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Minggu, 27 April 2014

Of Edges And Sharp Corners – 20 Cool Geometric Art Pieces

Geometric shapes are widely used in graphic design these days. You can find them on items like t-shirts to coasters. It’s one of the big trends that is hard to define, encompassing complex and large-scale patterns as well as simple shapes.

An ordinary triangle or a circle can totally change a photograph or illustration giving it new mystery, depth and meaning.

Here, we’ve put together 20 clever art pieces showing how circles, squares, rectangles and triangles can create stunning alternatives of what we don’t normally see in art. In the list, we feature creative business cards, illustrations, posters and editorial pieces that feature geometrical forms.

Have a browse through these creative creations and who knows, maybe it’ll encourage you to create some awesome geometrically inclined designs of your own.

Wolf in sheep skin by Kevin Harald Campean

Mixed Media by Sarah Eisenlohr

neutral. by LyKy Dragos

Space Out by Ross Bruggink

Polyanimal Project by Matt Rudinski

Lumi – Killscreen Magazine by Nicola Felasquez Felaco

Alice no PaĆ­s das Maravilhas by oraviva! designers

Geomas Type by Josip Kelava

Geometric Reveries by Bob Sparks

Typeforce 4 Submission Announcement by Will Miller

Thrift Store branding & collateral by Ally Simmons

ANIMAL SLANG by Marc Vila

Working Simply by Design Etiquette

Sea Level Album Art by Jeremiah Shaw

Yosemite X Eason Lee by Eason Lee

Basement Jaxx Single Cover by Sam Aylard

Encounter Mara by K&i Design Studio

Tanagram Furs by Patrick Sluiter

Calling from The Wild by Adam W-E

Hipster Illustrations by Kristýna KonečnĆ”



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Rabu, 23 April 2014

How to Create a Blog with Jekyll – A Beginner’s Guide

WordPress, which humbly started as a blogging platform, has now transformed into a full-fledged and a very popular CMS. With WordPress, you can build (almost) any kind of website, from a portfolio to an e-Commerce website.

But what if you only concern about blogging, and you do not need jam-packed features in WordPress like custom taxonomy, user management, comment moderation, and a nice media uploader?

In short, you just want to be focusing on writing and publishing your content. If that is something you have in mind, let’s meet Jekyll, a static blogging engine.

About Jekyll

Jekyll comes with the idea of creating a static (same old HTML) blog, one which is easily maintainable. In comparison to a dynamic blogging tool, like WordPress that is built with a server-side language like PHP, a static website has 2 key advantages.

First, it serves and perform faster. Second, it consumes less web resources namely memory and database I/O. Additionally, if you use Jekyll, you can host your blog in Github Pages for free.

Install Jekyll

First, let’s install Jekyll in our system. Launch Terminal and type the following command line:

sudo gem install jekyll

Once installed, run this command to ensure that jekyll command is functioning.

jekyll -v

The command should show the Jekyll version, like so:

Create a Jekyll Site

To create a new blog with Jekyll, type jekyll followed by new and the name of the site in Terminal. For example:

jekyll new jekyll-blog

In this example, it created a new directory as specified, jekyll-blog, as well as the following stuff within:

Type this command below to activate Jekyll server.

jekyll serve

You can also run the the server using the --watch flag; that way it will automatically update the blog everytime we made a change.

Go to the browser and type http://localhost:4000, or as shown in the Terminal screen to open the blog.

The Document Structure

Jekyll applies a specific document structure that we have to follow, so the blog could function properly. Let’s take a look at what we have in our blog directory below:

|-- _config.yml|-- _layouts|-- _posts|-- _site|-- css`-- index.html

First, we have _config.yml; it is the the blog’s configuration file written in Yaml. In this file we can specify the blog name, the permalink format, host, Port number, and etc.

_layouts is where we put customized layout for page or post.

_posts is the directory where we save all our posts. All the posts should be written either with Markdown or Textile. They will be compiled and save the output in _site directory; this is the directory where Jekyll will serve the posts in the Browser.

Lastly, we have css and index.html.

For now, we will leave them as they are, with no custom configuration. Let’s start writing our first post.

