also becomes a prop on the child component because all data passed from parent to child will become props in the child. This example shows how a method from ComponentB can access foo and bar as props:

// ComponentB
componentDidMount: function() {
  console.log(this.props.foo);
  console.log(this.props.bar);
}

In the Fetching Data with Ajax example, data received from Ajax is set as the component’s state. The example doesn’t have child components, but you can imagine if it did, the state would “flow” down from parent to child as props.

To understand state better, see the React Documentation. From here on, this tutorial will refer to the data that changes over time, as “state”.

It’s time to break up

In the Fetching Data with Ajax example, we created a problem. Our UserList component works but it’s trying to do too many things. To solve the problem, let’s break the UserList into two components that each serve a different role. The two component types will be conceptually called Container Components and Presentational Components, a.k.a. “smart” and “dumb” components.

In short, Container Components source the data and deal with state. State is then passed to Presentational Components as props and is then rendered into views.

The terms “start” vs “dumb” components are going away in the community. I’m only making reference to them here in case you read about them in older articles, so you’ll know they’re the same concept as Container vs Presentational.

Presentational Components

You may not know it, but you’ve already seen Presentation Components before in this tutorial series. Just imagine how the UserList component looked before it was managing its own state:

var UserList = React.createClass({
  render: function() {
    return (
      <ul className="user-list">
        {this.props.users.map(function(user) {
          return (
            <li key={user.id}>
              <Link to="{'/users/' + user.id}">{user.name}</Link>
            </li>
          );
        })}
      </ul>
    );
  }
});

It’s not exactly the same as before, but it is a Presentational Component. The big difference between it and the original is that this one iterates over user data to create list-items, and receives the user data via props.

Presentational Components are “dumb” in the sense that they have no idea how the props they received came to be. They have no idea about state.

Presentational Components should never change the prop data itself. In fact, any component that receives props should consider that data immutable and owned by the parent. While the Presentational Component shouldn’t change the meaningfulness of the data in the prop, it can format the data for the view (such as turning a Unix timestamp into a something more human readable).

In React, events are attached directly to the view with attributes like onClick. However, one might wonder how events work since Presentational Components aren’t supposed to change the props. For that, we have a whole section on events below.

Iterations

When creating DOM nodes in a loop, the key attribute is required to be something unique (relative to its siblings). Note that this is only for the highest level DOM node — the

var UserList = React.createClass({
  render: function() {
    return (
      <ul className="user-list">
        {this.props.users.map(this.createListItem)}
      </ul>
    );
  },

  createListItem: function(user) {
    return (
      <li key={user.id}>
        <Link to="{'/users/' + user.id}">{user.name}</Link>
      </li>
    );
  }
});

var React = require('react');
var axios = require('axios');
var UserList = require('../views/list-user');

var UserListContainer = React.createClass({
  getInitialState: function() {
    return {
      users: []
    }
  },

  componentDidMount: function() {
    var _this = this;
    axios.get('/path/to/user-api').then(function(response) {
      _this.setState({users: response.data})
    });
  },

  render: function() {
    return (<UserList users={this.state.users} />);
  }
});

module.exports = UserListContainer;

Zoho has kept me company for more than ten years now. For years, Zoho Writer has been the only tool I used for word processing. The company from India always aimed to be in direct competition with Google and Microsoft, and developed cloud-based office solutions at a time, were nobody even used the word Cloud. It’s not surprising that Zoho’s software is one of today’s most matured of its kind. Today, I’ll introduce you to Zoho Projects, a cloud-based project management application that leaves (almost) nothing to be desired.

