Hi everyone, I hope you’ve had a nice easter. I’ve just completed the first mockup for the company website. I would love to know what you guys think and any suggestions are welcome. Remember it is only the first release so there is plenty of room for improvement! I’ve also noticed that we’re getting quite alot of visits, yet no one seems to comment! This would be a great time for you to do so!
I was browsing the blogosphere today when I read an interview with Steve Poland, one of the questions asked: Aren’t you worried about telling the world your start-up idea? After reading his reply, it made me think. What’s the point in keeping Juvely a secret any longer? As said before our idea is already out there, we’re just trying to improve existing solutions. Luca and I are both extremely passionate about the application. I think it’s time we let you guys know exactly what we’re working on. I’m not going into detail with all the exact features because things could change. [Another blog discussing keeping your ideas secret with links - Luca]
So what is Juvely & why have we built it?
Juvely is a web based help desk application. It’s aimed at small to medium sized businesses. We’re aware that there is strong competition already out there, however, a lot of it is stupidly over priced and badly designed. We’re trying to fill this void, I’ve run hosting companies in the past, for example, a friend and I ran a hosting company – we had near to 100 clients, we tried many help desk solutions although most of them were time consuming and badly designed, and those that we deemed “ok� were way overpriced. We, as students understand that running a business does cost money, although why should you be paying over the odds for applications which really aren’t worth the time of day? I’ve been working on Juvely for over a year. When I first came up with the concept, I did a lot of research into the market, and concluded that most of these help desks were bloated, hard to use and gave you way too many features (half of which you wouldn’t use anyway – so why pay for them?).
What do we think is important?
I’ll be honest, we don’t have a “final� feature list yet, we are still coming up with possible features, and we evaluate then decide whether they would really beneficial to the user. Following the idea of simple, sexual and smart sums it up nicely. Here is our key feature list so far.
What now?
That’s about as much as can be said at the moment, we still have features to think about. Another thing to mention is we will ALWAYS be open to suggestions and feedback from our customers. As we see it, at the end of the day, you’re paying for the service we are providing, why shouldn’t we listen to you and implement the features you want?
Over the last few months we have been hard at work moving towards the first version, we hope to have a beta version out by the summer, and then get onto building a business. We aren’t yet sure of all the details but we will let you know in due course. Don’t worry though, we aren’t planning to make a quick sell out, we are in it for the long haul.
Now you know what the app does, if you are interested you might want to sign up to the beta, when we go live, we’ll let you know asap!
Over time as I have AJAXified more and more of Juvely we have unfortunately had more and more little Javascript code blocks spread around the page. On the dashboard I think it was 4 or 5 codeblocks each with only about 3 lines of Javascript within them. I thought this was rather inefficient, so I was going to write a helper to store each block, and then output it all at the end, fortunately CakePHP has something that does just this built in!
The Javascript helper allows to cache all the code put through the codeBlock() function and then either output it at the end of the view, or include it from a seperate file. I decided to output it at the end of the view as this seemed more suitable for our uses. To enable this you simply need to include the Javascript helper in your controller and then put this somewhere in your view:
$javascript->cacheEvents();The problem with this is that you have to put it in every view you want the Javascript buffered, and you might forget, so instead open up the code for the Javascript helper (cake/libs/view/helpers/javascript.php) and set the following variables at the top of the class:
var $_cacheEvents = true;
var $_cacheToFile = false;
var $_cacheAll = true;Right, so how do you use it? Well simple, you just need to pass your code through $javascript->codeBlock() and tada! If like me you don’t current do this, you might want to do what I did to avoid horrible multiline PHP strings argg! I used PHPs output buffering functions to grab the code and then send it to the $javascript->codeBlock() function, I even made a nice little helper for it:
< ?php
class MiscHelper extends Helper
{
var $helpers = array('javascript');
function jsBlockStart()
{
ob_start();
}
function jsBlockEnd()
{
$this->javascript->codeBlock(str_replace("\t", "", ob_get_clean()));
}
}
?>Then I just need to enclose my Javascript in the tags from the helper like so:
< ?php $misc->jsBlockStart(); ?>
alert('This code is buffered!;');
< ?php $misc->jsBlockEnd(); ?>
Feel free to share this, and if anyone has an account for the CakePHP Bakery to post it there!
Some light entertainment
Here are a couple of links to distract you from your real work for a few minutes.
First, a little video from the game The Punisher which some Aussie I know made:
http://www.loreindustries.com/flash/PunisherHill.html
Second, a nice little addictive flash game. Please take note of the warnings that it is very addictive and you will waste many hours playing it:
http://www.handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/
Anyway, back to work on Juvely now, we have set a deadline for when we are going to start the beta, and it isn’t very far away! Eeeeek!