Bare Naked App

I interviewed Tim O’Reilly on Friday for Vitamin, and at the end of the conversation we had a chat about Amigo.

He swore to secrecy :) and I told him what the idea was. He said “Wow, now that’s a great idea. I can’t believe that hasn’t been done yet. How are you planning on marketing it?” I told him about our marketing strategy and how we wanted to get certain vertical markets for the closed Beta. He gave me some amazing ideas and tips. He also said it was important that we get enough people in on the Beta, so the potential opposition would be discouraged from trying to launch a direct competitor.

It’s not every day that I get free advice from one of the industry’s sharpest thinkers. Thanks Tim!

I’m doing a 1-day workshop called A-Z: How to Build a Web App. Here’s a list of some of the topics I’ll be hitting:

• Making sure your idea is financially Viable
• Choosing your hardware platform
• Setting a budget
• How to cut costs
• Putting together your team
• Legal issues and lawyers
• Setting up e-commerce
• Timescales and deadlines
• Marketing
• Tech support
• Scaling
• Things we’ve learned

If you’re planning or building a web app, you’ll find this day extremely valuable. Seats are selling pretty quick, so if you’re planning on coming, best to grab your seat now.

We’re all moved into our new office (with shiny new desks and everything) and Amigo is back on the conveyor belt. Here’s a quick tour of our office and Ryan to give you an update on the latest issue with PayPal.

RSS readers, view the video here.

I’ve been getting some emails with questions about my process for logos and layouts, so I thought I would post some of them here with my answers:

How long do you sketch before moving to the computer?
Well, the short answer is: as long as it takes. I have strong opinions about hopping on to the computer too soon, but, that is because I am very observant of my work habits and understand what works for me. It’s different for everyone, but I find that when I start moving stuff around on screen without having a solid idea, I end up losing sight of the concept. What it comes down to for me is: the computer is a precise tool and my sketchbook is an imprecise tool. By using an imprecise tool first, it allows me to get my brain working on the idea rather than my hands working on the execution. It’s a cart-before-the-horse situation.

In the case of Amigo, I did something I rarely do: I showed the Carsons (the “client”) my sketches. This doesn’t work for everyone, and you really have to get that sorta gut feeling about a client. Some clients get really freaked out by seeing just sketches, and no amount of explaining that they are roughs will quell them. I knew I could show the Carsons my initial ideas and have them understand that I wasn’t showing them final ideas. They realized that they were actually getting the better end of the deal: more ideas to choose from up front.

What’s your next step after sketches/what programs do you use?
After I am done sketching, I jump into Adobe Illustrator. I know a lot of people who have a terrible fear of Illustrator, which is a shame, because it’s a very powerful and useful program. “Why not Photoshop?,” you might ask. Well, Photoshop is a damn fine program too, but I don’t like it for logo work (unless there is something concerning the logo that Photoshop inherently does better, eg. anything dealing with photography manipulation). I learned Illustrator before Photoshop, so that may have something to do with it, but Illustrator feels very fast for fleshing out my ideas, especially for heavy shape editing or color and font play. What’s more, I think it’s extremely important to create a vector version of your logo so that you aren’t tied to specific resolutions or dimensions; you can quickly edit and be on your merry way.

What kind of sketchbook do you use?
Well, yes, it’s trendy, but I use a Moleskine Sketchbook. The binding is durable, I really like the paper quality, and it’s just the right size. Say what you will, but when you find a sketchbook you like, you stick with it.

Well, those were the most common ones I got, if you have any others, feel free to fire away in the comments.

I’m currently in Kenya, just outside Nairobi in the beautiful Rift Valley. (I was lucky enough to be invited to do some consulting on web strategy for an African wildlife conservation web site.)

It’s amazing how all I need is a web connection (in this case a satellite connection), and I can still to manage the building of Amigo. Let the work continue! Jason has just cranked out some more comps for the website. Here’s a sneak peak at the Buzz page (I’ve changed the strapline, obviously).

This is our environment right now. Yes we are moving offices. I know, I know, great timing huh? We have no telephones or Wi Fi yet so we’re effectively still working from home right now.

But despite our increased levels of disorganisation, Amigo is still ticking along. We received a letter of confirmation from the Patent Office, acknowledging our application for the trademark, and accepting our cheque for £250. So finger’s crossed!

While on the development front - Dave has assured us that we can expect a full Beta in around two weeks and Jason is busy in Philadelphia working on the web designs.

So at the moment Dave and Jason are doing all the work, while we spend our time putting Ikea desks together and getting ‘Allen-key’ wrist! Building web apps certainly is glam…

Amigo is a tricky beast as we’re not only accepting payments, we’re also paying people. Here’s how it works:

1. Person A pays Carson Systems (Amigo) with their credit/debit card. We use Secure Trading’s XPay module to do this.
2. Carson Systems generates an invoice (marked paid) and emails it to Person A
3. The money goes into Carson Systems’ bank account
4. Carson Systems uses the PayPal API to pay Person B

The last step is the really tricky one. Watch the video to see how we solved it!

