It’s no secret that designers must start designing for mobile. With more and more people starting to browse the web from their phones, web designers have to get hip to making sites good and viewable on smartphones. It’s imperative because we’re not just taking a look online, but we as consumers are beginning to purchase, request info and more from our phones. And we have to be set up, as businesses, to convert in any environment.

The next part of learning this new skill is creating the front end of a mobile app. Many businesses have decided they don’t just want a mobile friendly site any more, but they want something their audience can carry along with them all the time. They want their owns apps.

It can be something useful to the lives of their customers or it can be as simple as a nicely designed RSS feed. Regardless, designers have to continue to learn how to design for mobile.

There are so many different experiences one can design for and different techniques one can use. Mobile interface design is challenging, yet a gratifying process when complete and seen in use. Today, we’ve gathered some of the most beautiful mobile interfaces for your inspiration.

Dribbble Android

 As an Android user and Dribbble fan, I love the idea of this app. Sometimes you just want to browse works while you’re away from your computer. This app isn’t only great because it makes sense but also because it has a very consistent look with its web version.

Prague Zoo

Here’s a great idea that shows a way to take make an interactive app that’s completely useful. The Prague Zoo App is for tourists of the park that need to locate attractions. One can also keep tabs of their friends by syncing up with them. While this app is wonderful, it has an absolutely darling design.

Natalie Retina UI

Makers of this interface claim it’s the sexiest user interface that all users want. They’re pretty spot on as this dark themed interface is extremely slick but still able to have loads of detail.

Alarm Clock

What should you do when no one makes an app that you think should exist? You take that matter into your own hands and create something spectacular. That’s exactly what this designer did with their alarm clock app. It has some great features that are totally useful for everyone and has just an amazingly clean design that’s easy to understand.

Today’s Schedule

I  like this app because the look is very interesting and futuristic, especially for a scheduler. While many designers are making use of squares and white space, this designer really decided to do something different with these shapes and even with the (assumed) function of the app.

Withjack Designs

I like this app because with portfolios, we focus all our time on creating a wonderful layout. This guy is forward thinking in creating an app for his portfolio that potential clients can keep with them at all times. There’s also some really neat and forward thinking interactions with this app.

Panvel Ciclos

This is an a very specialized app for women brought to them by a pharmacy in Brazil. The design is absolutely superb and the color palette is just amazing. It goes to show how apps can be useful while subtly extending a brands touch to a consumer.

Coffely

First off, this idea is just genius and I don’t even know how they do it. But Coffely basically is a remote control app that allows you to tell your modern coffee maker when to make coffee. It also stores your favorites and you can set alarms. 

Whatsapp

This fictitious Whatsapp redesign takes clean design to a new level. Everything here is absolutely perfect. And even though there’s not a lot too it, the details are so well thought out and make so much sense.

Hunt a Place

If you ever travel to a foreign city or country, you’ll probably want to download this app. You’re able to connect with people from certain areas who can essentially show you around via this app. The interface is so clean and attractive, especially the profile page.

Facebook flat concept

I’ve personally never been a fan of the way Facebook designs any of their user interfaces, whether it be online or on mobile. It always feels like something is missing. This app concept lends itself to some of the very small details that make this app go the extra mile. Just goes to show how important the minor things are.

Bikester

When you’re creating an app that’s going to be heavy on statistics and data, you have to find a way to make it easily visual and easy to understand. This Bikester app does a great job of doing that while also making the design aesthetically pleasing. From the icons to the colors, this app just feels good.

Teamride

Teamride is an app for skiers and snowboarders who want to be able to make a team, communicate with each other and see each others stats. The design is absolutely beautiful, especially with the maps and statistics. What’s really neat is this app also works with Google Glass.

Web Fest

The Web Fast app is a great example of how you would create an app for something that would otherwise just go on a website. The app is for a festival that takes place, but they also have found ways to make the app interactive and useful, especially by showing a timeline of the event.