Writing a New Post

As mentioned above, in Jekyll, we either write the post in Markdown or Textile. We have covered in the previous on how to write with Markdown; you may want to check that link first before going any further.

Naming Convention

To create a post, we also create a new file that must follow this naming convention year-month-date-{post-slug}.{file-extension}, for example: 2014-03-11-hello-world.md. Save the file in _posts directory.

Post Front-matter

Before we begin writing the body content of our post, we must first define the post front-matter namely the title and the post layout. We can also define the post categories and the tags, but these are optional. The most important thing is that the front-matter must be set within triple-dashed line. Here is an example:

---layout: posttitle: Hello World!---

Then we can write the content:

Hello world! Welcome to Jekyll. This is your first post.

Save the file. We will see the psot generated, and appear on our blog. Nice!

Wrap up

In this post, we have shown you how to install Jekyll and write your new post, which are the basic things that I think you ought to get to know before going further with Jekyll. There are a lot more things to explore in Jekyll, and we will discuss them in future posts. Stay tuned.



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Jumat, 18 April 2014

Myth – Writing CSS of the Future

CSS has introduced a slew of new features such as CSS Gradients, Shadows, Border Radius, and Animation that can all be achieved purely with CSS. There are also several features that have yet to be implemented due tolack of browser support for CSS variables and CSS calc() functions. But if you can’t really wait for the future, let’s check out Myth.

Myth, unlike other pre-processors that invent its own syntax, uses the same syntax as the standard spec. You can use variables, perform mathematical or color operations, and write new CSS properties in its official form. Its goal is to allow developers to write pure CSS, while also be able to utilize future-standard syntax, right now.

Getting Started

To get started, we need to install Myth binary to be able to compile it to the current CSS standard. There isn’t GUI application like Codekit or Koala that supports Myth at the time of writing, so this is the only way to compile Myth into browser-compliant CSS format.

In Terminal, type the following command:

npm install -g myth

You can then use this command below, for instance, to compile source.css into output.css.

myth source.css output.css

Or, type this to monitor the source.css and compile it to output.css for every change.

myth --watch source.css output.css

Myth does not introduce a new extension. It works with .css as shown above.

Writing CSS with Myth

Myth also does not introduce proprietary functions and rules like the other CSS Pre-processors, so you should be able to get used to Myth almost immediately. It is like plain CSS.

Variables

Let’s start with Variables. In CSS, a variable is declared, like so:

:root { var-length: 10px; var-color: #000;}.class { background-color: var(color); width: var(length);}

Myth compiles this code into browser-compliant format:

.class { background-color: #000; width: 20px;}

You can refer to our previous article about Using CSS Variables for more details.

Math Operations

As mentioned, we can also perform mathematical operations with the new CSS3 calc() function. We have also covered this function in our previous article: Using CSS3 Calc Function.

Let’s extend our first example with it:

:root { var-length: 10px; var-color: #000;}.class { background-color: var(color); width: calc(var(length) / 2);}

Myth compiles the above codes into:

.class { background-color: #000; width: 10px;}

Color Adjustments

Myth also supports some color operations or adjustments like in LESS or Sass. A new standard function for it is proposed to be included in CSS spec named color() — including a set of color-adjusting functions such as tint(), shade(), and blend() just to name a few.

Below is one example: we increase the background color’s lightness by 80% and decrease the border color by 50%.

:root { var-length: 20px; var-black: #000; var-white: #fff;}.class { background-color: color(var(black) lightness(+ 80%)); border: var(border-width) solid color(var(white) lightness(- 50%)); width: calc(var(length) / 2);}

That code will produce:

.class { background-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border: 2px solid rgb(128, 128, 128); width: 10px;}

Autoprefixer

Myth will also automatically add vendor prefix to CSS properties. We can simply write, for instance, CSS Box Shadow, this way:

.class { box-shadow: 2px 1px 0px var(black); }

The output is:

.class { -webkit-box-shadow: 2px 1px 0px #000; box-shadow: 2px 1px 0px #000;}

Final Thought

I love the idea of Myth. With it, we can write pure CSS of the future today without worrying about browser support. And since it uses the standard syntax, later when all browsers have implemented it (as the standard), we won’t need to rewrite all the code. I think I’m going to start using it in every one of my future projects. What about you? Will you adopt the same?