Project Management – No Time for Nostalgia

Project management. The term itself makes you lift your head reverently as soon as you hear it. Project, that surely is a vague term. Management too, everyone has a different understanding of what that is. It’s immediately evident, that a blank page is not enough to plan and control the course of a project once it reaches a certain minimum complexity, like a wedding weekend with five different events, two of them being parties with a couple of hundred guests. Not everyone wants to deal with something like that, but those who do, need help…

In the 90s, I worked as a project manager. Yes, exactly. I was responsible for planning and monitoring of projects with multiple companies, multiple sections, and, of course, with customers being additional participants. The financial scale of each project was between 120,000 and 500,000 dollars. The yield was below 5 percent and was only this high, when there were no interruptions throughout the project’s course.

Back then, I used Microsoft Project. The software still exists today, currently being on version 2016, which got released in June 2015. In the 90s, it was rather expensive, costing about 2,000 USD, and it still is today, with a price of a little below 800 dollars, or via monthly rent. In contrast to the scope of service back then, the product is also available as an online solution via Office 365.

In its prime, I planned enormous projects using Project’s core functionality, the Network Planning Technique, and printed not less gigantic schedules, mostly using A0 plotters. These printed monster plans hung in every project’s participant’s office and were already outdated when they were put up the wall. And even though everyone knew that, there simply was no better method.

The communication on the project plans mostly took place via email already. I was annoyed by how information significant for the project was always on its way through many channels, never reached all involved people, and thus increased the coordination effort drastically.

So if I get asked nowadays, whether everything was better back in the day, I can surely say that this isn’t the case for project management. I don’t know how mature and productive today’s Microsoft Project is, but honestly, I’m not too keen to find out.

Current Project Management

Today, I’d like to be a project manager again, as the cloud has created solutions that were unthinkable in the past. Who in the 90s would’ve expected complete software solutions within browsers? Solely the client-server principle was already popular and in constant use. However, that didn’t allow for work independent of the location, as you always had to have a device with an installed frontend on you, and a stable internet or dial-up connection to the backend always had to be provided as well. That alone has been a technological challenge on its own.

Today, we install a browser and, at best, a couple of plugins, but usually, not even that. We access the respective service via its URL, log in, and get going.

Currently, I’m completely cloud-based when it comes to emails, data synchronization, calendar, tasks, contacts, bills, office applications, and free time apps such as music, movies, and books. I was still looking for a proper project management in the cloud, and I’ve been looking for a long time.

Many years ago, I started testing and writing about project management solutions in the cloud for our German sister magazine Dr. Web. ClockingIT, ProjectPier, Collabtive, Basecamp, Trello – just search through their archive, there’s a lot in there.

Right, I didn’t find anything in the sense of a lasting solution. From the ones I just mentioned, only Trello has stayed as a set part of my daily routine. However, I don’t really use the software for project management, but more for the pure coordination of tasks that multiple people work on, and that require a lot of discussion. Trello’s card-based approach to single tasks while providing a particular comment area for each is a magnificent solution for asynchronous communication. Better than emails, at least. However, I wouldn’t call this project management either.

Enter: Zoho Projects

Me stumbling across Zoho Projects was more of a coincidence. I was cleaning up my access information and found my ancient Zoho account. I have to admit; I almost forgot about the sympathetic team from India; no, to be honest, I forgot about them completely.

With a guilty conscience, I began catching up to Zoho’s current range of services. A lot has happened over the past years. Tons of things have been added, and many things have been discontinued. At Zoho, people are focused.

Quick research showed that Zoho is doing amazing. The company is writing black figures that are so black, that it doesn’t depend on investors, but can finance its own growth from the current income. Enviable!

Basically, I’d have to take a look at, and report about half a dozen of solutions from Zoho. That’s how attractive their products are. However, that’s for further articles, as the project that caught my attention first was Zoho Projects. Not least because Zoho Projects is available entirely (well, almost entirely) in German as well as many other languages, it fueled my interest even more.

My professional episode as a project manager certainly played a role as well. Still today, planning and coordination are such a hassle, that I can’t adequately depict it. Wunderlist or Producteev might be rather easy to handle, but are both too simple regarding functionality when it comes to more complex correlations. That’s where tasks start to have sub-tasks that need to be monitored separately.

