Bad / Good design

The Bad: PayPal Receipt Concept on Dribbble

Animations are a crucial element of interaction design, but they should always serve a purpose. They should never be done for animation’s sake. Unfortunately, designers tend to have a love affair with animations, partly because animations are so fun to create that we might not know when to stop.

Vladyslav Tyzun’s animation concept for a PayPal email receipt, posted on Dribbble, is an example of animation done wrongly:

The animation is pretty, but superfluous. In total, it takes a whopping 3.5 seconds to see the transaction details. A simple fade-in of the receipt would be more elegant, and because it takes up less time, better for the user as well.

This problem becomes dangerous when designers seemingly cannot get enough of animations. As of 2016, Vladyslav’s animation would receive more than 500 likes and 8,000 views. This shows a misguided appreciation that designers have towards animation for animation’s sake. Having insight into the designer’s tendency to prefer swooping epics over more direct representations and catching yourself before you give in to animations will save you a lot of time and prevent many headaches. Remember, users come to sites for a purpose—we want to show them what they are after in a short space and time, not detain them in a grand tour of the gallery.

The Good: Stripe Checkout’s Animation

When we do animation purposefully, however, the results can be great. Look at Stripe Checkout’s animation when the user receives a verification code:

Stripe uses animations to make things seem faster than they are: it provides users with updates (like “Sent”) even though they might not have received the SMS yet. This prevents users from feeling frustrated at having to wait, and provides assurance that an SMS is on its way right now.

Rachel Nabors, an invited web animations expert at the W3C, suggests five principles to keep in mind when designing animations3:

1.     Animate deliberately: think through each animation before you create it.

2.    It takes more than 12 principles: Disney’s 12 principles of animation work for films, but not necessarily for websites and apps.

3.    Useful and necessary, then beautiful: 

 should take the back seat to UX.

4.    Go four times faster: good animations are unobtrusive, which means they run fast.

5.    Install a kill switch: for large animations such as parallex effects, create an opt-out button.

Remember, users come to sites for a purpose—we want to show them what they are after in a short space and time, not detain them in a grand tour of the gallery.

An IoT developer

 Short depiction of an IT professional in your country (qualities, skills, education, attitudes etc. 

The IoT developer's main activity is to analyse the needs of client companies and to anticipate those of end users. They support the sales teams in studying the technical feasibility of a project. It is he who ensures the study and development of IoT solutions. He or she defines a minimum viable product (MVP) strategy, integrates the technical constraints and performance expectations of the communications protocols into the specifications (energy consumption, autonomy, interoperability, information flows to be transmitted, costs, set of sensors to be integrated, etc.).

They keep a constant watch on technological developments in order to anticipate them. The IoT developer's role is also to develop software interfaces for the microcontroller. He/she creates prototypes/models "Proof of concept" (POC), he/she creates API programming interfaces and manages their deployment. He defines test scenarios and implements them. It analyses the performance obtained, proposes and implements improvements. He/she sets up evolutionary maintenance measures and participates in the structuring of databases.

Technical skills required

Technical skills are expected of the IoT developer. He/she must master hardware architectures (interfaces, sensors, etc.), have a good knowledge of embedded electronics, understand its constraints (autonomy, energy consumption, etc.), and be familiar with electronic board manufacturing processes (PCB / Routing). 

He/she must also manage telecommunication protocols and therefore know Low Energy / LPWAN network protocols and master the associated prototyping platforms (microcontroller, Raspberry PI, Arduino).

Concerning development and computer and embedded systems, he/she must master agile methods and object methodologies, master operating systems or real-time OS, master frameworks, know several programming languages (C, C++, Java, Python, Perl, Golang, Assembler) and have a good knowledge of security standards and techniques applied to connected objects. Finally, concerning data storage and processing, he/she must master Cloud Computing environments, master web applications (JavaScript, PHP, Node.JS, HTML, CSS), and have a good knowledge of fusion and mass data processing.

 

What is the career path for the IoT developer? How has it been changing during the last 20 years (since the millennium)?

Before becoming an IoT developer, they may have started their career as an embedded system developer or OS developer. Among the possible evolutions: project manager or IoT product manager.

To become an IoT developer, the most sought-after profiles are those from engineering schools or universities with a specialisation in industrial computing or embedded electronics. The required level is generally Bac+5. Three to five years' experience in iOS, embedded software development or innovative technologies is also desirable.

The number of vacancies for IoT developer positions increased by 28% between 2016 and 2018 in France. 

From 1995 to 2015, there has been a dramatic change in the developer ecosystem.

- The rise of open source options: In 1995, there were about 5 open source languages for the web including Perl. Now there are over 100 languages including Ruby, PhP and Javascript.

- Plethora of libraries and frameworks:The only libraries available in 1995 were those for Javascript. Today, there are over 100 libraries and frameworks for Php alone.

