Amigo is tantalisingly close to being ready. The copy for the site is written (I spent all weekend writing the help topics and last night putting together the ‘Learn’ section). Ryan is doing some last minute bug testing and Dave is having a cup of tea…or testing the invoices go through PayPal, one of the two. We’re just waiting for the drum-roll to start, the champagne corks to pop and Amigo will be live! Don’t go anywhere.
Poor Dave! He’s in bug-fixing hell with all the to-dos we’ve flagged for him on Basecamp (which we’ve dubbed ToDoCamp). Both myself and Ryan are testing Amigo and bombarding him with bug fixes. He’s been working solidly all weekend and we appreciate it. Ryan is better at describing bugs than I am (being more technically savvy than me) so his to-dos are very to the point, and minutely described. Mine are more along the lines of ‘the category picker is acting strange on this page’ - which I’m sure must drive Dave mad. But right now, myself and Ryan are the only bug-testers we have so we’ll have to plod on.
Believe it or not we’re about ready to launch Amigo! The photo above is me doing 1:30am bug testing - gotta love it! I’m forcing myself to do almost all my testing in IE on a PC, as that will statistically be our largest user demographic.
We’re doing final tweaks, changes and testing. I’m really excited as it’s all starting to come together. We’re pushing hard because it needs to be live for The Future of Web Apps.
If you haven’t guessed, we’ve decided to move ahead, despite the trademark issues. We feel it would be detrimental to wait until it’s sorted out, as that could take months (maybe even a year or more).
If you applied for the Beta, don’t be offended if we didn’t contact you - we could only allow a few people in. Thanks for your help and excitement!
Now that we’ve launched our first large-scale web app (DropSend - a tool for sending and storing large files that you can’t email), we wanted to get started on our second app. We’re a firm believer in “scratching your own itch” so we were thinking about what tool or service we’d love to have, that doesn’t currently exist.
Gill and I were driving back from one of our Carson Workshops with Dave Shea (god of CSS and the brain behind CSS Zen Garden), and we started to throw around some ideas.
After a bunch of ideas that sounded so-so, Gill suddenly said “Wait a minute, why don’t we help people find advertisers for their email newsletters? There’s a million people out there with small newsletters who will never be able to attract large advertisers because their list is small. If we lump all of those small newsletters together, we’ve got a large audience that would be valuable for advertisers!”
We realised that there are a lot of hobbyists who run sites because they’re passionate about the subject. A lot of them have built up newsletter lists of 1000+ subscribers. These people would love to make a buck or two off their site, but it’s almost impossible to get an advertiser to pay for an ad in a small newsletter.
But …
Combine 10 sites like that and all the sudden you have an audience of 10,000. This would be quite attractive to an advertiser, as long as they only had to pay for ads that actually get clicked on.
As I always harp on about, the number one thing you need to do is make sure your idea is financially viable. Was ours? We think so, for the following reasons:
A key ingredient for us being able to launch this web app is the fact we’re essentially doing it as a side project. We’re not dropping everything else (DropSend, Carson Workshops and Vitamin) to make it happen.
In Amigo we’ve got percentage bars! This was the image that Jason came up with:
In turning this part of the design into something flexible on the website I saw two options; clever CSS, or ‘Lots of Images’. I decided that ‘Lots of Images’ was a bad idea:
… so clever CSS it is.
Okay, it’s not really that clever, it’s CSS not rocket science. It does however mean that no matter how many percentage bar’s will be displayed on the page the user will only need to wait for two images to be downloaded. I think it’s a nice solution that you might be interested in. Here’s the XHTML & CSS:
<img src="/images/percentImage.png" alt="9.5%" class="percentImage" style="background-position: -110.315px 0pt;" />
img.percentImage {
background: white url(/images/percentImage_back.png) top left no-repeat;
padding: 0;
margin: 5px 0 0 0;
background-position: 1px 0;
}
If you understand XHTML/CSS, you’ll see there’s two images involved. The first image is the border for the widget, inside of the border it’s transparent:
The second image is the bar’s color, split into two halves. The first 50% is the "full" color, the remaining 50% being the "empty" color:
Notice, the alt attribute of the img tag (I’m with you Roger) is the percentage that the image represents for screen readers etc. - this is important information and we want to make sure it’s accessible!
The width of the img tag will always be the same regardless of the width of the background image we set in the CSS, knowing this we can position the background to the top left (as default) and set it not to repeat. The background-position is set to 1px so that the image fits within the border in the first image, however, we could make the image a little large if we wanted to.
The inline style handles what pecentage we want to display in the box by changing the position of the background-image. In our case a PHP script handles all the math for us (which is why it’s a little too exact, however I believe browsers will round that to the nearest pixel).
I’ll throw a few other thoughts out there for anyone interested in using this method:
Some of you may know the history of DropSend. Basically, we had to change the name from DropBox to DropSend because we didn’t get the trademark (anyone see a pattern developing here?).
Due to recent events we’ve been thinking about DropBox again and how we felt when the name was refused. And also how we dealt with the name change. Looking back, I think that the name change worked out in our favour. If we hadn’t named the app DropBox then I don’t think we would have thought to use a box in the logo.
If we had started the design process with the name DropSend then it’s likely we may have used some kind of swoosh, or envelope maybe? We certainly wouldn’t have started with a box. Now that we have the box - coupled with the words drop + send - it makes you think that you might drop your large file in a box and send if off.
It works. It adds depth. And it illustrates that losing the trademark doesn’t mean game over for the logo.
Well, we promised Bare Naked App would be a warts-and-all blog, so why stop now?
We just got the letter through about our trademark application and it didn’t get approved. Argh. Argh. Arrrrrgh.
So what does this mean? Well, we’ve set up a meeting to appeal the decision and try to convince them our trademark isn’t like the others. It’s so frustrating as Amigo is nothing like the other trademarks. It’s crazy - there is one category for “computer software”. What?!
Gotta keep reminding myself: “If it was easy, everyone would do it.”
By the way, if there are any good trademark lawyers reading this, please get in touch. We might need your help.
We’re up to the stage with Amigo where we are finishing up the very last things that need doing before the beta can go live. One of those is the ’sign-up’ e-mails that people will receive when they register.
Jason had designed some really nice e-mails using the logo and the ‘Amigo’ colours. But, unless Jason wanted the e-mails to look like a bunch of text sandwiched between some worryingly empty boxes with tiny red X’s in them, then something was definitely amiss.
Of course the e-mails looked crap because the images were turned off. Luckily, we had read David Greiner’s article on Vitamin all about designing e-mail newsletters for real people. In the article he stresses the importance of creating an e-mail that makes sense with or without images turn on.
So that’s what we did. The image on the top is the welcome e-mail with images not downloaded. And the example on the bottom is the same e-mail with images downloaded. Of course the one on the bottom is preferable. But the one on the top is perfectly readable even though the recipient chose not to see the images. They still know where to click, and more importantly they know where the e-mail is coming from.
Ryan gives an update on where we are at with Amigo and what the plan is going forward. We’re not sure why he’s developed a lisp - maybe something to do with a change of camera. Watch it and find out.
RSS readers, view the video here.
Just a quick note to say that my workshop is only three days away. We still have a few seats left, so if you’re planning on attending you should grab a seat quickly.
Here’s a quick description:
A one-day practical workshop that will teach you everything you need to know to build a web application. This in-depth course is perfect for small teams who are constrained by time and budget. We’ll reveal all the secrets that we used to launch DropSend, our massively successful (and profitable) web app.