Self-hosted solutions, which I’m basically always very close to, are out of question, as I’ve been valuing the availability of mobile apps for the respective cloud case of an application for years already and for me, mobile access is indispensable, especially in project management.

So I decided to give Zoho Projects a spin. Although the software is purely cloud-based, however, it does provide additional native apps for iOS and Android. That doesn’t sound bad so far…

Zoho Projects: A First Overview

In my old Zoho days, the mid-nineties, I got used to being offered Zoho’s portfolio for free for the most part. Since then, this has changed a bit. While there still are so-called Free Plans, the fascinating features have become hidden behind a paywall.

Zoho Projects is handling it similar to how Basecamp used to do it. One project is free, and the amount of users is unlimited. The online storage is limited to 10 MB. There’s no Dropbox synchronization. Google Tasks can not be synchronized, and time tracking isn’t available either. All of this is restricted to the paid variants. However, it should be noted that Zoho Projects at least still offers a free version. Basecamp discontinued this offer a while ago already.

The free version of Zoho Projects provides the integration of Google Apps, calendar, and forums, collaborative editing of documents, the import from MS Project, the feed view, which I’ll get back to later, and task management. Others, like Wunderlist, turn the last feature alone into an entire application …

The different plans are not distinguished depending on the number of users. Unlimited projects are available starting at 249 dollars (Express plan) with annual payment. Monthly payers already need the Enterprise Plan for this, which costs 80 dollars a month.

Apart from that, the plans mostly differ regarding the available storage, but also the increased scope of features. If you need DropBox integration, for example, you’ll have to pay 499 dollars and up, per year. Other features can be booked using so-called add-ons. All in all, the entire feature set can easily cost up to 1,600 dollars a year. However almost nobody will need all of that. For me, the truth in numbers lies somewhere in between.

In your everyday reality, the Express Plan for 249 dollars a year should be sufficient. For a more professional approach, including DropBox integration, subtasks, and monitoring of planned hourly budgets, the Premium Plan for 499 dollars per year is a good choice. Generally, the annual payment is recommendable, as it’s the only way of working with an unlimited amount of projects.

Zoho Projects is the only project management solution that I know of that offers an integrated bug tracker, that should be highly valuable for software developers. This bug tracker is available as an add-on and doubles the price of all plans. It’s a good thing that it exists, yet, I don’t need it.

Zoho Projects: What the Product can do

Those that used other task managers before will initially struggle to get used to Zoho Projects a bit. That’s not a disadvantage, though, and mostly owed to the much larger feature set. Once you got used to the process, the handling is not much harder than using pen and paper.

Zoho Projects: Four Stage Hierarchy Means High Flexibility

The highest hierarchy stage at Zoho Projects is claimed by the so-called portal. A portal is equipped with a separate URL. A portal can be the organization within the projects and tasks are supposed to be managed. That’s what I use it for, at least.

Within a portal, projects are set up. In the free plan, there can only be a single one. In the other plans, there’s an unlimited amount, as long as you chose annual payment. In monthly plans, the number of projects stays restricted as well. Within a project, you can now set milestones, task lists, and tasks. You can already see that, in comparison to more simple task managers, there are an additional two hierarchy levels to allow you to better structure your tasks.

Dependencies can be assigned to tasks, which you can have displayed visually via the Gantt chart view. This way, it’s clear which task needs to be completed first before the following work can begin. If you add realistic durations to each task, it will quickly become evident, where the project’s critical path is.

Zoho Projects: Team-based With Additional Features

On the task level, there’s a time tracker, which can be activated by a single click. This will count the time spent on the task, and give you a final time schedule, with all the times listed later on. This time schedule can be used as a time sheet for bills.

The tracked times can then be evaluated for all users so that the project manager will quickly tell which workers are not as productive as they should be.

