Interfaces

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?

In-depth UX case study describing the design and thinking process we went through while building better filtering and sorting experience in a backstage life of one of the most ambitious and rapidly-growing online shopping startups in Southeast Asia.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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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).

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’!

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.

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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: