February 2nd, 2010, by fitzy
Lately I have been left feeling slightly bemused, possibly even despondent. What about you may ask? The reaction this week to the iPad for one.
The instant it was announced, the concept of jumping on the nearest spaceship and leaving this planet behind was not far from my mind. I mean, who doesn’t love a good argument on the Internet right? But the sheer magnitude of negativity and lack of foresight was astounding. I guess there was a lot of disappointed people who expected the iPad to be something that it was never intended to be, but are we really living in an “all about me” society? More importantly, is that where we want to be?
I would never expect everyone to like such a device and nearly everyone I talk to that doesn’t use an Apple product, hates Apple products. I used to be one of those people too. I grew up with MS-DOS, Windows 2, 3, 95, 98, 2000, XP, then shifted to Linux for the next few years. Maybe a solid Apple product came along at the right time for me, just as all the other competitors were struggling. They’ve since moved on and regained their following again, but I’ll most likely continue down the path which has seen me the most productive in business and life.
But back to my original point. I spent 10 minutes thinking about potential uses for the iPad that I hadn’t seen mentioned anywhere, and it wasn’t hard to come up with some amazing out of the box solutions. I contemplated writing a post, to join the other millions of bloggers out there but I held back for a while. Eventually Venessa Miemis wrote exactly what I was thinking, but she’s done the hard work citing resources and everything!
If you have a spare ten minutes it’s definitely worth a read, regardless of how you feel about the device. It may turn out to be a game-changer or it may disappear into insignificance 12 months after it launches. But if like me, people want to read some objectivity on a topic, then this is for you.
iPad: Overhyped Flop or a case of Great Design Thinking?
We are a web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. You can read more about our Ruby on Rails development or contact us.
Posted in Industry Trends, Lifestyle | No Comments »
January 20th, 2010, by fitzy
What is Sortfolio?
Sortfolio (the website formerly known as Haystack), is a website where web design firms (and freelancers) can provide the necessary information about their business to a potential client. Instant information such as location, price and style of work are easily found. Sortfolio makes it easy for a potential client to browse multiple web designers all at once and make an informed choice.
Whether this concept will prove to be effective long term is still an unknown. Certainly for companies in Australia it seems to be less effective at the moment. I would imagine that potential customers in Australia probably aren’t using this sort of website or directory, like our American counterparts would be.
We’ve had our free listing on there since the site launched in October and have had no enquiries in that time. Potentially the 11 hits to our website from Haystack last year were all internal.
The paid plan experiment
Sortfolio offers a paid plan for $99 per month. You have access to 6 thumbnails instead of 1, and a larger listing card. Given that there can be a large number of people competing for ad space, this can prove to be effective from a theoretical point of view. You can see the immediate benefit on the Perth-Australia page.
This benefit is less apparent when the search is refined, however there still is an advantage to being a large listing card.
Recently 37 Signals announced another benefit for paid listings. They purchased a slot on The Deck Network for Sortfolio. That gives somewhere between 2,500,000 and 3,000,000 ad impressions in a 30 day period. They used to run a static ad in that spot, but now are splitting the ad display 25% static and 75% dynamic. The dynamic ads feature the Sortfolio Pro customers. About 140 companies have Pro listings and the ad is a combination of a crop of the thumbnail as well as linking to the Sortfolio listing.
This means we will also get roughly 15,000 highlighted ad impressions across The Deck Network. This means exposure to sites such as Daring Fireball, A List Apart, 43 Folders, Kottke.org, The Morning News, Ze Frank, Twitteriffic (in app), Tweetie (in app) & Design Observer.
It will be interesting to see over the next 2 months whether this proves to be effective for an Australian company, as well as it seems to be for our US counterparts. You can check out our full listing on Sortfolio and if you are an Australian company (or freelancer) who has had success with Sortfolio, please leave a comment.
We are a web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. You can read more about our Ruby on Rails development or contact us.
Posted in Industry Trends, Inside TFG | 1 Comment »
January 10th, 2010, by fitzy
JRuby is a 100% Pure-Java implementation of the Ruby programming language. From the folks over at the JRuby project:
The JRuby project has been growing impressively quickly, with frequent releases and a constantly expanding community. There’s a hefty list of impressive users and companies, and the team has been touring the world, trying their best to make it out to everyone who wants to hear and learn about the project.