RSS readers, view the video here.

We wrote the text for the website a while ago and passed it over to Jason, who has since produced some very stylish designs for the site’s homepage. However, there has been some debate on how to present the strapline for the app (or in simple terms, the sentence that explains what the app does).

Ideally, your strap would state exactly what your app does in simple language, in one neat sentence (max 5- 6 words). However, things are not always that simple. In our case things were complicated by the fact that we have two types of user. If we aimed the strapline at one type of user we would effectively alienate the other by completely ignoring their needs. It took us a while to get our heads around this one.

When we wrote the text in Word a couple of weeks ago we thought we had it pinned down. We would write a vague (catch-all) strap line in a kind of “connect, share, be friends” kind of way (once again Amigo is not social software it’s just an example). And then we planned to use a longer sentence to really nail what Amigo does, aimed at both sets of users. It seemed to work - on paper.

When Jason sent through the design (see example number one) we knew it wasn’t right. It was too long-winded and it took an age to actually ‘get’ what the software was about. It was all wrong.

Roll in example number two (second down from top). Here we tried to drill down to the very basics of what the long sentence was trying to say. We split it into two sections (one for each type of user) and put a bullet point infront of each. The style we used was: “User number one: this is why Amigo is great for you” then “User number two: this is why Amigo is great for you”.

Nope! This was still not working because lower down the page Jason had created some neat little icons to represent each type of user and your eye automatically floated down to read the text associated with which user you were. The bulleted list was now superfluous and actually confused the eye when looking for data.

So we ended up with option number three (third down). We deleted all extraneous waffle and let the icons draw the users in to their particular area, where they would be told, succinctly and quickly what Amigo can do for them. It worked.

The whole process of deciding this one very small (but very important) part of the site took us the best part of week.

And by the way these screenshots are not Jason’s final designs. I have replaced the original text with dummy text so that I could post about it here. The real versions are slightly neater!

Apparently there’s interest about the environments we’re all working in. First the eye-candy, these three picture’s are what I consider the main parts of my working environment.

1. The "geek" section of my book shelf (and, yes, there is also a non-geek section - it’s good to have a balance!). It’s a good reference, some good reads, some half read (awaiting my time), and it’s always growing. Books from Algorithms to [dare I admit it] Visual Basic with much in between (and, yes, alphabetically ordered).
2. Servers and other hardware, well, the current ones.. there’s been a few over the years! I’ll run through them quickly:
   • Mac Mini (only really use for Safari testing)
   • SMC router
   • DEC programmable switch (thanks Gary - one day I’ll get round to setting this up)
   • APC Powerstack UPS - that needs replacing.. I can’t have both servers on and running through it at the same time!
   • IBM xSeries 330 (hopefully the future dev-server for my own app!) running Gentoo linux
   • Custom built 4u server / desktop, also running Gentoo with KDE as a desktop, RAID, SATA, aeroplane engine.. no, that’s just the fans! This is where I do most of my browser testing, Internet Explorer (ies4linux), Opera, Konqueror, etc.
   • (in lower picture) IBM t30 laptop which has both Windows and Ubuntu Linux using GNOME as a desktop. This is where I do all my communications (email, skype, sip, im) from, keeping them on a separate machine limits the distraction.
   • (in lower picture) Motorola E680 - a linux phone (also waiting for my time!), for daily usage I’ve got a Motorola v3.
3. Desk space, this is a temporary setup all due to change (rack enclosure, Herman Miller Aeron chair, etc) in 2 months or so, but the main part of all this is my keyboard, a Goldtouch Adjustable keyboard, RSI is not something to ignore and this keyboard really helps!

When working I spend most of my time in bash and vim, followed by Thunderbird and Akregator. There’s always music playing - can’t work without music, top of the list to get me coding is at the moment are:

• Raga Against The Machine’s Renegades
• Ali Farka Toure & Toumani Diabate’s In the Heart of the Moon
• Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison

(how depressing, none of them play anymore!).. I’d be interested in what gets other coders coding, music? coffee? a good environment? On that note, time I started coding..

I’ve been putting this off because it’s one of those really boring paper work things (yuck). Once I finally did it though, it proved to be very easy (took me about one hour). Here’s the steps I took:

1. Searched the trademark database for similar items (we’re good, phew!)
2. Downloaded the TM3 form
3. Printed out our logo and taped it to the correct place
4. Filled out the form
5. Chose category 9 and 42 as they applied to Amigo
6. Signed it
7. Wrote a cheque for £250
8. Sent it off!

Hooray! Now we just hold our breath and hope we get it. If we don’t it means we have to start over with the logo and branding. Not good considering we’re launching soon.