Technology- How insurance can help the Tech world
Quietly and almost covertly, Apple’s iPad has become a common tool in every realm of professional design. Fashion designers sketch on it, designers collect and curate ideas using it, digital artists paint with it in stunning realism, and architects even prepare 3D models before going to production all from the 9.7″ screen. The device is a near ubiquitous sight inside studios, design shops, and most noticeably at trade shows, an ideal compromise when the pocketability of the smartphone is too little and a laptop is just too large. For a demographic regularly relying upon composing, showing, and sharing projects, the iPad is Goldilocks perfect. Here are several of our favorite iPad apps for creatives with content creation and collaboration in mind.
Curator: As a longtime (and daily) Pocket user I’m already well acquainted with the utility of clippings and tagging app for ideation footwork. But Curator is a little different than more singularly focused cousins, Pocket and Pinterest, allowing users to not only collect, but also compose handsome presentation-quality image collections/mood boards.
Designed by architect Daniel Nordh, Curator was built with designers especially in mind, and it shows every time the cell+grid UI greets users; with regular use the app populates with images pulled from nearly any online source, making it a fantastic project research tool designers can use to eventually present without worry of clutter and confusion.
Field: Don’t underestimate opportunities for conceptual exploration. Field isn’t necessarily a tool, but more of an audio-visual experience which utilizes the iPad’s camera to translate what the device “sees” into abstract light and color Op-art geometrics. Austrian video artist, media designer, and the mind behind the app, Rainer Kohlberger, belongs to the Art Concrete movement, a creative philosophy which embraces seeking abstract representations and experience outside of nature and the visible world. As you can see from the video above, Field does a fair job of creating this particular sensory experience.
Adobe Shape CC: The graphics software giant has made a notable investment in the iPad category with a whole stable of apps maximized for Retina display devices. Adobe Shape CC is an innovate tool in that it takes advantage of the iPad’s camera to convert photographs into vectors, a useful tool for putting together client/project mockups.
Fontbook: In the past designers had to keep and thumb through large printed tomes to review font choices. Now it’s possible to skim quickly through a catalog of nearly 37,000 typefaces from 8,000+ font families sourced from 1,660 type designers from a single device. The Fontbook app is a definite improvement considering most designers are now designing for screens, not print, and the ability to compare side-by-side is a tool for efficiency, especially with 730,000 typeface samples on hand
Brainsparker: Imagine a toolbox of images, questions, and quotes all collected for the sole purpose of igniting the corners of the brain into creative action and inspiration; the interface is analogous to a deck of flash cards, and as used as such, can be an informal aid for getting over a creative hurdle without overthinking.
Phaidon Design Classics: Sometimes the best place to start on a project is reviewing how someone else tackled an idea. The Phaidon Design Classics is the equivalent of having an encyclopedia dedicated to the best in design (and in fact, is available in print versions), but without the shelf space required for a collection books dedicated to the designs of Marcel Breuer, Achille Castiglioni, Le Corbusier, Jasper Morrison, Dieter Rams, Eero Saarinen, and Philippe Starck. Each object can be viewed and turned using the iPad’s Multi-Touch technology, with each design supplemented with sketches, photos, and the historical context related to its creation. The only thing lost in going digital compared to the original books? The satisfaction of seeing them on your bookshelf.
Procreate: If more robust illustration and paintings tools are required than those listed above, Savage Interactive’s Procreate app does an impressive job of turning the iPad into a blank canvas where virtual pencils, paints, and inks with 120 brushes to choose from. 64-bit color values optimized for the iPad’s Retina display, the app is amongst the better choices for artists who can’t get back to the Wacom Cintiq setups back at the studio and need to get an idea on screen ASAP. Need a little more convincing? Check out what this app is capable of producing in capable hands.
After years of wearing early iterations of smart wearable devices (whether for fitness or for data/communication) and perusing the aisles of new and upcoming wearables at this year’s CES, I’ve come to the conclusion the technology still has a way to go before become natural extensions of our lives and universally adopted. The biggest obstacle beyond battery life and unique apps specific to the wearable experience is user accessibility/screen legibility. We’ve all become accustomed to increasingly larger smart device displays, and navigating a small wrist display can feel regressive and unnecessarily challenging. But one developer is hoping to bridge the divide between utility and legibility, ditching tiny screens and proposing we use our own skin as a touchscreen display.
Currently a concept-only, the Cicret Bracelet is envisioned by its French developers as an Android powered, wrist-worn smart device which trades in the usual eye-squint inducing 1.5″-2″ displays for a pico projection solution. An array of “long range sensors” allows users to touch and tap the projected screen across their arms and wrists just like a smartphone, all without the worry of dropping a fragile screen.
Top 10 Programming Languages To Learn In 2016
However, the IT landscape is wide and varied. With so many different programming languages out there, the tech scene can seem like a modern-day Babel sometimes, where understanding each one can be a nightmare. Assuming you can’t be fluent in every programming language, the big question is:
What are the best programming languages to learn right now?
