day -10: Website in the Works
Daily stories from the ambadoo team, behind the scenes, dev-stats and other random stuff.
Website In the Works
For you who’ve followed ambadoo know that ambadoo.com has been static, very static. The current site is a temporary old one that we put up when we realized the other was broke. The old site was connected to the application that we removed, hence, broken.
It’s been hanging there, waiting for the real thing to happen and was never meant to do any magic more than saying Hello World.
We’re re-building the site from _blank. It was time to hot it up and actually explain what we’re doing a little bit more in-depth this time.
Web App, Hot.
We’ve good flow in the Web App development now with lots of small goodies implemented. Some UI stuff, like maps on addresses but the more interesting part is in the Facebook integration, which is about to be really awesome!
We’re continue to fight against time on the iPhone development. Things are harder, and takes more time than we’re hoping but we’re making progress and by the end of this week we should have reach 100% functionality for this version. That might be only 5% of what we’re imagine we’d like to implement but it’s the five most important percentages.
This is a web app, not a native. It’s stunning what you can create with HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and some php programming. However, there are things that you can’t do from a web app and where native are still superior. We’ll continue to develop both to take advantage of what the two platforms has to offer.
day -26: Good Monday.
Daily stories from the ambadoo team, behind the scenes, dev-stats and other random stuff.
Good Monday!
It was another hot, beautiful day in Malmö, which we started off with our weekly sprint meeting, today focusing on the the client side. The back-end developers have been ‘locked in’, focusing on spiking whether or not we’ll rework the back-end now, or wait with it until later. There’s a lot of unused code which is nested making it hard to fix it. The time-box is set until tomorrow afternoon when we’ll decide which path to take.
iPhone + Facebook Connect
Last week we got the sharing working on the iPhone, though some hard coding for the proof-of-concept, while the back-end devs were got the Facebook Connect to work correctly. This week we’ll connect the two, so that you can log in with your Facebook account, then share your profile with another ambadoo user, and add each other.
Web App
You might ask yourself, what about the people that’s not an iPhone user? Are we thinking about them? From the very first thought about this system, universal & cross-platform was a given. A self-updating contact system wouldn’t work if it wasn’t for everyone.
We’re now in the works of developing a web app, that everyone with decently new ‘smart phones’ can access. Daniel Krusenstråhle, a Malmö University student is doing this as a continuation of a semester project he did earlier this year. It’s awesome to have him onboard so that you can access your contacts from anywhere, not only the iPhone owners.
Git & Codebase
How lovely it is with tools & collaborative platforms that make it a joy to work together, or at least simplify the process. I remember the days with USB sticks and external hard-drives. I’m happy to remember them and that they’re gone forever. We’re using Codebase as our main tool for repositories & ticket system. It’s awesome. Even if I’m doing virtually no coding at all I get an overview of what’s going on in the project, I can report bugs and new features and best of all things: if that hard-drive blow, we don’t care.
I’m a really newbie on Git but it’s love at first sight. You can work on the same code, even the same files and still it doesn’t get messy. All version controlled and smooth. The iPhone coders can work on the app and when they’ve made a new commit everyone can do a git pull and install the new version. Could it get easier? No.
Blog + Website
As with everything else, the website & the blog has been in freeze mode for way too long time. I did some minor changes today, but more’s coming. I’ve you’ve ever read the blog you might have noticed the lowercase text. It’s normalized. I admit, lowercase isn’t always a nice to read, though in logos & titles it’s still a clear winner.
Two other experimental additions made today was the real-time page, and disqus comment system. Real time, bring in discussions from around the web about ambadoo. Not sure about this feature, especially not now when there’s not much happening. It might be nice later when you can actually see a flow in it.
The disqus comment system enable you to comment, logged in with either via Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, OpenID etc. to make it easier. So don’t be shy, drop us a line.
Oh yeah, please hit us with ideas and feedback on what we can do with the blog to make it more alive.