threehv

We have published a bit more information about how we work – our Beautiful Code doctrine, the process that we follow and how we convert your ideas into tangible features.

One of the greatest things about RSpec is that the specifications you write not only prove that your code is doing what it should be doing, but also it provides a starting point for your technical documentation.

Which means you are secure enough in your development to add functionality like this:

ApplicationHelper greeting
- should say 'morning' between 4am and 12pm
- should say 'afternoon' between 12pm and 5pm
- should say 'evening' between 5pm and 9pm
- should say 'night' between 9pm and 4am

One of those tiny details that most people won’t even notice – but makes a subliminal impression on your users (in this case, greeting them with a “Good morning” or “Good evening” depending upon the time).

The Trade Counter Promotions site has been live for a few weeks now.

Built upon 3hv’s own ecommerce base (codenamed Marquez) on the Radiant platform, it communicates with a central database to ensure that all product entries are up to date, with data feeds coming straight from the suppliers.

Will Jessop organises the North West Ruby User Group (of which our own Leeds Ruby Thing is an offshoot).

He recently joined 37Signals as a sysadmin – and unfortunately his first week also coincided with a load of downtime on Basecamp and Campfire. As many of us depend upon their services, this prompted many of us to instantly put two and two together and scream “Damn you Will Jessop!”

After a business lunch (honestly, we were discussing code and software design for PizzaPowered) at Mr Foley’s we decided that “Damn you Will Jessop” needed building.  Luckily, Will’s first piece of deployed work was to add an API to the 37Signals’ status feed – perfect for our needs.

So a few days later, after a bit of HTML and Javascript coding – Damn you Will Jessop was born.  It shows a picture of Will when things are going well and an angry Caius shaking his fist as soon as 37Signals reports an error.

This caused a fair amount of laughter in the NWRUG IRC channel – and Will even mentioned it to his colleagues, who thought it was funny too.

Stupid joke sites like this may take up a couple of hours of our time, probably when we should be doing something else.  But it made me smile, a lot, and with that, work needn’t seem such a chore.

This is the first time I’ve disagreed with Horace Dediu.

He asks what’s in the deal for Nokia?

And comes to the conclusion that possible maps revenue is the only upside.

I disagree.

Nokia’s core problem is that when they were great, phones were hardware.

Now, phones are as much about the software as they are about the hardware.  This will become more and more the case as the phone becomes most people’s primary computing platform.

Nokia couldn’t go with Android – they would either ship stock-android, just the same as any other no-mark manufacturer.  Or they could customise android.  But Nokia is bad at software – they have no track record in that area, it doesn’t appear to be in their DNA.

So Nokia chose Windows Phone 7.  Microsoft is actually good at software.  Not as good as some of their competitors, but it is their core business and they know it well.

Couple a decent hardware manufacturer with a decent software manufacturer and you’ve got a winner?

Well, maybe – the entire thing rests on who else builds Windows 7 phones.  Will Nokia be top of the pile of the WP7 manufacturers or just A.N.Other?

D&G Educational have recently launched their new online store, a joint production of Telescope Studios and 3hv.

Built on the Spree platform, the site showcases the many products of D&G and uses custom shipping rules to calculate your delivery price, as well as taking payment via Paypal.

The marketplace, the economics, the entire dynamics of the ecosystem are completely different to the 80s and 90s.

But, after six hours with an Android phone (my two and half year old iPhone 3G is dying a slow death), there is one striking similarity.

The Mac had a wonderful desktop with user interface elements never seen before (although the idea of the GUI was bought from Xerox PARC, Apple added pull-down menus and icons) and a large investment in researching how these elements should be put together – which were written down into the infamous “Human Interface Guidelines”.  Windows had the same user interface elements (although as far as I am aware, Microsoft copied them without ever paying or even acknowledging where they came from) but it had no such research or guidelines (or rather they had guidelines but there was never any pressure to follow them).

The iPhone has a wonderful user interface with interactions never seen before (although touch screen phones and devices pre-date the iPhone by many years) but along with it comes a series of strict guidelines on how to build your user-interface – one very important one being that a tappable area should have a minimum physical size.  Android has the same user controls and interactions, but there is no consistency in their usage; one common example being a number of apps let you swipe a page off to the left to reveal the page to the right hand side.  But if you want to go back to the previous page, you don’t swipe rightwards, you press the back button.

A tiny detail.

And just like Mac versus Windows, it’s these tiny differences that add up to a feeling of frustration and dissatisfaction.  However as the cause of this dissatisfaction is so tiny you never know where to attribute it.  You just realise that you swear less and feel a little bit happier when using a Mac or iPhone.

PS: Don’t get me wrong, I can feel the potential in Android.  And widgets on the home screen is a great idea.

But the user-experience is shocking.

Sadly, most people buy purely on price, not experience.  And then wonder why they hate their computer and/or device.

3hv is pleased to announce that the Total Handling Solutions online store is now live and taking orders.

Built upon the Spree platform, Total Handling is the first of a suite of sites that synchronise with a central products database.  It displays those products and allows you to pay, either via Paypal or using secure encryption to allow you to enter your card details directly.

Technologies that look interesting and need further investigation:

• Redis: the only ‘NoSQL’ database that interests me
• Resque: I love queueing and messaging and Resque looks like the simplest, most performant, way to get started (especially when Redis gains clustering)
• JSON: not really a new technology but the idea of having a server-side app that is nothing more than a JSON API is gaining traction
• Backbone.js: I really liked the look of Sproutcore but it was just too heavy, backbone gets us many of the benefits without the weight
• Mustache.js: No point having a JSON API if you can’t display your results on the page
• Sencha Touch: Commercial and/or GPL but produces amazing results