Lucid Dreaming

There’s a bit of a phenomenon that’s been around for a while called lucid dreaming. It’s basically the ability to know that you’re dreaming, as you’re dreaming. There’s a certain kind of skill to it that this app helps you prepare for so you can have your own lucid dreams. You can also use this app as a dream journal to help you remember your dreams.

National Geographic redesign

Redesign a site that you absolutely dislike or think is just too dull is a fun personal exercise. This designer did that with the National Geographic website and smartphone app. They’ve used many elements from well known apps and created something that’s beautiful and intelligent enough for the National Geographic brand.

Taasky

Taasky is trying to make a task list app that makes more sense and is obviously more beautiful than the rest of them. The UI is super clean and looks like it’s super easy to use.  The app will be available soon for free and I’ll be waiting in line to catch that download.

Cmplain

Most of our time on social media, we use it to complain and badmouth some of the brands and businesses we’ve had interactions with. You know, people are more likely to tell a story about a bad experience rather than a good one. So this app has come along to make sure you send your feedback to the correct people so they can do something about it.

I Need Money!

When you think of UI and you take into consideration many of the apps we’ve seen already, this isn’t your typical style. It’s handwritten, looks organic and stands out from many other apps. 

Weather

While everyone is living in boxes and other geometric shapes, it’s nice to see someone do something a little different. This isn’t your typical run-of-the-mill weather app and I think that’s what makes it so great. It’s still easy to understand but beautiful as well.

Conclusion

Creating and designing apps for smartphones and tablets is the next big thing. It’s not enough for designers to just know the web, so it’s best to be up on great user interface design and the ways in which to make it useful. There are so many resources out there, from blogs to PSDs to give you a jumpstart on your creations. Dive right in and become enthralled with the beautiful world of mobile app design.

What’s your favourite app? Have you ever dreamed of designing one yourself? Let us know in the comments.

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This is 2013. If you are going to build a webapp, you must add real-time capabilities to the app. It is the standard. Meteor does a pretty good job at helping you to quickly build and make apps real-time. But meteor is tightly coupled with MongoDB and it is the only way to add real-time capabilities. Sometimes, this is overkill.

MongoDB is a perfect match for Meteor. But we don’t need to use MongoDB for all our real-time activities. For some problems, messaging based solutions work really well. It’s the same problem that pubnub and real-time.co are also addressing.

It would be great if we could have a hybrid approach to real-time, in Meteor, combining the MongoDB Collection based approach and a Messaging based approach. Thus Meteor Streams was born to add this messaging based, real-time communication to Meteor.

Introducing Meteor Streams

A Stream is the basic building block of Meteor Streams. It is a real-time EventEmitter. With a Stream, you can pass messages back and forth between connected clients. It is highly manageable and has a very good security model.

Lets Give It a Try

Let’s create a very simple, browser console based chat application with Meteor Streams. We’ll first create a new Meteor application:

meteor create hello-stream

Next we install Meteor Streams from the atmosphere:

mrt add streams

Then we need to create a file named chat.js and place in the following code:

chatStream = new Meteor.Stream('chat');
    
    if(Meteor.isClient) {
      sendChat = function(message) {
        chatStream.emit('message', message);
        console.log('me: ' + message);
      };
    
      chatStream.on('message', function(message) {
        console.log('user: ' + message);
      });
    }
    

Start your app with:

meteor

Your app will now be running on – http://localhost:3000.

Now you have a fully functioning chat app. To start chatting, open the browser console and use the sendChat method as shown as below.

Let’s Dive In Further

It’s kind of hard to understand Meteor Streams with just a simple console based example, like the one we just built above. So, let’s build a full featured chat application to become more familiar with Meteor Streams.

The App

The app we are creating is a web based chat application. Anyone can chat anonymously. Also, users can register and chat with their identity(username). It also has a filtering system, which filters out bad words (profanity).

At the end, it will look something like this. You can grab the source code from github to see the final result.

