day -15: hope & girl power
Daily stories from the ambadoo team, behind the scenes, dev-stats and other random stuff.
Mission Accomplished. What we set out in the beginning of this week’s sprint we also managed to complete. The sprint demo went really well, and apart from some minor things we kept this sprint.
Current State
As it is now you can log in, either as an existing user or create an account through Facebook Connect. When you’re logged in, you can share/broadcast your profile over Bluetooth or WiFi. We’re already seeing some difficulties with this technique and will move over to a server/geo based connection system in the future. But it will have to do for now.
People nearby can then add you to their address book on the fly, conceptually it is like exchanging those business cards people did in the old days, before they added directly on twitter, facebook or linkedin.
That, plus actually being able to add & edit your profile, list contacts, view and contact a friend was pretty much what we limited the first version to. We’re close now :-)
New Backend Planning
There’s been some great changes in the API, from sending urls to only use json, a data-exchange format. Though we’re continuing to stabilize and clean up our existing back-end we’re starting the draft of a new backend, built on Neo4j, strictly using RESTful, OAuth 2.0, HATEOAS, and other open standards that makes an Open API awesome.
Girl Power
Currently we have only one iPhone developer, and as a matter of fact (as far as I know) the only female iPhone developer in the Öresund region, Ester Ytterbrink, which is pretty awesome! She’s fighting hard with the app, but it’s a heavy mission to be alone on, since everything has to be written from scratch more or less.
Rumors says that she’s getting company from next week – which would be such a relief for all of us. It’s a heavy burden to sit alone on things that’s taken another team several people months to complete. Hope we have.
#IAday
a collaboration between startup and some awesome students
I just came back from #IAday, which is where the IA Students of Malmö University presents their projects they’ve been working on the past semesters. We’ve had the pleasure of working with four great students; Daniel Krusenstråhle, Thomas Svensson, Anton Tibblin & Richard Persson. Late last year we started to examine what parts of ambadoo would be interesting for them, and us, to work on. We divided the team in two; one working on usability testing & user interface and the other team working on the API and the possibilities with that.
What came out of the projects is quite amazing. Most importantly we’ve got a closer connection between us and the university. I’ve always wanted to have a good collaboration with the institutes & research centers and this has proven us right. Close collaboration with students pay off. They are curious, open-minded and thinking outside the box by nature. And the best thing is that they force us as a company to re-think and re-evaluate our concepts and ideas.
The User Interface
Richard & Anton set out to test and improve the User Interface, with usability testing. The current front-end is pretty non-existing so doing tests on that was pointless. Instead we started from scratch to build mock-ups, converting them into a usable interfaces that could act as a dummy since there’s been no connection to the back-end.
The students focused mainly on how to edit & update the user profile, and the listing & contacting friends in an easy manner. Inline editing and jQuery elements to expand and minimize both profile sections & contact list was a clear response to the user testing.
The outcome is a very clear & easy navigable interface which we’ll definitely use elements from. If we look at existing address books like Google Contacts & Mac Address Book, the work by Anton & Richard is easily in competition with those big boys. It should be as easy to navigate and find friends as to keep them updated. Big up for you guys!
The API
From the very beginning we wanted to work with an Open API to create an ecosystem of developers that together can create a unified better system that we could ever do ourselves, and of course working with standards such as OAuth, OpenID, Microformats to make it easier to integrate with existing platforms and user bases. Thomas & Daniel decided to work with and examine the possibilities with the API, which is yet to be open.
First off the students looked at the possibilities; strengths & weakness of an Open API and some of the cases that was brought up was Auto-fill Registration Forms, Ambadoo – Yellow Pages updating, Contact Widgets & Apps built directly on the API.
To prove their point they went to build a Contact Widget and a Web App which they very cleverly called WebAppaDoo.
A:Widget.
A very simple little snippet to put on whatever site you have and want to show your contact information. Instead of hard-coding in your details let your ambadoo-profile update it to all your sites. It’s a totally customizable widget that can be a little contact button or a fully fledged “Business Card“. The point is, edit in one place, update on all sites. Just to try it out I did a customized Business Card suitable for for mobile visitors. I’m using petter.palander.se as my sole e-mail signature, which directs people to all my contact information instead of listing everything you usually do. Try it from your iPhone.
Here you have all the information you’ll need to get in touch with me. Obviously this looks different on a desktop browser than in your mobile, but the information is the same. All users on ambadoo will get a contact widget like this as default so they can direct their contacts and friends to this one spot where they collect all relevant information to connect.
This is the super simple code snippet. They made a code generator so that you could chose your own language & decide if you want it expandable or not. Some restrictions in the current version of the API does require a small PHP-proxy but we’ll change that so the only thing you need is this piece of code.
<!-- AMBADOO API WIDGET / START -->
<script type='text/javascript'>
userID = '9';
minimized = false;
toggable = true;
expanded = false;
expandable = true;
lang_phones = 'call'
lang_emails = 'email';
lang_addresses = 'locate';
lang_websites = 'web';
lang_jobs = 'jobs';
lang_button_on = 'contact info';
lang_button_off = 'minimize';
lang_profile_link = 'connect';
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/ambadoo_widget.js"></script>
<!-- AMBADOO API WIDGET / END -->
.
WebAppaDoo.
Just like it sounds, a web-app for ambadoo. No more, no less. In fact, the first functional application built on the ambadoo platform, made by two 2-year MAH students. Pretty damn cool. Thomas & Daniel acted 3rd party developers, using the API to create an app to keep your contacts up-to-date. They’ve done it very well, and exceeded all expectations. This really shows the power of an API and the Web as a platform. It’s a proof of concept and we just get a glimpse of what’s possible.
If you have an ambadoo account you can just log in with Facebook Connect and try it out. Works like charm. You can update your profile, contact & add friends and see notifications when someone’s added you.
No Limits.
This is what close collaboration with students can do. If you haven’t tried yet, you should. It’s been a very good journey, and I’ve got to know these guys very well and got insight in how they work at the university. We’ll continue working together, build amazing stuff and show the world what we can do with extremely limited resources. Your imagination is your only limit.