As with any growing code base though, there’s a need to keep things tidy; frequent releases and speedy development also mean bugs, and things that need fixing—and that’s where we turn to you!
The first ever official JRuby BugMash will take place this Saturday, January 9th through Tuesday, January 12th. The core team will spend the days prior to the BugMash highlighting the specific bugs that are most important—you’ll want to keep an eye out for the JRuby Introsection, which will one of the focuses of the BugMash. Also look in spec/tags for failing RubySpecs for JRuby’s 1.8 and 1.9 compatibility modes. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit (especially in 1.9) for both new and experienced developers. Then, Saturday morning, it’s off to the races! As a small token of our appreciation, in addition to the wonderful satisfaction of having made a difference to the project, we’ll be sending each of the first 100 participants a limited edition JRubyConf Poster.
The JRuby Core Team will be around on IRC channel #jruby throughout the BugMash to help folks get started and to answer questions. Be sure to stop in and say hello!
There’s also a great post on the good and bad of JRuby over at the Engine Yard blog.
We are a web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. You can read more about our Ruby on Rails development or contact us.
Posted in Industry Trends, Ruby on Rails | 1 Comment »
December 3rd, 2009, by aaron
I think the IT industry has a tendency to push our clients and users to upgrade, or change things to suit our requirements or desires. Often times the reasons may be rooted in practicality, but as good IT workers tend to develop heuristics for problem solving they can sometimes find it hard to explain their reasoning.
A good example is browser upgrades. We all know it’s a worthwhile suggestion, and having the latest browser is the best option in most cases, but explaining that to a user or client can be difficult. It can be especially difficult if you don’t have face time with a user; the most common situation in the web environment.
Telling a user that the site works better in Firefox 3 or Safari 4 will, perhaps, just lead to the user finding a site that works better with their browser instead. It would be nice if we tried a different tact, and in doing so helped not only ourselves, but the wider community of developers. After all we want the same outcome : to have our work viewed the way we intended, for the minimum amount of work. Cross browser development sucks!
I was thinking the other day that I don’t think I’ve ever heard from a developer that users should switch browsers for security reasons, or any other reason the user would care about. Users don’t care about ACID compliance, or Javascript optimisations or any other technicalities. What they do care about though is security, especially now that mainstream operating systems, manufacturers and financal institutions have gotten the word out about phishing and other vulnerabilities.
- All the latest browsers support some form of malware protection and anti-phishing protection. This increases user security.
- All the latest browsers concentrate on process isolation and run time optimisations. This decreases crashes and increases browsing speed.
- All the latest browsers have been improving standards compliance. This increases the likelihood that more sites will work for the user.
- All the latest browsers manage their own update process. The user isn’t required to remember to stay up to date in the future.
- All the latest browsers have the latest patches and updates and latest features. This gives the user the most secure, fastest, and feature packed experience.
We all know that unless you have a very good reason, it’s silly to be running an old browser. However when was the last time you explained the benefits for them personally? Increased security, increased stability, increased speed, more compatibility with other sites and the latest features available.
If you find a better way to sell your clients on spending 5 minutes to upgrade their browser then make sure you spread the word. Every user you convert is a win for the web community and the internet in general!
We are a web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. You can read more about our Ruby on Rails development or contact us.
Posted in Industry Trends, Inside TFG, Tips and Tricks | No Comments »
November 26th, 2009, by fitzy
Not to be outdone, AOL is on the rebrand bandwagon. Last time I checked, AOL was neither hip, cool or anything else that they are now claiming to be.
Here’s their old identity followed by the new identity (warning may not actually be a single identity).
(picture sourced from ABC)
(picture sourced from Inquisitor)
I wonder what the outcome of this will be? Once again, there’s a steady stream of backlash, mostly due to the fact that people remember AOL for what they were. I’m not sure changing the logo is necessarily the way to fix it. In any case their old logo looks fine to me, maybe they should have spent money on their service offering and public image instead. Although not according to the CEO:
“Our new identity is uniquely dynamic. Our business is focused on creating world-class experiences for consumers and AOL is centered on creative and talented people – employees, partners, and advertisers. We have a clear strategy that we are passionate about and we plan on standing behind the AOL brand as we take the company into the next decade,” said Tim Armstrong, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of AOL.
We are a web development company and this is our blog. We specialize in building web applications with the Ruby on Rails framework. You can read more about our Ruby on Rails development or contact us.
Posted in Industry Trends, Rebranding | 2 Comments »
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