Web App: Juvely

My first post in a long while. I’ve not been away, I’m actually working really hard. I’ll give you a little update of what I’ve been up to and then I’ll fill you in on where we are going with our products.

I’ve decided that it would be best for me to leave my current university and apply for another. My reason is that I’ve found passion in my life. I’m not talking about with my girlfriend but with design. I’ve completely migrated from my programming routes and gone full time into design. And all I can say is that I absolutely love it. I’ve received an unconditional offer from another university to study “Design for Digital Media“. So it feels I’ve pretty much wasted the last two years of my education I’ve learned a lot of very important life lessons and have really realised where I want to take my career. Now that I’m an official university drop out until september, I’ll be freelancing full time (which is working out quite nicely) and devoting all other spare time to work with our apps!

..So what’s happening then?

Keepsy

Firstly we want to launch Keepsy (the concept of the idea is up and running). The reason behind this is fairly simple, it’s a great little application. It’s really handy and I’ve really taken to it and think a lot of people could benefit from its simplicity. I’ve got some great design updates planned for it, streamlining the user interface and experience, removing bloat and unnecessary UI functionality. Here’s the progress with the current design. (Yep I’m aware that the little photos are exactly the same as twitter, it’s just a concept).

Theres a couple of possible paths we could take with Keepsy. We could launch it as a beta-super-secret-invite-only app, hopefully create some buzz and gather a following. However, we are leaning towards just fully releasing it into the wild. This is still a decision to be made. We hope to have it all done and dusted as soon as possible, most likely a couple of weeks.

Juvely

We have got some great plans (theres a surprise?). However, we are going to put this on hold (yet again) until summer. I’ll be heading to Exeter for a week (to stay with Luca) to finally get it all done and dusted. It’s been an extremely long time, we’re still extremely passionate about the app, it’s just restraints that have held us back. It’s funny to think this all started when I was 16.

Deer & Spiller

This will become the registered parent company for all of our future applications - it’ll be our blog as well. The design is pretty much finished, it just needs to be coded and integrated with wordpress. Once we’ve got the site fully launched, we’ll register the business, hopefully getting everything sorted out (bank, contracts etc) then I hope to write a series of articles helping other young students go about setting up an online business. As well as post tutorials and any other bits and bobs we’re working on.

I’m not a fan of update posts but I thought, its been a while, the loyal readers (yes all 7 of you) might be interested to know where we stand.

Peace out!

This week has been rather busy, we have got quite a lot done, but not quite enough to show yet! Here is what we have been up to and what we hope to do over the next couple of weeks…

The chat section is near enough finished, we just need a few GUI changes here and there, we have started creating an API and an Adobe AIR application! (If you want some cool links on creating an API or Adobe AIR app check out my keepsy feed!)

While I have been busy coding, James got carried away while tinkering with the Knowledgebase UI…

So, yep we shall have a new UI at some point for Juvely, we have also got redesigns lined up for the Juvely marketing site, creation of the Deer&Spiller site (our company name) and integration with the blog. I think James has ideas for a Keepsy redesign floating around too!

Resources on the server are getting a bit tight so I am considering moving to Slicehost (which I keep typing as Slidehost). There is nothing wrong with (mt) by Slicehost are cheaper and they allow you to build your server from scratch as you need it, which will allow us to save on memory.

Oh, and inauguration of the company!

Whoa no posts for two months? We have been slacking! Unfortunately over the last couple of months James and I have had loads of work to do for uni and haven’t had much chance to work on Juvely. Thinks have been progressing, slowly. The chat section is starting to take shape which is good, we planned to get loads done over the holidays but I stupidly decided to say to my boss I wouldn’t mind working every day for two weeks. Hmm. Anyway, we are both free from other commitments now so we have been pushing on with Juvely. Or we were, until it became apparent that somebody left the PSDs in Scotland…. So we decided to get started with something different.

James and I have both had a few ideas for other apps we would like to see come into life on the big wide web. Unfortunately most of them have had flaws such as being too big or not having a good enough revenue stream. The next idea we were going to try once Juvely had been finished was a simple social bookmarking site, think Delicious mixed with Twitter. I expect something similar had been done before but we decided we were going to try it anyway.

James thought it would be a good idea to have this done before Juvely to get some exposure so he looked into having someone else coding it. The best price he got would have been £200 each! He did a bit of bartering and managed to bring this down to £100 each if I do the XHTML and he does some designing for this guy later. Still, I am a bit of a cheapscate so I decided to look into it some more and thought it seemed rather simple, so I decided to give it a go!

So far I have been working on it for about 12 hours and have got most of it done. The main challenges involved relearning Ruby on Rails as I haven’t used it for so long! Still we have got quite a lot left todo but we plan on launching by the end of the year (yes I know, that is four days time, but I think we can do it!).

Ill leave you with a screenshot of our todo list so you can see how much has got to be done. Unfortunately I have got to work tonight and all day tomorrow so I won’t get any more done until Sunday. Its gonna be tight…..