Category → The Status Quo
Improving the website production process – Part 1: Exporting to development platforms
If you’re involved in the website production process, chances are your job involves wireframing, visual design, prototyping, development or a combination thereof. More often than not, the process involves designers tossing designs “over the fence” to a development team. Regardless of what side of the fence you’re on, it’s clear that there’s room for improvement.
The website production process.
Adventures in integrating payment services as a Dutch business
We’d been developing and testing our PayPal subscription flow for Quplo for a month and had almost gotten it completely working when PayPal suddenly decided to change their user-facing checkout wizard. Our code was suddenly broken, and x.com‘s documentation hadn’t been updated to reflect any changes. Nor had the web service code. Even though we probably could have figured it out by looking around the internet and asking people, this entire experience gave us a queasy feeling: pulling the rug out from under developers’ feet, even if it’s just the Sandbox, doesn’t inspire confidence.
5 wireframing & prototyping tools doing something unique or different
In our search for other people in the industry working on wireframing and prototyping software, we looked around on Twitter for lists of prototyping apps. To our dismay, we didn’t really find many that had more than a few people and companies listed. So we decided to create our own.
Balsamiq’s Peldi already created a great list of wireframing tools, so we decided to focus on prototyping since we believe there’s a significant difference between the two, and we came up with a list which we’ve added to our Twitter account. You can follow it here.
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”.
Wireframing is not prototyping
When you look around the web for prototyping software, you find a lot of wireframing apps pretending to be prototyping tools. There’s a difference between the two, though. Continue reading →
5 innovations in text editing and IDEs
Text editors and development environments are in dire need of some innovation. We looked around the Web to see if there were any interesting editors out there that were making waves in this area. Here are five innovations that caught our attention. 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?
Why we’re not building yet another visual prototyping tool
In our last few posts, we talked about our philosophy, designing in the browser, and how we think the modern IDE sucks. These two ideas might seem unrelated, but in fact they’re essential to what we’re trying to do with Quplo: build a workspace that makes it easy to create interactive prototypes by writing code. Continue reading →
The modern IDE sucks
Here’s a screenshot of a modern IDE, the Eric Python IDE:
This screenshot is a great example of what’s wrong with IDEs today (here’s one of Eclipse or one of Visual Studio for comparison). Although it’s an extreme example, all the windows, buttons, icons, selections, lines of differently coloured text and other distractions hardly craft a focused workspace. In fact, what are integrated development environments even designed to do?
“IDEs are designed to maximize programmer productivity by providing tightly-knit components with similar user interfaces”
– Wikipedia’s article on IDEs
Yet, according to Wikipedia, “because an IDE is by its very nature a complicated piece of software, this high productivity only occurs after a lengthy learning process.” For the purpose of creating web-based prototypes, we think things can be different – simpler, more intuitive, and more integrated.
The same Wikipedia article mentions that an IDE “provides many features for authoring, modifying, [and] deploying software” and “increases developer productivity”. That sounds a lot like what a tool used to develop interactive prototypes should do.
The modern IDE sucks. We think designing in the browser allows you to get away from overly complicated IDEs with huge learning curves and arrive in a friendlier environment where productivity and ease of use are paramount. We’re working on a user interface for Quplo based around these ideas. Stay tuned.
In our follow-up post, How we redesigned our editor, we talk about exactly what kind of changes we want to bring to the IDE.
