Web App: Juvely

Well I have finally got back from Cornwall, so now its time to push on with work, or so I thought!

I did some more for Juvely Mk II yesterday, but have come to a bit of a dead end. The actual logic code for Juvely is rather simple so I have got the main chunks done, unfortunately the complicated stuff is getting the interface code working correctly with this. This is a bit of a problem, as at the moment there isn’t an interface. The plan was for James and I to work on this seperately and merge it together. So yeah, Im at a bit of a dead end. I haven’t read Getting Real since about Christmas so Ill have a read through that to see if it can spark up any ideas.

In other news James needs some urgent work done that will probably take about a week, so there goes my push for Juvely…

Yay, at last exams are over, so now I can begin work on Juvely again! Well, not entirely true, as Im off to do some voluntary work for a week, but when I return its full speed ahead! Last week James and I had a chat and decided the best way for us to work would be implement the code and design seperately, until we are definate on what features we want, so yesterday I started work…

Originally we decided to create Juvely using the CakePHP framework because James didn’t know Rails much and we both planned to do the programming, in the end though it was me stuck doing it, and I grew to like CakePHP quite well. It is a nice framework, and clearly a lot of hard work has gone into it, but there are two things I don’t really like about it: PHP is an ugly language, and for some reason on our server is sssllloowww… Keepsy (written in Ruby on Rails) performs a lot more processing and intensive database queries than Juvely but seems a lot faster. Its not as if I have got it setup wrongly, they are both running as FastCGI applications under Lighttpd - you don’t get faster than that!

So anyway, yesterday I begin Juvely Mark II, in Rails. Just to give you an example of how I feel PHP is ugly, here are two identical statements in CakePHP then Rails. It is used to link the Tickets and TicketMessages models.

At the moment there is nothing really to show as I have only worked on it for about 5 hours, but I hope to add a much more Web 2.0 interface (I recently came across MoveMe, it has a really nice design but doesn’t look cheesy), and maybe even Google Gears integeration for offline usage.

Anyway, watch this space! For now here is a screenshot of what it looks like at the moment (not good…):

(P.S. This is also my first time posting with Wordpress 3, it looks very nice although it took ages for me to figure out how to attach an image as the form the ‘Insert To Post’ link is on doesn’t render correctly on Opera…)

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!