2009 Wrap-Up (Part I)
It’s been a fairly decent year for making stuff. My goal at the beginning of the year was to build and launch 2 web apps, and I actually exceeded that by several. I even have some things from my day job to show!
In chronological order:
1. Whatti — This was the first web app that I ever designed and built from scratch. And you can tell, because it honestly kind of sucks. (I hesitate to even link to it, honestly.)
However, in the course of making it I got to learn jQuery, which is just about the best thing EVAR, and the CodeIgniter framework, which means that I could now more easily move into Rails or any other Rails-type MVC framework. I also learned a lot about password security and building a logon system, and about how not to design a homepage. And I have forgotten more about the date/time functions in PHP now than I ever really wanted to know.
This project is basically abandoned now, but I am still interested in the idea of this site, which is providing personal analytical information about your habits and progress toward goals. At some point I would like to throw everything here away and do a complete redesign: visually, functionally, architecturally, and of the code. I would like to make it simpler, more focused, and more visually appealing; and I would also like to switch over to the Kohana framework. This will be a project for sometime next year when I am bored.
2. EventHitch — This was my first site with co-conspirators Dennis Becton and Mike Nagle, who had been working on the site about a year before they asked me to join them as a designer and front-end developer. The site hasn’t gotten a lot of attention lately, because we decided that it was too broadly-focused and decided to pursue more of a niche strategy. But I got to play with Google Maps and work on my design skills some more.
3. BandHitch — This was our first niche site, focusing on local music. It is basically a re-skinned version of EventHitch. I want to change the header because I think it looks bad, and a few things need to be fixed CSS-wise. I like how the background effect came out, though.
4. This blog — which sort of counts, I guess? I didn’t build the theme from scratch, but I took a plain one and customized it a lot.
5. The Truth About Costs interactive graphic
The Truth About Risk interactive graphic
(both from the excellent Investing Truths series)
Finally some things from my day job! Exciting!
I did not design either of these graphics, but I built the Costs one and about half of the Risk one (the table and line chart views, and the sliders). They were both done using Flex 3. I hope to do a lot more work in this realm in the upcoming year, moving into the information design side of things as well as more Flex development. (More about that in my next post.)
6. Towniverse — This is the second of our 2 sites that are under active development, along with BandHitch. This one I pretty much got to design and build from scratch, which was a lot of fun. There was some semi-intricate javascript involved, which was nice to play with, especially getting it to work in IE. I’m actually fairly proud of the interaction design on this one; I think it’s fairly smooth and intuitive. (I hope!)
The current plan is to add more features (ability to invite friends out to a restaurant, integrating our events feed and placing weekly events on the map) and then to expand to other locations, focusing on smallish towns in the Philadelphia area. We are also moving to a faster server (possibly Amazon) since the current guys are painfully slow.
Well, that’s pretty much what I did this year. In part II, I’ll talk a little bit about what I learned, and what my plans are for 2010.