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Rabu, 16 April 2014

New vs. Current Clients – Which Are More Important?

If you’re a freelance designer serving a target market that seems to be shrinking or not providing you with quite enough business, maybe it’s time to change up your client base. This can be done in a number of different ways, but usually involves making a decision about whether to seek out new clients, or upsell and strengthen your relationships with the clients you already have. We go over the pros and cons of each strategy, so that you can determine which is right for you.

In the meantime do check out some of these freelancer-client relationship posts previously published:

Market Health

Design in general has been both a buyer’s and a seller’s market for the past decade or so. More individuals and small businesses are in the market for professional design. At the same time, there are more working designers out there than ever before. This means that opportunities are aplenty for just about every designer who zooms in on a niche.

If you’re looking to narrow down your client base, which you should always be doing, a wise approach is to assess your current clients and determine whether or not they represent exactly the market niche you want to serve.

If not, it’s time to fire those clients and find new ones. No matter what your niche is, there are plenty of potential clients out there.

Focusing Outward

Focusing on acquiring new clients requires more time and effort, in terms of marketing and reaching out. But it can result in a more lucrative freelance career. Not just because you can raise your prices with ease as you accrue experience, but also because you’re constantly exposing yourself to new people to work for, who also bring with them new possible opportunities.

Say you do some work for a brand new client that’s really nothing special. But that client happens to be closely associated with another influential person in your niche that you’ve been dying to be introduced to for a while, but who has eluded you thus far.

Well, impress client A enough and scoring an introduction to potential client B will be a breeze.

Shrinking Budgets

Sometimes, clients cut back on the number of design services they accept due to financial reasons. In this situation, it’s helpful to seek out new clients, rather than simply hoping your current clients pick up steam again.

This way, you’re not left hanging if one of your important sources of income suddenly dries up, which I’ve seen happen to a lot of designers. The moment you catch a whiff of things heading south, dust off your business cards and find some new business.

However, do keep in mind that the best clients are always the ones you form real relationships with. If you’re not doing your best to provide value and create a raving fan in each new client, then there’s no point in seeking out new business.

You’ll get stuck with one-offs and clients who don’t really care about you. They see you as merely a commodity – an Adobe technician for hire – which is the absolute worst place for a designer to be. Commodities can’t negotiate or make a good impression, and they always must take whatever work or compensation is offered.

Getting Referrals

Your existing clients should not be left out in the cold, however. You can make them feel appreciated by providing them with extra value. This will incentivize them to give you more work, or refer you to others.

You already have relationships with your existing clients, so it’s a lot easier to ask for referrals. Yet, many designers have a very hard time doing so – they’re afraid their client will say no, or that it will be an imposition. This could not be further from the truth.

Yes, you may get the occasional odd client who will balk at referring you to others, but this is usually a sign that it’s time to cut ties with that client. Remember, asking for referrals is a completely normal part of the freelance process. Any client who refuses to do this small service for you, after you’ve just provided them and their business with so much value, is the one with the problem – not you.

In Conclusion

So, to conclude, choosing between your new clients and your existing clients is a matter of personal preference and what makes sense for you. It all depends on your individual situation and the relationships you have with your clients. However, it’s wise to always maintain a watchful eye for new opportunities, so you won’t fall victim to any sudden, nasty surprises.



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Hack – The Language Behind Facebook

Hack is the new language behind Facebook, which is still the most popular social network to date. It’s a web programming language invented and (recently) open-sourced by Facebook. The company claims that the language helps programmers to code programs faster and avoid errors early and easily.


(Image credit: guardianlv.com)

Hack is a language used to build complex websites at great speeds while still ensuring that the site’s source code is well organized and comparatively free of errors. Its "safety net" features allow programmers to write safer code which reduces the chances of later stepping into troubles.

In this post, we’ll look into Hack and some of its features which are arguably better than PHP, currently the most popular web programming language driving most websites. Hack is built to run on the Facebook’s HHVM virtual machine, which is known to deliver superior performance.