Let’s Create the App

Let’s create a standard Meteor app and install Meteor Streams from atmosphere. We’ll also be adding support for bootstrap and Meteor Accounts.

meteor create awesome-chat-app
    cd awesome-chat-app
    meteor remove insecure autopublish
    meteor add bootstrap accounts-password accounts-ui
    mrt add streams
    rm awesome-chat-app.* //remove files added automatically
    

Let’s Build the UI

The user interface for our app will be pretty simple. We have a div showing the chat messages and an input box to enter in new chat messages. See below for the complete HTML of our UI. Check out the inline comments if you need help understanding the code.

Add the following content into client/home.html:

<head>
      <title>Awesome Chat App</title>
      <style type="text/css">
        #chat-message {
          width: 500px;
          height: 50px;
        }
    
        #messages {
          width: 700px;
          height: 300px;
          border: 1px solid rgb(230, 230, 230);
          margin: 0px 0px 10px 0px;
        }
      </style>
    </head>
    
    <body>
      {{> mainBox}}
    </body>
    
    <!-- Main Chat Window -->
    <template name='mainBox'>
      <div class='container'>
        <h2>Awesome Chat App</h2>
        <!-- shows login buttons -->
        {{loginButtons}}
        {{> chatBox}}
      </div>
    </template>
    
    <!-- Chat Box with chat messages and the input box -->
    <template name='chatBox'>
      <div id='messages'>
        {{#each messages}}
          {{>chatMessage}}
        {{/each}}
      </div>
      <textarea id='chat-message'></textarea><br>
      <button class='btn btn-primary' id='send'>Send Chat</button>
    </template>
    
    <!-- Template for the individual chat message -->
    <template name='chatMessage'>
      <div>
        <b>{{user}}:</b> {{message}}
      </div>
    </template>
    

Wiring Up Our Chat

Meteor’s reactivity is an awesome concept and very useful. Now, Meteor Streams is not a reactive data source. But it can work well with local only collections to provide reactivity.

As the name implies, local only collections do not sync its data with the server. Its data is only available inside the client(browser tab).

Add the following content into lib/namespace.js to create our local only collection:

if(Meteor.isClient) {
      chatCollection = new Meteor.Collection(null);
    }
    

Now it’s time to wire up our templates with the collection. Let’s do following:

• Assign the collection to the messages helper in the chatBox template.
• Generate a value for the user helper in the chatMessage template.
• When the Send Chat button is clicked, add the typed chat message into the collection.

Add the following content to client/ui.js:

// assign collection to the `messages` helper in `chatBox` template
    Template.chatBox.helpers({
      "messages": function() {
        return chatCollection.find();
      }
    });
    
    // generate a value for the `user` helper in `chatMessage` template
    Template.chatMessage.helpers({
      "user": function() {
        return this.userId;
      }
    });
    
    // when `Send Chat` clicked, add the typed chat message into the collection
    Template.chatBox.events({
      "click #send": function() {
        var message = $('#chat-message').val();
        chatCollection.insert({
          userId: 'me',
          message: message
        });
        $('#chat-message').val('');
      }
    });
    

With the above changes you’ll be able to chat, but messages are only display on your client. So let’s handover the rest of the job to Meteor Streams.

Let’s Create the Stream

We’ll be creating the stream on both the client and the server (with the same name) and adding the necessary permissions.

Append the following code into lib/namespace.js to create the stream:

chatStream = new Meteor.Stream('chat-stream');
    

Just creating the stream alone is not enough; we need to give the necessary permissions, which allow clients to communicate through it. There are two types of permissions (read and write). We need to consider the event, userId, and the subscriptionId when we are creating the permission.

• userId is the userId of the client connected to the stream.
• subscriptionId is the unique identifier created for each client connected to the stream.

For our chat app, we need to give anyone using the app full read and write access to the chat event. This way, clients can use it for sending and receiving chat messages.

