New Apps
The last two weeks were very interesting and I would like to share some info about two new apps that I have been working on.
The first app is the State of JavaScript 2016 Explorer which presents the results of The State of JavaScript 2016 survey by Sacha Greif. More than 9000 people participated in the survey and answered almost 90 questions related to JS itself, front-end frameworks, build tools, CSS frameworks, etc. You should definitely read the article, if you haven’t already. The cool thing is that the survey results are publicly available, so I decided to use Cx to visualize the results. Some interesting facts emerged, which I’ll briefly explain.
The most conclusive results are usage percentages. The first percentage shows how many developers are already using the selected framework/tool, and the second percentage shows how many people want to continue using it or learn and use it in the future. This indicates the potential of future usage share.
From the picture above, it’s clear that almost every JavaScript developer used plain JavaScript before, however a significant chunk (10% of all participants) prefers not to use it again. This makes total sense when you look at the numbers for ES6, which is the best rated subject of the survey. 75% of all participants already use ES6, and practically everybody wants to use it for future work. TypeScript got mixed results. It obviously has a lot of potential for growth, however there is a significant chunk of people who are not interested to learn more about it.
Front-end framework category shows interesting results too. React looks very promising. More than 50% of people are already using it and there is a lot of room for growth. Angular has the biggest usage share, however the other percentage reveals its decline. This is natural as Angular 2 is here and it looks promising, although, like TypeScript, there is a really large chunk of people who are not interested. Possibly, these are the React fans.
The app has a lot of additional data so go on and find more interesting facts there. Hopefully, Cx will be on the charts next year and it will probably need a category of its own. At the moment, it could be in two categories: front-end frameworks and state management.
The second app is a todo app called tdo which is quickly becoming my favorite. You are probably wondering why yet another todo app? Well, I take a lot of quick do it later notes. Things reveal themselves while you’re working on something else and the only thing you can do at that moment is to write down the idea and come back later. Initially, I used Trello for taking notes, but there are a few things I didn’t like. You can put links in cards, but you can’t click on them. If you add an additional description it appears as an icon. When a task is done you have to move it to another card, which gets full quickly. Don’t get me wrong. I love Trello and use it for other things, but for this purpose it didn’t work. Next, I tried using a plain text document, but then I didn’t want to check my notes into the project, so I moved notes to Google Docs. This is another story, but in short, my conclusion is that a single document is not well suited for taking notes in multiple categories.
If you take a lot of notes then you must try tdo.
tdo is 99% keyboard driven, it supports Markdown which makes it easy to paste links, bold text or put code snippets. tdo supports multiple boards which appear as tabs on the top and multiple lists within each board. Completed tasks are automatically removed after a few days. Tasks are stored in localStorage or synced with a GitHub gist of your choice. This gives you a complete version history and nice diffs. The best thing last, you can hack lists and boards and apply different CSS styles to emphasize things which are more important.
If you like tdo and have an idea how to make it better, please report in comments or GitHub.
