As part of my work, I often create prototypes of Rails applications. My preferred tool for doing this is Serve. But as excellent as it is, it's a very thin application with no persistence layer. To be honest, I don't really want a persistence layer at this stage. But there are times when I want to be able to iterate over collections of objects the same way that I would in a Rails environment. Creating an index view of subscribers is a great example.
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Last April we sponsored the first MoDevUX event in Washington DC and helped facilitate some important conversations about user experience design and application development with hundreds of industry experts.
We had the opportunity to take the stage to share some of our insight gained from developing beautiful, modern mobile applications over the years. Our presentation garnered a lot of feedback and even landed us a story in InTheCapital, DC's leading online news source for tech and startups.
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Creating a more beautiful web, one application at a time.
Our website has always been more than just a sales tool for displaying our services. As a web development and design company our website is our brand; it embodies the essence of who we are: our values, our culture, and our discipline.
We don't take a redesign lightly; when we approach the task of a redesign we begin with long, thoughtful discussions about our company, our image, where we're going, and what we want to communicate about ourselves to the rest of the world. Our website has to exemplify our passion for elegant and functional design, quality code, collaborative work, and our obsession with emerging technologies.
Read more…Jurgen and Anthony poke fun of the stylus tool and talk about fostering happy development teams in this exclusive interview at MoDevUX.
Read more…Last week we sponsored MoDevUX, a mobile conference in Washington, D.C. led by vanguards in the mobile development and design industry. In addition to learning about emerging trends from the diverse crowd of presenters and attendees we also shared a bit of our own "secret sauce".
Anthony Nystrom, our Director of Mobile and Emerging Technologies, shared the stage with Jurgen Altziebler, our Managing Director of UX to tackle the topic of "Development and Design: When the Two Must Act As One".
Through cultivating a culture of quality in both design and development we've gained insights on the formula for success among teams of developers and designers. MoDevUX was an opportunity for us to share those insights with the greater mobile design and development communities.
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Ted O'Meara departs today for Salt Lake City, Utah where he'll spend the next few days immersed in the ever-evolving community of Ruby and Ruby on Rails developers. He's headed for destination: MountainWest RubyConf.
Ted came to Intridea two years ago as a designer and in just a short time he's proven to be a dextrous and pioneering leader. Not only has he become an accomplished project manager, he also plunged into the development world in an effort to become a more knowledgable and powerful designer. He did it. He crossed the streams.
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As a QA Manager who often oversees more than a dozen projects at a time across both client/services side and internal/product side development I get an inside look at what helps projects succeed. Today I’m pulling my head out of the depths of QA Land to give you an important tip that’s been rattling around my brain cage for the last couple of weeks:
The squeaky wheel gets the grease
In other words, speak up. And keep speaking up until something is fixed.
Now I know that proverbs are silly to use since many of them are so contradictory: “good things come to those who wait”, right? Listen up folks — in the world of software development, good things do not come to those who wait. In fact, waiting around does absolutely nothing except tank your chances for successful delivery and implementation.
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This November, a crowd of pioneering programmers will gather at Digital Harbor High School in Baltimore to create applications that provide solutions to teachers, students and schools.
The American Education system is a large, complex structure. It is often targeted as a system that desperately needs improvement, yet its proportion makes is seem impenetrable and unchangeable. As technology advances schools struggle to keep up. Teachers work to find ways to use technology on their own to improve their systems locally and to reach students in more modern and relevant ways.
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This article focuses on the correlation of UX and brand equity to quantitative measures that we see in market value.
User experience (UX) is a catch-all term that we use in the software industry to describe the overall feeling that an end-user gets when using a product. The UX is the attitude that is triggered when using (and subsequently thinking about) a company and their products and services. Since your user's attitude affects their future behavior toward your brand or product, a good user experience is vital to product adoption, engagement and loyalty.
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Demosphere, a leading provider of web-based administrative tools for youth sports organizations approached our mobile development team to help give their users mobile accessibility. For some time, they have provided an IVR interface to youth sports organizations to phone in results of soccer matches via cell phone voice commands. Demosphere wanted to break into the mobile app space because they knew that's where their users were; so, they asked us to assist with creating custom mobile applications for Android and iOS devices.
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Earlier this month we brought our expertise in mobile development and design to MobileUXCamp in DC. As we facilitated discussions throughout the day we were able to interact with motivated, creative mobile enthusiasts. We talked about how mobile design standards have influenced web design; we talked about our UX process, and we even delved into consulting strategies.
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Several of our designers and developers spent this past weekend attending sessions on art and technology and talking to people about Intridea's methods at Betascape. The event pulled together artists and technologists from various industries and demonstrated what is happening on the bleeding edge of that intersection - from robotics to personal fabrication to data visualization.
The most popular session among the Intridea contingent was Kyle Fritz's talk, "Computers Suck, The Internet Rules: How to make networked stuff that interacts with the real world." Kyle touched on ways to virtually control your home stereo, locks, lights, and other household objects that can be remotely manipulated with just a simple working knowledge of electronics and a bit of hacking. It was a great example to our designers of how technology can be accessible and useful to them.