Add the following code to server/permissions.js:

chatStream.permissions.read(function(eventName) {
      return eventName == 'chat';
    });
    
    chatStream.permissions.write(function(eventName) {
      return eventName == 'chat';
    });
    

Connecting the Stream With the UI

Now that we have a fully functioning stream, let’s connect it to the UI so others can see the messages that you are sending.

The first thing we need to do is add our chat messages to the stream, when we click on the Send Chat button. For that, we need to modify the code related to the Send Chat button’s click event(click #send), as follows (in client/ui.js):

Template.chatBox.events({
      "click #send": function() {
        var message = $('#chat-message').val();
        chatCollection.insert({
          userId: 'me',
          message: message
        });
        $('#chat-message').val('');
    
        // == HERE COMES THE CHANGE ==
        //add the message to the stream
        chatStream.emit('chat', message);
      }
    });
    

Then we need to listen to the stream for the chat event and add the message to the chatCollection which is being rendered in the UI, reactively. Append the following code to the client/ui.js file:

chatStream.on('chat', function(message) {
      chatCollection.insert({
        userId: this.userId, //this is the userId of the sender
        subscriptionId: this.subscriptionId, //this is the subscriptionId of the sender
        message: message
      });
    });
    

Now we need to modify the logic which generates the value for the user helper in the chatMessage template as follows:

• Logged in user – user-<userId>
• Anonymous user – anonymous-<subscriptionId>

Modify the code for the user helper in the chatMessage template to reflect the above changes (in client/ui.js):

Template.chatMessage.helpers({
      "user": function() {
        var nickname = (this.userId)? 'user-' + this.userId : 'anonymous-' + this.subscriptionId;
        return nickname;
      }
    });
    

Displaying the Username Instead of the userId

Showing just the userId is not very useful. So let’s change it to display the actual username. Here, we’ll be using Meteor Pub/Sub to get the username for a given userId.

First of all, lets configure Meteor Accounts to accept the username when creating the user. Add the following code to client/users.js:

Accounts.ui.config({
      passwordSignupFields: "USERNAME_ONLY"
    });
    

Then let’s create the publication for getting the user. Add the following code to server/users.js. It simply returns the username for a given userId.

Meteor.publish("user-info", function(id) {
      return Meteor.users.find({_id: id}, {fields: {username: 1}});
    });
    

Now we need to create a subscription on the client for each user we are interested in. We’ll do this inside a method. Additionally, after we get the username, it needs to be assigned to a session variable. Then we can use the session variable inside the user helper to get the username reactively.

Append the following code into client/users.js:

getUsername = function(id) {
      Meteor.subscribe('user-info', id);
      Deps.autorun(function() {
        var user = Meteor.users.findOne(id);
        if(user) {
          Session.set('user-' + id, user.username);
        }
      });
    }
    

Finally, let’s modify the user helper in the chatMessage template to get the username from the session (in client/ui.js):

Template.chatMessage.helpers({
      "user": function() {
        if(this.userId == 'me') {
          return this.userId;
        } else if(this.userId) {
          getUsername(this.userId);
          return Session.get('user-' + this.userId);
        } else {
          return 'anonymous-' + this.subscriptionId;
        }
      }
    });
    

Filtering Out Bad Words

Our chat app will make sure to hide any profanity. If someone tries to send a message with some bad words, we need to filter those out. Meteor Stream has a feature called filters, which is designed for this. Let’s see how we can filter out the word fool from any chat message.

Add the following code into server/filters.js:

chatStream.addFilter(function(eventName, args) {
      if(eventName == 'chat') {
        var message = args[0];
        if(message) {
          message = message.replace(/fool/ig, '****');
        }
        return [message];
      } else {
        return args;
      }
    });
    

Feel free to add in your own filters.

Our chat app is now complete. You can see a live version of the app at http://streams-chat.meteor.com. Additionally, the Source code for the app is available on Github.

