pelago

Last week I attended a training session by Adaptive Path on user experience design and two nuggets stood out:

1. Adaptive Path has formulated a very powerful tool for explaining the components needed to build a successful web team.

» The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams

This wasn’t the main point of their training, but I found it extremely valuable. We are a web only shop and sometimes our clients don’t fully appreciate what all that entails and what kind of expertise we bring to the table. The web is a multi-disciplinary animal and the 9 Pillars does a powerful job of showing the pieces. It’s also a great tool to think about your own career development and what may be missing from your team.

2. It’s great getting together with peers in the Web Development industry.

It’s rare that professionals from small and big companies, generalists and specialists, get together and talk shop. Our industry needs to make more efforts for collaboration and discussion. Maybe we should host an event in Santa Barbara?

-Michael

On the heels of Ruby on Rails comes an array of MVC frameworks developed in PHP. WASP, Symfony, and Prado all look promising. The real challenge with any PHP framework is going to be building the scaffolding automation onto a proven MVC framework.

Symfony seems to be the most robust of these, but perhaps too complex for most basic web apps. Built around Mojavi, it is a fully robust framework. It’s main challenge will be in providing an easy to use scaffolding functionality that allows the developer to easily customize the resulting code.

WASP and Prado both are young and are developing the scaffolding alongside the core framework code. They could both evolve into strong frameworks.

Naturally, we at Pelago have found that there is no one-size-fits all framework. In the process of rolling our own framework, we’ve adapted the features we need from a variety of pre-existing frameworks. My guess is this will be the case for most web development shops building an app that goes beyond the basic app. I’m not saying that basic apps are bad, but i’m noticing a niche developing in the web app world. There are apps that do too much, which this new framework movement is rebelling against, and there are apps that do too little, which is all too often the aim of these new frameworks.

The success of these new frameworks will depend on providing a seamless setup experience for the basic web developer, while also allowing the more advanced web developer to customize and tweak the code to their needs.

Looking for some solid free software? Here is a good start. Ten of the better known open source resources.

Has this ever happened to you: You’ve ordered some new gee wiz gadget from an online store and find your self obsessively checking the UPS package tracking to see where your gee wiz gadget currently is? Ever wish you could see it on a map?

Here’s a couple of sites using google maps API I found.

Trulia Real Estate
MapBuilder.net
smugMaps

We are actively recruiting folks interested in participating in our beta program. Intervals beta program participants get to use intervals free for 3 months, then 50% off for the next 9 months.

If you are a freelancer, small business, or department of a large business and are having a difficult time managing tasks and tracking time, intervals may be perfect for you.

» Learn more about Intervals

» Sign-up for the beta program today

1. Be Narrow
2. Be Different
3. Be Casual
4. Be Picky
5. Be User-Centric
6. Be Self-Centered
7. Be Greedy
8. Be Tiny
9. Be Agile
10. Be Balanced

Read the details here: http://evhead.com/2005/11/ten-rules-for-web-startups.asp

Our guiding principals for Intervals development are very agreeable with Evan Williams’ thoughts. We have been around for over 6 years, so we’re not a start-up, but our decision to develop a web-based product definitely makes part of our company a start-up. We see many companies, and especially small companies, trying to niche products in the market for the new type of consumer. We are optimistic that Intervals will fill a need for folks who need a no-nonsense time and task management system.

We’ll see how it goes in 2006 – Michael

I saw this link on my link back section. It’s a nice showcase of the new multi-user features available for the Flash Player.

http://collab.nl/index2.html

We are actively developing Intervals; web based task & time management. We originally developed Intervals for our own company and we have had so much interest that we are redeveloping it and will offer it as a subscription based service.

If you are interested in following the project, please visit intervals101.com.

>> Michael

“That gap is closing. Take a look at Google Suggest. Watch the way the suggested terms update as you type, almost instantly. Now look at Google Maps. Zoom in. Use your cursor to grab the map and scroll around a bit. Again, everything happens almost instantly, with no waiting for pages to reload.”

Read more here

>>The fact that a page has to reload in order for the user to retrieve content is quickly becoming a thing of the past. It’s great that the majority of the web browsers are compliant enough that we can start using the Ajax concept. –Jaime