Category → Design Decisions
E-mail signatures are bad UX
Recognize this?
E-mail signatures. Meh.
Right! It’s your company’s e-mail signature! And it sucks. Not because of the disclaimer. Not because of the environmental note. No, it sucks because of the predefined “Kind regards”.
How the browser roundhouse-kicked Chuck Norris
It struck me this week. Browsers nowadays are so kick-ass that they outdo Chuck Norris’s badassness. The current momentum of skyrocketing browsergoodness can’t even be surpassed by Holland winning the worldcup next Sunday. Or perhaps it can, but let’s have a look anyway at where browsers are today shall we? Pure for the the sake of the great joyride that we’re in for when going retro.
Chuck Norris showing off his badassness.
CSS code completion in your browser
It’s been three days since we introduced Common Sense Code Completion, the HTML code completion addon to CodeMirror for speeding up your browser based editing experience. Today we’re adding CSS support using the same common sense approach as last time.
There’s a video for you to check out, demo to play with and source code to grab. And there was much rejoicing.
Introducing prototype templates: redesign your website with quplo
Over the past week we’ve been working on a great new feature called prototype templates. We decided to build it to solve two problems. First, when you create a new prototype, you’re faced with an empty editor, which is fine for advanced users but not great for newbies since they don’t know what to do next. Secondly, sometimes you want to create a new prototype based on one of your existing prototypes, and that involves copying and pasting a whole bunch of stuff that could be automated.
So we automated it.
Common Sense Code Completion
I remember when I first learned HTML. It must’ve been around ’97 or so. Over the years I’ve memorized an arsenal of tags, attributes and values that I know how to use. Now whenever my HTML knowledge lets me down (like when adding an encoding type to a file upload form) I rely on code completion or Google. I bet you’re no different.
Quplo is intended for designers and developers with a strong passion for HTML, and building a prototype in quplo introduces nine new tags. Only the <page> tag will do at first, but in order to create reusable parts of HTML, work with real data or mock up a functional sign in form you will need to master all nine of those tags. In order to familiarize you with these new tags we’ve built code completion into our browser-based editor. It adds to the kickass user experience that we’re trying to achieve with Quplo. In fact, in some cases our code completion seems more useful than what regular desktop IDEs such as Visual Studio tend to offer when you’re writing HTML. And that’s odd, because Quplo’s code completion does so little! We just used common sense. That’s why we call it “Common Sense Code Completion”.
Imitation: the sincerest form of flattery?
Lately we’ve been working on the promotional marketing site for quplo. It’s a challenge. We’ve never built something like this before so it’s definitely uncharted territory, which means we need to do a lot of research and thinking in order to figure out what our site needs to say and how it should be presented. Continue reading →
Yo Dawg, I herd you like to eat your own dogfood
So we put Quplo in yo Quplo so you can prototype while u prototype.
And so we did.
Being developers, we know the difference between testing your own app and using it and there’s no other way to get that end-user experience than by taking it out for a spin. So, in the best tradition of eating your own dogfood, Rahul set off to build the Quplo marketing site with… Quplo.
The funny thing is that the current version of Quplo is actually built using an earlier version of Quplo. So Rahul is building Quplo using Quplo that was built using Quplo. Yo Dawg, time for a history lesson. Continue reading →
Writing code is about writing
Here’s a funny thing about writing code: you’re writing. That’s something IDEs tend to sort of ignore by taking up screen real estate with all these power controls. Perhaps an editor that focuses on writing, and actually protects that part of the process pretty heftily, could offer something new?
How we redesigned our editor
It’s been a little while since our previous post. Suffice it to say we’ve been busy for the past week redesigning our editor. I thought we’d talk a little about how that came about.
At its core, Quplo is a code editor. In this code editor, you write what basically amounts to a microlanguage inside HTML. For instance, you write “<page>” to specify a new page in your prototype. And you write “<layout>” to specify a layout. We’ve created a few of these tags that we hope will help designers and developers work together to create interactive prototypes using a browser.
That’s the context. But what did we do this past week? Continue reading →
