Articles by admin
User and events tracking for early products – part 1
It’s rarely too early to instrument a web or mobile app with user and event tracking services. Sure, it’s ideal to only track the metrics needed to answer specific questions, yet it’s not often the case that those questions are known during the early stages of product development. It’s been our experience that we can …
MVP In Four Weeks
On a recent project, my client set the ambitious goal of launching their MVP (minimum viable product) with just four weeks of development time. The entire project was budgeted for just two months, and we needed to launch midway so that we could gather data and user feedback, then iterate on those learnings. (At the …
Controlling embedded Vimeo video using javascript
We are embedding video from Vimeo on a site we are working on and wanted to change the behavior of playing a video so that it would go back to the first frame after the video was done playing, rather than staying on the last frame. Since it ended up being harder than expected and …
Erector views – undefined method `default_url_options’
I’m posting this because it took me too long to figure this out. Hope it saves someone else some trouble. If you want to use named route helpers to generate urls in your erector widgets you need to include ActionController::UrlWriter in your class, like so: class Views::Layouts::BasicPage < Erector::Widgets::Page include ActionController::UrlWriter … end
SmartyCard Launches!
Our client SmartyCard launched in early March at the DEMO conference picking up the People’s Choice Award. SmartyCard is a learning site that offers kids rewards for completing a variety of interactive learning games. Kids are able to ‘learn, earn and play’ grade-appropriate games while earning real and virtual rewards.
Compass, the 960 CSS framework, and Semantic Markup
Finding your way to meaningful grid layouts using the Compass framework My problem: Grid layouts – crazy, sexy, cool. Presentation classes in my semantic markup – neither sexy nor cool, and arguably crazy. These days I can’t help but notice a burgeoning awareness regarding seasoned typographical principles and practices and lively discussions around the best …
Absolutize for jQuery
We’re using jQuery for one of our current projects. Today I found myself in an IE situation that could be solved by using the prototype librarie’s absolutize method. I couldn’t find any equivilent implementation that I liked in jQuery so I went ahead and ported absolutize from prototype to jquery. Download Here It can be …
Generic Custom Argument Matching in EasyMock
EasyMock is a clean, simple library for creating mock objects. It provides a whole range of facilities for declaring our expectations of the method call interactions on the mock including call count, call order, return values, exceptions, and argument matchers. Unfortunately, the argument matchers provide a limited set of argument expectations and a somewhat cumbersome …