Category → Handcraft
Tweak, don’t pivot
Back in March we wrote a short post called The Influence of Unintended Use, which highlighted our growing concern over how some people were using Handcraft.
New in Handcraft: better performance, drag & drop file uploads and more
The past few weeks we’ve made a lot of improvements to the underlying architecture running Handcraft, which has led to several speed gains. But that’s not all; we’ve also released a new javascript library, Live.js, introduced drag & drop file uploads in the editor and file management screens, and fixed tons of bugs.
Basic and Premium accounts now available
Basic and Premium subscriptions to Handcraft are now available. Both these plans are aimed at more frequent use of Handcraft, when you need more than one prototype, work with more users and upload more files. Our premium plan also lets you host your prototype on a custom domain, ideal for presenting or sharing a prototype without your clients having to know it’s Handcraft. Check out which features are available on each plan on our plans & pricing page.
Thanks for helping us test Handcraft
If you signed up for our beta in the past 9 months, you’ll also be receiving an email today with instructions on how to activate your account. On June 1st, we’ll be asking all of our beta users to activate their accounts, but if you do so before then, you’ll get an additional free month as thanks for helping us test Handcraft during beta. Without your feedback we wouldn’t be where we are today.
Slides from our talk at Mangrove
Earlier today we gave a talk at full-service web dev company Mangrove about Handcraft and the way it fits into the production process as a HTML prototyping solution. We thought we might share the slides here.
HTML prototyping lies at the crossroads of two approaches towards developing a website: fidelity and functionality. The higher the fidelity, the more definition and resolution something has, and the more it communicates. But at the same time, websites are interactive and expose some kind of functionality. We compared the two and set out traditional processes (design, wireframing, development and the final result) along two axes. HTML prototyping (and by proxy, Handcraft) is a convenient path between these points.
See the slides below – slide 7 gives you an overview of the above (NB: some of the slides contain some Dutch!)
Many thanks to Mangrove for letting us come over and talk about Handcraft!
How we changed our name at the last minute
Quplo is now Handcraft.
That’s a big change. We wanted to share some of the decisions we made to get here and how we’re dealing with the implications. Continue reading →
Why interactive prototyping and Balsamiq Mockups can live together in peace
Balsamiq Mockups’ new manifesto includes a chapter about prototyping. Here’s an excerpt:
Wireframing + real running code is way better than prototyping
We consciously decided not to let our users specify interactivity other than the ability to link wireframes together into a storyboard.
Two reasons:
- We’re not huge fans of building large prototypes.
- Letting you specify behaviours and click-actions would inevitably turn Mockups into a much more complex tool
Geez, Peldi! We’re hurt! 
The Influence of Unintended Use
Let’s say you’ve got a startup. You’re building a service and stick to the plan. But your beta users find your service useful for things you either hadn’t foreseen or didn’t consider core functionality. What do you do? Do you stick to the plan, or adjust? Flickr emerged from an image tool that was orginally built for a massively multiplayer online game called Game Neverending. It’s a success story of adjusting, but does that success story apply to other startups?
We don’t know, but it’s a situation we’re facing and we wanted to share it with you.
A great example of unintended use, courtesy of www.museumofunintendeduse.com/
Looking back on the quest for payments
For the past two months we’ve been finalising agreements with various service providers so that we can finally, finally get our payments up and running. If you’ve been following us for the past few months, you’ll know of our adventures trying to find a payment service provider that would meet our needs while also supporting a Dutch business.
Scatter – Ajax without coding
Asynchronous Javascript and XML. With a mouthful of technical geekery, the term AJAX is actually pretty lame (no offence guys) as it mystifies a process that could’ve been described as something my mum would understand:
“Replacing webpage contents without doing a full page reload”.
Sure, Ajax can do a lot more than that, but for the sole purpose of dynamically refreshing parts of a webpage you still find yourself getting jQuery and doing javascript coding.
We think that shouldn’t always be necessary, especially when building an HTML prototype.
The Payment Provider Shortlist, Part 3: Spreedly
(This is part 3 in a series on payment and subscription billing providers. Read part 1: FastSpring or part 2: Chargify)
Over the past few weeks, things have been coming together pretty well around payment solutions for Quplo. One thing that’s been especially insightful is our growing understanding of the various services, contracts and companies involved in just being able to sell your stuff online in 2010. It’s sort of terrifying that this problem still hasn’t been solved concretely for worldwide businesses.
But that’s a story for another time. Today we want to talk a bit about Spreedly, who, as the part of the chain that our users will be interacting with, also seems to be the only part of the chain that actually knows what it’s doing and cares about how it presents itself.
