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Cuppuccino Posted @ 15:02 on 5th September, 2008
I've been excited about this for a while, and now it's here! I'm still very excited - can't wait to get my hands in there and build something with it.
Lessons Learnt, Part 1 Posted @ 14:28 on 3rd September, 2008
As I mentioned yesterday, we killed our startup. I've been thinking a lot about the things I've learnt from the experience, and after yesterday's post about starting work immediately, something else has come to mind.
I'll be the first to admint that I'm not a great graphic designer - though I do enjoy doing it. Similarly, my interface design isn't great. However, I enjoy doing it. So I'd taken on that role in MeejaCake. One of the big things about MeejaCake was that we were studying the relationship between objects, and so we needed a good interface to allow people to add those relationships. For some reason, I went for the standard, Web 1.0 way of doing things, which was to have separate forms for each relationship and force the user to navigate between them. I knew this wasn't the best way, but for some reason, I stuck with it. It didn't work very well. I thought a lot about how I could improve the forms to make them work, but what I didn't consider was a completely different way of doing the forms, which is what I should have done.
When I hit a brick wall in programming, often I'll try and code the same problem a different way, to see if that produces the same errors or results. Most times, I'll find I come up with a better solution than my first attempt. If I had approached the interface design like a programming problem, I would have come up with a much better interface, but for some reason i stuck with the one that didn't work and kept trying new things to make it work.
My A-level Computing teacher always told us "There's more than one way to skin a cat". I should have applied the same rule to interface design. I know I will in future!
For those interested, what I believe I should have done is what the Amazon product does - which is instead of presenting you with a form for each relation, it shows you the entire page (i.e. the page with all the relations on), and allows you to simply add new ones, one at a time. This makes the back and front end code much neater, and since you can do everything with AJAX means the form is a lot more intuitive. Also, users don't need to learn two layouts, one for the page and one for the form - once they see the page, they will immediately know how to edit it.
Lesson: learnt.
Death of a Start Up Posted @ 12:53 on 2nd September, 2008
Advice: if you get a good idea, DROP EVERYTHING. Do it. Do it now. Don't sex, sleep, eat, drink, dream until it's done. Why? Because the moment you think of the idea the window of opportunity starts to close. Unfortunately for us, the window closed just as we were thinking about leaving private beta. Someone else had the same idea - and that person was Amazon. No way in hell can we compete with them, so we've closed the startup. Which, though disappointing, means we were definitely onto something. We wish, however, that we had just done it 18 months ago when we had the idea.
Ah well, back to the drawing board.
OS X Mouse Following Issues Posted @ 12:36 on 1st September, 2008
I've found a problem on my iMac which is a bit odd. OS X doesn't seem to be able to trace my mouse movements. This manifests itself in a number of issues, some of which are outlines below:
- The dock doesn't magnify
- When a select a menu, and then hover over the options, the options don't turn blue (i.e. the hover state isn't activated)
- Similarly, when I select a menu and then move across to the next menu, the first menu remains open.
- The x, - and + symbols on the window action buttons (close, minimize, resize) don't appear on mouse over.
Now, my MacBook Pro has the same version of OS X, both are up to date, and only the iMac has the problem. I suppose it could be a PowerPC issue, since the iMac is a G5 and the MBP is intel, but I can't find other people complaining of a similar issue. I wonder if it's some spyware or similar that's found its way onto my system - there don't appear to be any suspect process in Activity Monitor though. It's not the mouse, either, same issue with different mice.
Has anyone else found this problem? Anyone got any solutions?
Solution! I zapped my PRAM, and everything seems to work fine. I wasn't entirely sure the zapping worked, but it appears to have done. So yay!
Coda Posted @ 22:12 on 28th August, 2008
You may know that I'm a Mac user, and that for my web development I use Coda, which I believe to be the best web development IDE available. I believed this even though it had quite a few niggling flaws and some features I would have loved to see. Yesterday, they added one of them - Subversion, built right in! Before, I used a terminal tab to commit and update my local source, but now I don't need to! Yay!
Panic do some very cool software other than Coda - Transmit is a very good FTP client, and though I haven't actually used any of the other software, I'm sure it's of a brilliantly high standard. Also, they have cool offices.