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At Blue Mango Learning Systems we primarily develop two applications:
Distributing a product for Mac, PC and running a hosted web service is a lot of work, especially when there are only two people in your company. Therefore we have had to choose our development tools very carefully. For us, the most important aspect of any development tool is our ability to quickly iterate over a product until we feel that we have it "right". Really, for us, all other considerations fall way behind. If we can't iterate efficiently then we are going to move on to another tool.
Ruby on Rails has proven to be a great tool for this type of development. There are a lot of people getting into Ruby on Rails so I thought some of you might be interested in my experience. I think that ScreenSteps Live is an interesting case study in the benefits and drawbacks of Rails, so over the next couple of months I will be posting some of the things that I have learned as I have dived into the Rails world.
First, a little background on myself as a programmer and ScreenSteps Live as a web app.
I have no background as a programmer. Well, almost none. We first got the idea for ScreenSteps Live back in late 2006 or early 2007. At that time I had never even attempted to program a web application. I knew some basic html, enough to throw up a web page, and enough php to do some basic includes. But nothing beyond that. I also had programmed some smaller desktop apps with Revolution but only after extensive help from Trevor.
But we needed a web app. Trevor wasn't going to have time to do it so we decided to outsource. I won't go into all of the details on this but our first attempt didn't work out so well. Suffice it to say that after 2 months we had nothing and were out a few thousand dollars. All I can say is be very meticulous in checking out the people you are hiring to develop your stuff. We weren't and it came back to bite us in the form of lost time and lost money.
Round here we develop all of our desktop applications using Revolution. I recently attended the RunRevLive 08 conference in Las Vegas where one of the speakers was Robert Cailliau, the co-developer of the web. Robert spoke on “Programming systems and the birth of the Web”. Following a very interesting presentation on how the web came about he discussed some characteristics he thought a good programming language should have:
His point was that you spend most of your time reading your code, not writing it. Therefore the language should be easy to read and understand. Since Revolution uses an english-like syntax it fulfills all of Robert’s criteria.
(more…)Over the last few weeks we have been shifting the primary focus of ScreenSteps Live to manuals. In doing so we have been looking at ways to easily integrate the manuals you create into a variety of different applications.
One feature we recently added was the ability to fetch a list of manual lessons that has been filtered by tags. For example, if I have a manual for my web application I can tag all of the lessons that discuss managing users with "user management". I could then add some javascript (supplied by ScreenSteps Live) to my user management screens that displays all lessons from my manual tagged with "user management". As I continue to add lessons and make updates based on user feedback those lessons pertaining to "user management" would automatically show up in my web application.
We just submitted ScreenSteps to Apple's downloads site yesterday and this morning it was listed as Staff pick and the featured download in the Productivity section. Here are the links: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/ After you get here you need to click on the Staff Picks tab.
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/productivity_tools/
