Panic posted sales & revenue figures at the beginning of the year and had this to say:

This is the biggest problem we’ve been grappling with all year: we simply don’t make enough money from our iOS apps. We’re building apps that are, if I may say so, world-class and desktop-quality. They are packed with features, they look stunning, we offer excellent support for them, and development is constant. I’m deeply proud of our iOS apps. But… they’re hard to justify working on.

Plenty of sales, very little revenue.

Underscore is a little bit slower than lodash and does a bit less, all in all. But if you were stressing about choosing one or the other (the correct choice was lodash), don't worry because lodash and underscore are merging into what is now being called Underdash.

Isn't it entirely possible that the websites you're talking about (I immediately pictured homogenized landing sites with big images, a little paralax, Open Sans, etc. etc.) are actually the expressive version of that site? (Fair warning, I'm feeling a little cynical)

So many of the products I come across are so... boring, that if the site were to be more straightforward it'd probably just be a single sentence:

"This is a ( pedometer | todo | hour tracking ) app. Download it from the app store."

But instead the sites all try to convey that "THIS APP WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE! WHAT DOES IT DO? WHO CARES! HERE'S A PICTURE OF A SURFER LOOKING AT HER IPHONE! SHE IS PROBABLY USING THIS APP!"

Often the site design doesn't really match the products, and a lot of the current trends are putting more than lipstick on a pig, they're dressing pigs up in fancy tuxedos and gowns.

Maybe all the developers who would rather be making fun experimental sites are just too busy coding the next cat GIF sharing app for tweens.

While it's true that react does have to account for inputs on form elements and it is a bit strange to wrap your head around, in practice, you'll probably only make a single input element and then duplicate it ad nauseum throughout the form.

It might be overkill for a small form, but it's just so darn fun to work in, it's worth it.

For a form, rather than actually coding inputs, you could build an array of objects that describe everything about the form, map through them and display it using only a handful of components throughout. Then to display a different form (or a slightly modified one), you you only have to tweak the objects a bit and bam! new form.

I'd argue that the screens don't matter, but the data does. What mobile design taught us was to decouple the client from the data.

Really, it was data first.

You can now have a fully featured data layer and API and a really really dumb client that is simply an interface to the API. Then you can build as many dumb clients as you want for any size screen, even a watch.

I believe that actually happened. A new school alum sent me info about it on Monday.

Don't know if you'll still pop in here. But to start writing an app in angular you just need to put this:

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/angularjs/1.3.14/angular.min.js"></script>

in the head of an HTML file and off you go.

Write you application code in a .js file and import it after the angular script.

I'll tell you that it's sometimes hard to wrap your mind around a framework that was built to solve a particular pain point if you've never experienced that particular pain.

My advice is a little round about, but build a few somethings (small small apps) in jquery using the plain old DOM, interacting with a few external APIs, and you might find that you start to figure out a few tricks that are the basis of these frameworks. Place a bunch of state in the DOM and have it get messed up, fix a bunch of bugs related to disappeared elements with event listeners, and soon you'll start placing state in some central store and use data properties to toggle your events, etc. etc. and you're half way to using react.

Start using lodash and learn a bit of functional style programming and you're getting even closer (actually, this is huge, try not writing for loops for a while and you might find you never really want to use them).

There are a lot of ideas in the new frameworks that perhaps you've never heard of or known that you wanted, but after feeling the pain of the old ways, you really appreciate them and learn them better.

This is a pretty good guide to work through:

http://javascriptissexy.com/how-to-learn-javascript-properly/

All of your favorite easter eggs involve dancing.