The Dynamics Of A Problem

Back in 2003, when Mark Zuckerberg started building Facebook, he used a web development language called "PHP". It was the most popular and (relatively) easy programming language at the time to create dynamic websites, with great speed.

PHP is a dynamically-typed language, which means you need not spend time in defining variables and once you finish your code, you can almost run it instantly. This eases the coding and decreases the development time and effort, but heavily increases the chances of getting into errors, which only shows its ugly head at the time of execution.

Can’t Afford To Have Mistakes

This further intensifies the problem as you need to run the code in order to find errors (unlike statically-typed languages). Thee errors continue to grow with the growth of the codebase. Small projects may not face a big issue, but with a large codebase with 5 errors per thousand-line code potentially carrying up to 5000 errors – that’s a lot to debug.

The situation worsens with Cloud-scale companies like Facebook when thousands of programmers write and ship new code every day. They also can’t afford to have errors in their code, which may lead to user data being compromised. So what is there to do?

Reinventing The Wheel

Since Facebook’s front-end was mostly written in PHP, switching to a new language would mean having to migrate the whole site code, which is not just impractical but also not feasible. Plus, if the programmers are already used to PHP, this calls for a massive reboot in human resource.

Luckily there is a better solution – they re-invented a language, derived from PHP, which can co-exist with this traditional language.

"Thus, Hack was born. We believe that it offers the best of both dynamically typed and statically typed languages, and that it will be valuable to projects of all sizes," it was announced on Facebook’s Engineering blog.

Hack Is Simply Better PHP

Essentially, Hack is "better PHP". Derived from PHP, it inter-operates seamlessly with PHP for faster and safer web development. You can have a project containing PHP and Hack code side-by-side and still, the project runs as required. This is the key feature that is going to attract PHP developers to try Hack. And possibly encourage them to gradually migrate their PHP code to Hack.

Hack primarily adds to PHP the power of static typing along with many more features found in other modern programming languages. It’s a language developed for HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine), an open-source runtime platform built by Facebook to execute programs written in Hack and PHP.

The Hack and HHVM combo is targeting one of the foundations of modern web: rapid app development. It’s never been easy to test and debug web applications, but Hack is changing that by allowing programmers to detect errors early on without compromising the development cycle of PHP. The conclusion from several tech sites has been that Hack is good news.

Advantages Of Hack

The greatest enhancement that Hack provides over PHP is the removal of unnecessary and error-prone features. Hack adds safety nets (without slowing you down) so you make less errors. It also adds various features found in modern programming languages which makes writing code in Hack enjoyable.

Hack is both a dynamically typed and statically typed web development language, thus bringing the best of both typed languages. This is actually called "gradual typing," a type system which allows variables to be typed either at compile-time or at run-time. It can run your code without compiling – you can edit a file and reload the webpage and see the changes instantly.

Other Features

Hack brings in features such as collections, lambda expressions, and run-time enforcement of return types and parameter types, addition of generics, asynchronous programming, etc.

These new features are non-obstructive, thus the code written using Hack will still look and feel like the traditional dynamic code created using PHP. Moreover, engineers will better understand the code as static typing acts a lot like documentation.

What’s Not So Advantageous

The greatest disadvantage of Hack is that it has abandoned the features that make PHP a simpler language for beginners. You cannot embed the HTML directly in your source code, and you can’t have a code written outside of a function or class. But this is a relatively small problem. While it may deter beginners, PHP programmers would not find it hard to adapt to Hack and will probably deem the advantages of Hack convincing enough for adoption.

Facebook has already deployed Hack on its website, which serves more than 1.2 billion people in the world. "We have deployed Hack at Facebook and it has been a great success. Over the last year, we have migrated nearly our entire PHP codebase to Hack," stated the article on the Facebook Engineering blog.

The Future

It’s going to be interesting to see how the PHP community at large will adopt this new language. We hope to see Hack supported on other PHP virtual machines and parsers, which will simplify code migration.

An open source project also means it’s not dependent on its original creators for new features and bug corrections. We may encounter some awesome feature in the future suggested or added by the open source developers community to this new language.

Moreover, Facebook is also working to improve Hack. They did create the language after all. "This is just the first step, and we are dedicated to continuing to evolve this software to make development even easier for both our own engineers and the broader community," as posted on the Facebook Engineering blog.

