HTTPS is a protocol for encrypting the data that users send to web servers. Without encryption, users are vulnerable to various cyber attacks.
It's up to web developers to install HTTPS security certificates on their web servers. Unfortunately, the certificates traditionally costed money, leading many sites to go without encryption.
Thankfully, a new free certificate authority called Let's Encrypt launched in 2016. The project aims to make encrypted connections to web servers ubiquitous. The project is supported by the Mozilla Foundation, EFF, Akamai, Cisco and others.
Let's Encrypt, along with Google announcing that it will penalize sites that don't use SSL certificates, will hopefully push many websites to use encryption in 2017.
Affinity has already come out with stellar replacements for Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop, and have hinted at creating a competitor for Adobe InDesign.
Affinity is making design more accessible by having a one time (low) payment for each piece of software, making it affordable for students, hobbyists, and professionals alike. They host their applications on the Mac AppStore - making it easy to install. Affinity is also compatible with Windows.
If you’re used using Adobe programs, their user interface is intuitive and simple. On top of that they offer features not found in competitor programs such as 10,000,000% zoom, batch processing, nested symbols, and powerful export options to name a few. Even though it's 2017 there are still so few options for pure design tools that can truly match up to and compete with Adobe products. Affinity is changing that.
We'd also like to give a shoutout to Sketch and Figma, a few other game changing design tools.
In 2016 we saw the rise of conversational style commands in apps and services. These are technologies that no longer rely on graphical user interfaces (GUIs). They rely on text driven interfaces or voice commands. They're more commonly known as bots.
You can "talk" to technology you use like it's a human. For example, you can ask Slackbot to set a reminder like so “ /remind me every weekday at 2pm to take a coffee break” and slack bot will set the reminder for you. Calculator app Numi is also conversational based. Instead of using the normal calculator like “2 x 2”, you can give the command “ 2 times 2”.
The surprising success of Amazon Echo has also been unprecedented. Echo is hands-free speaker that allows you to converse with and send commands to "Alexa" using your voice. The personification of the voice that speaks back to you has been done before, with the iPhone's own Siri (although less successful). We believe the success of Amazon Echo has opened the door for even more chat and voice based technology to come in 2017.
Progress Web Apps (PWA) are a new breed of web-based applications that are similar in concept of Single Page Applications (SPA).
What is a PWA? The concept of a PWA extends beyond simply delivering your page loads in bundles and places a standard on how to develop that promises to be reliable, fast, secure, and engaging.
You can use a PWA even in uncertain network conditions - you might never see the Downasaur again. Dependencies are bundled and packaged in modern ways to maximize use ie. HTTP/2 delivering an even faster web experience. HTTPS is enforced on all communications to protect users security. Progressive Web Apps offer an immersive user experience, by utilizing modern web capabilities to deliver an app-like user experience, without the need for an app store. This is not only faster, but more efficient, and offers users a happier experience.
Google has released Lighthouse, a PWA audit standard test to improve the quality of their work and deliver high quality web apps.
As the Internet has evolved, we have seen a tremendous amount of change in how the web is designed, built and used.
Each change represents a fundamental shift both in how we interact with the web, but also informs how and what we build on the web. Text-driven information sharing platforms such as Newsgroups and mIRC opened up possibilities of information sharing, conversation, and the creation of global communities. Later, platforms like Geocities empowered anyone to stake out their own personal (and sometimes strange) space on the web.
Blogger and other platforms popularized the idea of publishing and empowered people all over the world to publish content, build an audience, and (potentially) get rich. Meanwhile, Friendster and MySpace brought us closer to our friends and family; often closer than IRL.
We’ve seen Flash come and go alongside skeuomorphic design and flat design all while websites get increasingly faster, more efficient, and more performative. At the same time, users are getting more and more sophisticated, demanding and—most importantly—comfortable with interacting with the Internet as a crucial part of doing pretty much anything.
Already hinted at by the ‘Brutalist’ web design trend, we look forward to a simpler, more performative, and more powerful web. As users become more sophisticated, interactions that hint at functionality will become less necessary. This, coupled with the demand speed and efficiency, will signal a dramatic shift in how websites and applications are designed. We see the websites of the future being faster, more powerful, and more simply beautiful.
The more I used react, the more I love it. The intuitive composition of components allows for very fast prototyping and development of new and useful components.
The learning curve is slightly steep to get started. As there is a lot to work through with the various ins-and-outs of component lifecycle events as well as configurations between JSX and some kind of bundler like web pack. Coupled with redux, which serves as a great framework for scalability and reliability as your app grows allows for a great container approach to building web apps that doesn’t feel overwhelming and helps you isolate bugs very quickly.
I look forward to improvements to the ecosystem with things such as Inferno.js, a lighter implementation with a very similar style to React, and frameworks such as MobX.
Javascript, APIs, and Markup. Three ideal ingredients for building websites and apps that are fast, secure, and simple.
New “static” websites aren’t static at all. The fastest and safest sites result from generating the code up front. Non-static websites separately assemble web pages per visit and then get served - hence longer load times. This is how a CMS like Wordpress operates. Whereas JAMStack websites build pages ahead of time, and are quickly served on request. This is how they are able to load pages faster. Page load times are especially important now that the majority of web traffic comes from mobile. Mobile is a far different environment to desktop when it comes to speed as seen in this video.
Essentially you are making a static version of your site when you cache a Wordpress site. Cloud CMS options also mean they are client friendly as well, like DatoCMS and Contentful. There are great hosting options such as Netlify, Zeit, and Surge. Most websites (not web apps) can be JAMstack websites, even if the content changes every 5 - 10 minutes.
Artificial Intelligence has been on the rise for a number of years, but we believe 2017 will be the year it truly starts to integrate into our lives more seamlessly. We believe this to be especially true for analytics.
Analytics follows the following chain of evolution: descriptive to diagnostic to predictive, and culminates with prescriptive, according to Gartner's classification. Many companies are still in the descriptive stage. They utilize the traditional BI approach of getting all your data together and using visualization to get an overview on what has happened.
Using predictive analytics to project what will happen in the future is where the innovation truly begins. As we combine analytics with AI, Machine Learning Models, and Deep Learning we can start challenging traditional knowledge bases that assume one singular version of “truth”. This idea of a single version contradicts reality: that there is an abundance of data sources with varying degrees of reliability, these sources may contradict each other, and the size and ingestion rate are also on a different level. In 2017 we can can start to answer the concerns related to data cleaning, reliability, location, and integration and learn how AI can better evolve around this every changing data.