Even if you work without a time sheet, you can still gain a decent overview of the productivity of your team members. The so-called task reports give you a clear summary of who has how many open as well as completed tasks. You can also see which milestones are the farthest away from completion, and how many tasks of which priority are still uncompleted.

In general, there are always different ways of displaying things. Aside from lists and diagrams, there’s a calendar view as well. You can even import your task feeds into your preferred calendar app via dedicated iCal-URLs, as long as your chosen apps support iCal, like Google Calendar or Outlook do.

If you can’t access the interface while being on the go, you have the option to access the tasks via their own email addresses to send updates.

Furthermore, tasks can be equipped with attachments. A comment system allows for discussions directly in situ. Should this task-focused communication not be sufficient, entire forums can be implemented; however, they then lack the task relation.

For a quick chat, you don’t need to use the comment feature, nor set up a forum. For that, there are chatrooms available that work exactly the way you would expect from your experience with one of the many messengers on the market. The number of chats is restricted to one project in the Free and the Express Plan. While this is not a problem with the free version, you should think about that when using the Express Plan, as chances are that you have decided on annual payment to receive unlimited projects, and wouldn’t necessarily expect that still the limit of only one chatroom remains. In other words: While you could manage 25 projects in theory, there would only be a chat available to one of them.

The same restriction applies for the so-called pages that were called Wiki in previous versions and gave a good idea of what they can be used for, solely because of their name. Pages are information containers for everything you should know about a project. I didn’t have any use for this so far. However, I can think of a lot of things that belong in there when it comes to complex projects, like a book publication.

As Zoho Projects is based on the idea that it’s always going to be teams working on the project, a lone wolf might be confused that none of the tasks will be displayed in their task overview, even though they already set up some. The reason for that is most probably that they have not assigned these tasks to themselves. As soon as any lone wolf does that, the tasks will appear in his/her dashboard.

Small to medium sized teams, that work on software or projects of a similar structure will quickly enjoy Zoho Projects. The plethora of features, extended by the bug tracker or the chatrooms provide maximum support. Now, if you add the time tracking, you quickly have a turn-key solution at hand, that only needs you to add e.g. Zoho Invoice to cover the accounting part.

Zoho Projects: Android App With Feed View

Zoho Projects can be used with matured mobile apps on the platforms Android and iOS, so you can always be up to date on your projects, or directly make adjustments from on the go. For users of the Chrome browser, there is an extension; that makes working with Projects that little bit more comfortable.

Zoho Projects: What it can’t do

As good as all this may sound, there certainly are restrictions that you should be aware of. If you see Zoho Projects as a luxurious task management, you’ll be more than satisfied. However, if you have to consider other resources, first and foremost machines, within your project plans, or not only want to plan and monitor hourly budgets via the project course, you’ll need to look for alternatives.

Of course, and this is how Zoho presents it in its example scenarios for different branches, Projects can also be used for construction projects. Truthfully, you’ll restrict yourself to the aspect of displaying and monitoring of human resources, like that of your own employees or subcontractors. This can suffice, depending on the type of project, but should always be kept in mind when it comes to the decision which system you’ll end up using.

Zoho Projects: Fully Recommendable

As it is unlikely that there are target audiences here on Noupe, for which the Zoho Projects feature set could possibly not be sufficient, I can give an unrestricted recommendation.

By the way: Because of the deep hierarchies in Zoho Projects, a freelancer or a small team can definitely handle all of their tasks using the Free Plan. The project could be called “to-do list.” Under that, you’d still have milestones for task lists, task lists for tasks, and tasks for sub tasks. Get it?

This way, Zoho Projects would be more efficient than Wunderlist, Toodledo, Todoist, and Remember The Milk altogether, even in the Free Plan.

Related Links:

• Zoho Projects | Product Landing Page
• Zoho Projects | Mobile App for iOS
• Zoho Projects | Mobile App for Android
• Zoho Invoice | Online Billing

(dpe)