Who is going to buy these guys?

With all the recent aquisitions of small web companies, I got to wonder, who's going to buy mir.aculo.us?

Look at their latest demo for fluxiom.

They're doing pretty impressive stuff. These guys are good.

UI

I've spent the last few working sessions getting my UI in order. I was previously working off of a prototype (non-functioning screen mock-ups), but once I started moving around the (somewhat) working application I knew I needed to change something.

(Just a quick recap, I'm creating a web application that graphic designers would use to display their work to their clients.)

Originally, I was displaying all of the individual "pieces" of a project on one page. I made the viewing area for all the pieces very large. I did this with the intention that a client could view all of the pieces, in a large format, just by scrolling up and down the page.

The problem(s)?

1) I was afraid that a client would not realize that the large images they are looking at are not at the "full" size. Then complain to the designer that they look distorted or fuzzy.

2) The 1 page of "pieces" also made the comment management more complicated than it needed to be. Both in terms of code I needed to write, and the UI.

I've since made the "project" page display all the pieces as a series of small thumbnails. There is no way anyone could confuse (hopefully!) the thumbnail for the full version. (Taking care of concern #1.)

When you click on the thumbnail, you're then taken to a dedicated "piece" page. This way the client will be able to concentrate on dealing with the individual piece, and their comments.

Other changes I've made are:

1) Gave the app a "fluid" layout (grows horizontally), and adjusted the color scheme.
2) Finalized the structure of the menu. (Still needs tweaks, icons, and more logic for varying user types. But where and how it's setup is finally .... final.)
3) Changed/re-organized a bunch of code. (This is my first Rails app. So I'm still trying to figure out how everything should be organized.)
4) Adjusted various other UI things. I spent most of tonight making the commenting feature "tighter" and less cluttered.

I feel good being back in the swing of working on this project. I'm still cranking away, making progress during every work session.

Rails 1.1, "enable_upload_progress"

Rails 1.1 was released, and with it the functionality for the "Ajax" (ug, I hate that word) file upload progress bar was turned into a plugin. I am posting this just in case someone followed one of the 1 million "how to upload files" in Rails tutorials and can't figure out why they're seeing the following errors:

config/environment.rb:59: undefined method `enable_upload_progress' for ActionController?::Base:Class (NoMethodError?) from

All you need to do is remove the offending line in their environment.rb file, and run the following command from your rails project root:

script/plugin install upload_progress

Everything should work perfectly. (Mine does. :))

("Thanks" to this blog post.)

Raise your hand if you're tired of this stuff.

COMET

Enough with the names. Just build useful stuff. 

The only guy at my day job that says "AJAX" is the marketing guy. (Don't get me wrong. He's a great guy, and we all like him. It just shows you who puts value on these names.)

So we should all just stop.... NOT

She's not saying, don't start a company, but apparently she thinks it's not a good time to start a company.

Flickr founder, "It's a bad time to start a company"

But what does that change? You don't pick when an idea strikes you. You don't pick when your heart tells you, "you can do this".

You just do it.

Lemonade Stand

I was having dinner with my wife tonight (2nd wedding anniversary) and we were talking about this project I'm working on. She asked me what I would need to do once I've completed it. I figured it was pretty obvious what I would do, but considering she's not really into starting her own software company I suppose it was a valid question.

I stated the usual, "support, enhance this application, and build new applications."

That was met with a not-very-impressed, "ok", from the wifey.

Determined to wow her with my keen business skills, I busted out a metaphor.

"If you open up a lemonade stand, what do you do when a lemon stand opens up right next to you?"

I was about to answer my own question with, "You come up with new features and products to better serve your customers so they will continue to come back to your place, as opposed to your competition."

But before I could start up the sentence she replied,

"Add more sugar."

Damn, I love that woman.

Finally, I'm setup again.

I've finally got my MacBook Pro setup for development. I've spent all week installing Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and subversion. I've just finished configuring everything and my half-finished app is now running!

I plan on getting back on a fixed development schedule. I made a ton of progress in the 4th quarter of last year. If I can get back to that level of productivity I'll be looking at a mid-year beta launch.

It feels good to be back. :)

Wow, Writely now owned by Google

In case you haven't heard the news, Writely is now a part of Google.

Congrats to Writely!