- Client-server application development to Web apps to Mobile apps: The overall changes are from PC (dekstop / laptop) client software to web applications and now to mobile applications. We have gone from native clients to browser based apps back to native mobile apps all over again.

- Phenomenal rise of consumer apps, thanks to mobile : Personal finance (Intuit), to 1+ Million consumer apps thanks to mobile. PC’s were largely (90%) used for “work” with few consumers having home PC’s. The home PC’s rose thanks to the web, but now everyone has a mobile phone. Which has led to a phenomenal increase in # of consumer apps, not just business or productivity apps.

- Increased availability of application level API’s: From providers such as Facebook, Twitter, and others on programmable web. 

- Ease of looking up coding examples, tutorials and sample code: Thanks to Stack Overflow and Github, there are many more samples, code snippets and examples that developers can use to be more productive quicker.

-. Increase in the number of indie developer (solo): With the rise of consumer mobile apps and mobile games, there has been a significant rise in # of solo developers who are able to make a living based on building applications for niche audiences.

- The change in market share of complied versus interpreted languages: 20 years ago, most programs and applications were compiled (C, C++) and the share of interpreted languages was small. Now, with Javascript Ruby and Php taking the forefront, most applications are interpreted not compiled. The only exception is mobile apps – which are still compiled.

- The changes in app distribution – App Stores: Discovering, installing and using apps is a much more smoother and easier process now than before thanks to App stores.

- The availability of Cloud infrastructure for app development: The biggest change for developers over the last 10 years has been the rise of AWS and other cloud services, which allow developers to provision, build and deploy instances and machines much faster than 20 years ago.

 

• What impact does the copyleft have on choosing a software licence for one's project? 

This is a short overview of different types of copyleft in FLOSS licenses. Essentially there are four types of copyleft. No copyleft, weak copyleft, strong copyleft and very strong copyleft.

No copy left : Thirdly we have licenses that are short and simple permissive. The only conditions being preservation of copyright and license notices. Modifying and distributing can be done without releasing source code and for some cases stating changes. Such licenses are for example the MIT, Apache and BSL. Software under MIT license is for example Ruby on Rails and Node.js. 

Weak copyleft

The main difference between strong GPL and the lesser variant is, that the lesser one allows the creation to be linked with a non copylefted project. The non copylefted software can then be redistributed under own's terms if it is not a derivative work, otherwise the software's terms must allow modification and reverse engineering for debugging such modifications. Weaker copyleft licenses are LGPL, MPL and others. Software licensed under LGPL is 7-Zip and some VLC media player libraries.

Strong copyleft. GNU GPL is a strong copyleft license which is usually used as the baseline for comparison with other copyleft licenses. It mandates that the code of derivative work to be released under terms of the same license and does not permit compilation with differently licensed code. Linux kernel is example of GPL licensed code.

A controversy was caused by incompatibility between CDDL and GPL. These licenses share the same spirit of copyleft but because of GPL’s strong copyleft, OpenZFS cannot be easily combined together with Linux.

GNU AGPL is very strong copyleft license. The only difference from GNU GPL is that network use is treated as publication. This license is targeted at hosting providers that run modified versions of copyleft software as a service and keep modified code to themselves.[2]

An Opinion On A Constructive Proposal For Copyright Reform

    

                             

This article aims to explain the opinion about the ideas of Chapter 2 of The Case for Copyright Reform from 2 members of "The Pirates King".

• Moral Rights Unchanged

In my opinion, it seems obvious, we can't claim that we have written or created somthing if it is not the case.

• Free Non-Commercial Sharing

"copyright has evolved to a position where it imposes serious restrictions on what ordinary citizens can do in their every-day lives. (..)We want to restore copyright to its origins, and make absolutely clear that it only regulates copying for commercial purposes."

This seems to be a good idea to follow in order to keep people living in art field, earning their life with their creation imagination. 

That's true copyright has evolved to a position where it imposes serious restrictions with sharing files. For instance in the case of movies and series, downloading and streaming are used although there are some fee if the personn have downloaded a huge number of movies or others.

• 20 Years Of Commercial Monopoly

The commercial exclusivity of 20 years seems for me a bit to short. 

• Registration After 5 Years

I totally agree on the fact that the copyright protection should be given automatically to all the new published works. And the writer have to have the right to continue to exercise his commercial exclusivity.

• Free Sampling

"Today’s ever more restrictive copyright legislation and practice is a major obstacle to musicians, film makers, and other artists who want to create new works by reusing parts of existing works."

That is why this have to done one each field after an other one. Each art has some different limitations and  patents of different time.

• A Ban on DRM

Acording to me, it should be regulated by the intension, if people are not intending to get profit of it then it shall not bother them. It sounds like a basic human right, lets say music. It would be out of place to forbid me to share music to my friends only because i did not ask permission from author?

To sum it all up, the ideas itself are great. They are rightful and don’t work against ordinary people. Of course, it will take plenty of time to make these rules work, there will be some adjustments made i believe.