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UI Kits are commonly found in most designer's toolboxes. We use them to bootstrap visual elements of a product before diving into the harder work. They are not as common with developers though, and in the spirit of this weekend's Betascape event of joining Art *and* Technology, I'm here to advocate for UI kits as a simple bridge between the design world and the development world.
Typically, every project goes through three main phases: Discovery, Design and Development. Although each phase defines a distinct position in the process, they do intermix. Generally, development starts as early as the Discovery phase, design continues to happen throughout all phases, and new requirements from the client pop up long after the Discovery phase is complete. This three-phased process is natural and effective but could be kicked up a notch by integrating a UI kit to the discovery phase.
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This weekend we'll be supporting the innovation that happens when artists and technologists collide, through our sponsorship of Betascape 2011.
Last weekend, we sponsored and presented at MobileUXCamp in DC to discuss the ways in which mobile devices are reshaping our interactions with the web. This weekend we'll be in Baltimore, supporting the incredible work that happens when artists and technologists focus their combined talents.
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This year we're proud to be a Platinum Sponsor of Mobile UX Camp DC, a mobile technology themed BarCamp. The event is supported by other leading technology companies and will be attended by mobile application developers, content writers and marketers, and others that want to gain an understanding of entrepreneurship and innovation in the mobile space.
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In previous posts in this series we talked about how outsourcing your development needs to a Rails shop can make more sense than hiring an internal development team. In this post, we are focusing on startups specifically, and how they are in a unique position to benefit from relying on a Rails shop to build their web applications.
Startups have distinctively different needs from established companies when it comes to launching a product. A startup is trying to penetrate the market as a new player, without a preceding reputation and without any history of success. Additionally, your startup needs to prove its ability to compete quickly after launch, in order to appease those that have gone out on a limb to invest time and money into your product. The startup world is cutthroat and austere – there is little room for mistakes and stagnation.
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In the second post in the series on “Why Your Company Needs a Rails Shop”, we’re talking about the “first-mover advantage" and how outsourcing your development to a Rails company can get your product to market quicker.
You’ve got a great idea. You know it’s great because you’ve done objective market research, talked to your target customers and made an effort to understand your competition. Now you need to get your product some legs of its own. Getting your product to market as soon as possible can be critical to the success of your initiative. The web is rich with the innovations of passionate people; the landscape is competitive. You have no time to spare.
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In this new blog series, Why Your Company Needs a Rails Development Shop, we’ll discuss why it makes sense to turn to a reputable Rails development company for web application development. In a new market saturated with Ruby and Ruby on Rails buzz, it can be hard to determine who the experts are and where to find them. We hope this series unveils some of those challenges and how using a Rails development shop can alleviate some of the headaches in making decisions about development.
In this first article of the series we’ll focus on the current climate of the Rails job market and how it complicates the process of finding and securing talented developers.
Since its release in 2005, Ruby on Rails has forged an incredible legacy for itself. Rails has been widely adopted as an ideal framework for creating web applications by companies large and small, and has been supported by a uniquely driven development community. Apple’s announcement that Ruby on Rails would ship with OSX v10.5 in 2006 helped to solidify the future of Rails in the business world.
Thanks to those early adopters and evangelists, Rails is now a legitimate and successful framework that is being put to use by some of the most prestigious and highly-trafficked web sites around the world, including Scribd, Groupon, Twitter, Amazon, NASA and more.
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When I was developing the Presently Android client I ran into an interesting problem. If a user is in the main timeline activity and a new message comes in, the active timeline just needs to update with the new message. However, if the user is in another activity stream, (like viewing @ replies or DM's for example) and a new message comes in to the main stream the application should not only update the main stream but should also show the user a notification so they can be aware that new messages are coming into another activity.
In this post I will show you I solved this problem.
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We know there is an Application class in the Android api and according to the class name, it's used for global settings or running entrance. What does it to do for an application? I will dive into it in this blog post.
In the Android reference it describes the Application class: "Base class for those who need to maintain global application state. You can provide your own implementation by specifying its name in your AndroidManifest.xml's
It’s been nearly a year since the release of the iPhone 4, and much to the dismay of the tech community, it’s still the only product in the Apple lineup with a high pixel density ‘Retina’ display. While the much-hyped feature drew universal praise when the device was unveiled, some were wondering the following:
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No matter what level of developer you are, at some point you will have the underrated joy of inheriting a legacy software project. And since we're fortunate enough to work in such a fast-paced community and ecosystem, "legacy" really encapsulates any piece of software more than a week or two old. Often though, we don't have time to appreciate how our ancestors used to write Ruby back in the days of Rails 2.3, or even (gasp) 2.1 — we need to get right to work. It's at this point that the nefarious Jabberwocky method can rear its ugly head.
Read more…When building a shared library for an iOS application, we have no choice but to either provide the source files or a static library that developers can link to. But when building a library for Mac OSX applications we have the option of providing that functionality in the form of a framework. Specific to Mac OSX, frameworks are similar to a dynamic library but provide several key advantages.
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