Code, Design, Designing Lean

Material Design for MVP

I’ve recently been building two prototype user interfaces, one for a mobile app the other a web-based dashboard. The mobile app prototype was built using a combination of Sketch and Apple’s Keynote presentation software. The dashboard had higher fidelity—a functional HTML/CSS/Javascript prototype interfacing with a light-weight JSON API.

I used this as an opportunity firstly to wrap my head around some of the design patterns for iOS 11, but also for trialling Google’s Material Design guidelines for this purpose.

There’s a lot to like about Material Design, especially for startups looking to develop a Minimum Viable Product. Continue reading →

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ecotrust/8632795882/
Code, Design, Sustainability

Random Hacks of Kindness Parramatta

This weekend I’ll be participating in the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon being held at the Western Sydney University “LaunchPad” near Penrith. To my understanding, this is the first RHoK being put on by the Parramatta crew.

It’s been a while since I’ve engaged in hackathon-style activities, but this one caught my attention given its emphasis on Western Sydney (now that I reside in the Blue Mountains, I’m keen to engage in more activities closer to home). But also because of the nature of the projects that are being pitched/developed across the weekend. Continue reading →

Code, Standards, Tips

Exploring SEO – Part 6: Technical matters – the invisible

It’s been, like, forever, since my last post in this series – feels like time to pick it up again and finish the series…

The suggestions in this post are focused on the “behind-the-scenes” elements of your site – to the untrained eye they may not be visible/obvious.

This post definitely sways towards the geek end of the spectrum (just a fair warning if that’s not your thing). However, even if you’re in management, it helps to understand these things for when you’re briefing your tech team.

Continue reading →

Code, NGOs & Nonprofits, Standards

FullCodePress

Just a quick note to say that the Web Standards Group FullCodePress is happening again in May this year. What’s FullCodePress?

Web teams from different countries take each other on to build a complete website for a charity in 24 hours. No excuses, no extensions, no budget overruns.

If you’re in a non-profit and would like to apply to be the lucky charity, check out the details and apply before Friday 17 Apr 2009…

Code

Campaign Monitor API for Python

Earlier in the week I made my first open-source code contribution to Google Code: a Python class that makes it easy to access some common functions of Campaign Monitor’s SOAP API.

It’s only a small contribution (and certainly not the most impressive piece of code I’ve ever written), but hopefully it’ll help someone. There’s some usage notes too on the wiki.

And of course the Campaign Monitor crew were kind enough to give it a bit of a plug too. Thanks! :)