THE IEEE SPECTRUM SURVEY
IEEE Spectrum, the flagship publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, makes that an easy question to answer by providing an interactive tool that ranks the popularity of programming languages.
Its ranking synthesizes 12 metrics from 10 sources, including Google searches, the number of new repositories for each language on GitHub, questions asked about the language on Stack Overflow, and Dice’s jobs listings. A more detailed account of their methodology can be found here.
TOP 10 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
Java
C
C++
Python
C#
R
PHP
JavaScript
Ruby
Matlab
To get a better understanding of this list, we went to the experts. Check out what two of our fellow Atlanta-area startup friends, Steve Rath and Gary McTall, had to say about this top programming list:
Steve_Rath_YikYak
A RECRUITER’S TAKE
Steve Rath (@steverath) is a Sr. Recruiter at Yik Yak with over 20 years of experience recruiting for companies like Apple, Turner Broadcasting, Pandora, Informatica, Bloomberg, Dolby Laboratories, Microsoft, and Home Depot. Over the course of his career, Steve says that the top half of the list—Java, C, C++, Python, and C#—has remained largely unchanged.
Many of the enterprise applications built over the past three decades were developed using these languages, giving them a lot of staying power. With powerful server-side capabilities and few competitors, these programming languages have become entrenched in the modern business landscape.
“Java being No. 1 does not surprise me at all,” Steve says. “It’s that ‘write once, run anywhere’ capability.” He was, however, surprised by C’s high ranking, which he talks about in a SourceCon article he wrote for ERE Media. “I’m just glad I don’t see COBOL on there,” he laughs.
The biggest movement from year to year on IEEE’s list occurs in the middle and bottom tiers, where up-and-coming languages duke it out with older languages on the decline. Steve believes that startup culture has played a big role in the changing popularity and adoption of certain programming languages.
“It’s different if you’re looking at startups. The established companies tend to go with the enterprise—Java, C, C++, C#. Twitter is not a big Java shop. They are Scala, Ruby, some Python. Now the big thing that’s coming out is Node.JS, which is like JavaScript on the server-side. That’s popular with startups. It’s almost like they’re more flexible because they’re using these open source languages that can get the job done, as opposed to the larger companies that already have the established code, the established platforms. It’s tougher for those companies to switch.”
Gary_McTall_GovSense
A CTO’S PERSPECTIVE
Gary McTall (@GovSenseGary), co-founder and CTO of Alpharetta startup GovSense, also sees a distinction between startup and enterprise development environments.
“When I came out of school, C# was the cool thing everyone was doing. .NET was at like 1.0. Everyone was jumping on that train,” he says. “Now, it’s so easy to leverage the cloud, spin up a back-end, and start writing beautiful interfaces on the front-end with languages like JavaScript and Ruby because you don’t have to worry about the back-end pieces.”
Gary has witnessed firsthand how quickly startups can get up and running by using new technologies. At GovSense, which is the first true cloud ERP designed specifically for state and local government (read their pitch in the Atlanta Business Chronicle), Gary says, “We’re able to do things 10x faster than any of our competitors because we are truly in the cloud—they’re just converting their app for the cloud, whereas we build it for the cloud.”
But the cloud isn’t the newest technology on the block anymore. Everyone seems to be talking about big data, and with good reason—90 percent of the world’s data has been generated in the past two years alone2. Businesses are becoming increasingly focused on wresting meaning from their terabytes upon terabytes of data, a trend supported by R—a statistical computing language used for analyzing and visualizing big data—jumping three spots on this year’s IEEE list.
“We’ve seen a huge paradigm shift when it comes to R. Its move on this list reflects the growing importance of big data to all industries,” says Gary. Which, he says, is good news for aspiring developers with little or no experience: “I think that R as a language, though not simplistic by any means, is one that non-developers can relate to. R is not necessarily just for software engineers.”
WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
While the IEEE list is certainly interesting, it admittedly doesn’t address what is perhaps the most important issue—what programming languages do you like best and are the most productive using?
Gary and I talked about a tweet from Elon Musk announcing that he was personally hiring engineers for Autopilot, Tesla’s autonomous vehicle division:
There was a deluge of people asking what particular languages Musk was looking for. Someone from Tesla responded, telling everyone that they were missing a key point—it’s not all about language. On choosing what programming language to learn, Gary offers this advice:
“The fundamentals of programming have always been the same. The truly great companies aren’t looking to hire specific languages—they’re looking to hire capable people. So, look deep inside yourself and figure out what your passion is. What gets you excited?” —Gary McTall
Those factors could be far more valuable to your language and career choices than which ones have greater financial gain or happen to be the most popular at the moment. More so than any one programming language, there’s really one fundamental factor that differentiates a good developer from a mediocre developer—curiosity. So, concentrate on the work you enjoy and never stop learning.