Conclusion

In this tutorial we built a chat application using local only collections for adding in reactivity and used Meteor Pub/Sub for getting the username of a user. Hopefully you can see how nicely Meteor Streams can work with existing Meteor functionality. Still, this is just an introduction to Meteor Streams, for additional resources, check out the following links:

• Introducing Meteor Streams – An article on MeteorHacks.
• Meteor Streams Documentation.
• Example Apps.

TapaTalk receives its first major update, Tapatalk 2 is considered to be the premium edition of the original app and now with WordPress, and Dropbox support.

Rob Gravelle demonstrates how to add some jQuery code to handle a button click and upload the user's name to a Java servlet that generates a customized greeting message.

Marketing and sales are two facets of a successful company that I’ve grown to appreciate the longer I’ve been in the business of Web entrepreneurship. Marketing is something that a lot of first time entrepreneurs neglect, as they tend to have the naïve mentality that “if you build it, they will come”. While this was often the case in the early days of the Web – pre 2005 – it’s no longer that way.

Successfully marketing your product is more important nowadays than ever before, which has only been reinforced by my own experience with my new startup, Uncover.

The inspiration for this article came from a meeting I had with two entrepreneurs in the planning stage of their new startup. I do some consulting on the side and what they’re building very much interested me. We met over coffee in the Lower East Side of Manhattan to discuss their product, vision, and game plan for moving forward.

When we met, one thing that was very apparent right from the get-go was that neither person had spent much time at all thinking about marketing and user acquisition. Both had been solely focused on product. What was clear to me after talking through their idea with them was that more than anything else it would be a user acquisition and marketing challenge. In fact, my parting words at the end of our conversation were that it’d be “90% marketing and 10% product when all is said and done”.

During our chat, I laid out some ideas about how they could go about marketing their first product. The first thing I tell every entrepreneur I meet with is that you should not do any form of marketing until you are in a position to track its success or lack thereof. That means that you need to track the source of your traffic.

For that I recommend a combination of Google Analytics, MixPanel, and Intercom: Google Analytics for tracking the traffic, MixPanel for seeing trends and creating funnels, and Intercom for gathering biographical information about new signups.

Next, I suggest looking at what your competitors are doing. If your competitors are half decent then they’ve likely spent the time, money, and energy to calculate what marketing works for them. If that’s the case then you can get inspiration and ideas about how to market your product from what they do. You won’t be able to know exactly how well their marketing converts, but it’s a great place to start.

Marketing without a budget can be difficult. It’s important to focus your time and energy on people that you feel you’re solving a pain point for. Before I start any sort of marketing campaigns after the idea generation phase, I try and poke around to see if there’s going to be interest before I go ahead with it.

One way is to reach out to people in the community you’re targeting to see if they actually want what you’re offering. Far too many times I’ve seen advertisements on websites where nobody in those user bases would ever actually use the service. That seems like a lot of lost revenue to me. A great way to do this is to contact the website and talk to them over Skype or the phone to ask what types of products/services have had success advertising on their website.

If the company doesn’t know the answer, then ask them what advertisers have been advertising for the longest period of time. It’s most likely that they would have canceled their campaigns if they weren’t doing well.

After you’ve got tracking in place, with some inspiration and ideas from your competitors or from your research, you then want to incentivize users of your website or product to talk about you with their friends and the world so that you can begin to see some word of mouth growth. That way the marketing money you spend will have extra reach.

Instagram, Foursquare, Vine, and others exploit Twitter and Facebook to do this. You need to look at your service and product and figure out whether there is something worth sharing, be it through an affiliate program, neat content they can share, statistics, or whatever. People are vain (sorry), and anything that can make them look better will encourage them to share your service.

There’s a lot that goes into marketing, advertising, and sales. User acquisition during the early stages of your startup is the most difficult, but persistence is the key. You cannot get discouraged if what you’re doing is not working at first, but at the same time you need to have an honest look at what you’re selling and make sure that it’s something people want.

I wish I could give you a magic formula, but in the end you’re going to need to experiment because every market and service is different.

The post Marketing Your First Product appeared first on Treehouse Blog.