What do you think about Hack? Do you think Hack is better than PHP? Can it replace PHP? Please post your answers through comments.



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Senin, 14 April 2014

Fresh Resources for Designers and Developers – April 2014

Alright, we’ve gone through the first quarter of 2014, let’s head on to the fourth month of the year. This round, April 2014, we have a framework for building WordPress theme, and one for building mobile app. We will take a look at a new code editor from Github here briefly, and a very cool font icon.

As usual, if nothing here strikes your fancy, feel free to look through earlier compilations of fresh resources for designers and developers we’ve published in the past year or so.

Runway Framework

Runway Framework is beyond just a framework that you can use as a starting point to develop a WordPress theme. With it, you can set plugin dependencies that are required for your theme, manage child themes, and create an Option/Setting page in drag-n-drop fashion.

StackIcons

This font-icon really caught my attention. We typically can only assign a single color to a font-icon, but StackIcons is sophisticated in the sense that each part within the icon is adjustable. Moreover, the icons also come in multiple shapes; circle, square, rounded, and icon-only. A really great collection of font icons that is worth bookmarking. Save it, in case you need it later.

TagTree

TagTree provides a collection of screencasts that could help take your JavaScript skills to the next level. To name a few, you can now learn to build an app using AngularJS and Yeoman, create data visualization with D3.js, and draw vector graphics with Paper.js. And there are likely more screencasts to come in the future.

Atom

Atom is a new code editor from Github. The idea behind it is to make a “fully customizable, hackable, and deeply extensible” code editor. Similar to Sublime Text, Atom can also be powered with packages. At the time of writing, Atom is still in Beta. It will be free (while in Beta) but only available by invitation. If you are interested you can request an invitation at Atom.io.

SassConf

Couldn’t attend web development conference? No worries, you can watch the screencast. SassConf, for instance, uploaded their recorded keynotes on a Vimeo channel. There are currently 15 videos that you can watch, covering all about Sass, tips, and tricks on building a better website.

Ratchet

Ratchet is the new mobile app framework on the block that allows you to build an app using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Since it is built by the same team behind Bootstrap, Ratchet also inherited similar code conventions. Ratchet also comes with a number of reusable components to build the app interface such as Title bar, Buttons, Forms, and Sliders.

WP Job Manager

Build a job board on your website? If it is built of WordPress you can install WP Job Manager. WP Job Manager adds a new menu on the Dashboard. You can add a new job listing with some of its required detail like job location, job expired data, and employer/company name as well as company logo.

Crowe Wireframe

Crowe Wireframe is a collection of common design patterns such as image, text block, navigation, and buttons that you can use for rapid prototyping. But unlike a conventional prototype that only visualize its components with a boring outline and boxes which makes it hard to differentiate an icon from a logo, Crowe Wireframe is more visual-rich and detailed.

Cerberus

Today, more and more people are checking emails through their mobile devices. So, it is important to make sure that your email displays nicely, and is readable in that situation. Cerberus is a good starting point to build your email. It is light, responsive, and compatible in most email clients including Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo.

Typebase

Typebase.css is a collection of styles to reset web typography, very much like Normalize.css. It is available in CSS, LESS and Sass format, so that you can integrate it in your project easily regardless of what framework you are using.



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Minggu, 13 April 2014

Online Banking – 5 Services That Will Change The Way You Bank

It’s not really a stretch to say that the big banks aren’t keeping up with the curve. Not only do they seem perfectly happy to ignore the needs of small customers, but these big banks aren’t really doing well trying to keep up with the mobile-centric lifestyles of today’s urban dwellers. Between the fees and the lack of mobile support from the big banks, it’s no wonder that alternative and mobile-friendly banking solutions are starting to emerge. If mobile payment systems are here to stay, maybe online and mobile-friendly banking is next in line.

Avuba

These mobile banking services take advantage of the possibilities afforded by being online and mobile, providing cool features that you just won’t see in the online apps from your traditional big banks. These services aren’t actually banks themselves, and are still backed by traditional banks, but each provides an interface and features that are worlds apart from what you’d get from a traditional bank’s mobile offerings. Here’s a list of five that might pique your interest.

1. Simple

Simple has been around for a while, and is one of the leading lights in this new generation of online banking services. Simple has easy to use web and mobile banking tools, which come with rich budgeting tools. For instance, you can set goals and request regular reports. You can even deposit checks using your smartphone. Simple is almost entirely free to use; the only fees Simple charges are a $2 International ATM Cash Withdrawal Fee, an $8 Treasurer’s Check Fee and a $1 Over the Counter Cash Withdrawal fee.

Simple

Simple also sends you a Simple Visa card, which can be used like any other card to make purchases. Simple is available by invitation only, and only to residents of the United States. However, Simple was recently acquired by BBVA for $117 million, and although this acquisition doesn’t seem to have changed much yet, there’s a possibility that this acquisition may lead to Simple expanding beyond the United States. The Simple app is available for both Android and iOS.

Simple App

2. GoBank

GoBank is a mobile-first bank that eliminates a lot of the fees and complexity associated with traditional banking. WithGoBank you can sign up straight from your smartphone, and it lets you send money and deposit checks straight from your smartphone. You can also use the GoBank app to create and send a paper check free of charge. GoBank has a large network of free ATMs, with 40,000 free GoBank ATMs spread across the United States. Deposits can be made at any Green Dot retailer, including Wal-Mart.

GoBank

GoBank, like most online banking services, includes robust budgeting tools, such as letting you set custom alerts for specific situations. GoBank gives you your own debit card for free. For added personalization, for a fee of $9, you can even customize it with a photo from Facebook. GoBank is only available for United States residents. Interestingly, GoBank has a negotiable monthly membership fee that ranges from completely free up to $9. GoBank supports both Android and iOS smartphones.

GoBank App

3. Moven

Moven is a mobile banking service and app that has only recently left beta. The app provides a lot of useful real-time information, including real-time updates and spending alerts. Moven also has useful budgeting and bookkeeping features, such as the ability to analyse spending across all your credit and debit cards. Moven even lets you send money through the app using either Facebook, email or mobile phone number. The Facebook integration also lets you see a map of social events, which may come in handy.

Moven

One thing that sets Moven apart, though, is that you can manage other accounts and cards through the app. Moven accounts are almost completely free, with charges only incurred for international ATM withdrawals. You’ll also be charged if you with draw from non-STAR Surcharge-free ATMs, although this is charged by the vendor and not by Moven. Moven is invite-only at the moment, and is only open to residents of the United States. The Moven app is available for Android and iOS.

Moven App

4. Avuba

Avuba is a new mobile-first, completely-digital online bank. Avuba has an always-available 24/7 helpline, and promises that you’ll be able to start banking within 24 hours of signing up. Avuba also supports authentification via text message and all the easy money transfer options you’d expect from a mobile banking app. Avuba offers free credit and debit cards. What’s more, Avuba waives withdrawal fees; even international withdrawals won’t incur any extra fees. Avuba also provides advanced analytics, letting users track their spending behavior thoroughly.

Avuba

Avuba is invite-only at the moment, and is currently entirely free to use, although they are discussing a 7 Euro monthly fee. The site doesn’t seem to explicitly mention any regional limitations, but it’s safe to assume that Avuba is at the very least limited to German residents. Avuba is also one of the 11 startups that’s part of startup accelerator Techstars’ London 2014 intake, which should help raise funds to improve Avuba even further.

Avuba App

5. Holvi

Holvi is an online bank that aims to help businesses, events and associations better manage their finances. Holvi works just like your conventional bank account, but with a clean interface designed for web and mobile use, plus a lot of tools and features that are usually associated with dedicated accounting software and services. For instance, Holvi has real-time invoicing built into the service, alongside budgeting and real-time bookkeeping features. You can also gather expense claims and pay them directly from your account.

Holvi

In addition to these accounting features, Holvi lets you invite other users to manage the same account. Definitely something useful for businesses and associations. This is complemented by an account Feed that lets all users see exactly what’s been going on with the money. Holvi even provides an online store for each account. Holvi is currently only available for Finnish residents, but the company plans to expand its services to the rest of the European Union in the future.

Holvi Interface



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