One Zombie in a Billion

The fantastic team at Megatechtronium have launched their new app today, Pownce.
As I was lucky enough to get an invite on launch, I thought I’d throw a few screen shots on the site to show folks what to expect.

As you see the design is super slick, designer Daniel Burka has done an amazing job. There are currently 4 different themes to choose from and the work the same way as vox themes.

On the homepage you have your notes and notes from your friends, these are also marked in the corner with a little banner so you know it it’s public or private.

You have 3 options for sending notes. Simple text message, website link, file (up to 10mb, 100mb for pro users) or Event notification.

From there you just punch in the message, choose the audience; Public, All of My Friends or a specific friend and then you post the bugger.

Leah Culver has done a top-notch job putting together an app that’s fast and easy to use.
It’s brilliant as a social tool, since you can send files/events to all your friends and when new friends join they be able to see older messages, which for me is preferable to digging out an old email because I forgot to add a recipient.

Anyway, I highly recommend folks check this one out, the invite request form is on the homepage.

Almost travel recovered from my trip to @media 2007. It was a great event actually, lots of wonderful talks, I especially enjoyed the ones from Jon Hicks, Jason Santa Maria, Simon Willison, Simon Collison, Drew McLellan, Hannah Donovan, Tantek Çelik and Andy Clarke, who did a bit about taking design ideas from comics, heh I knew those 18 years of reading was leading up to something!

Some food for thought to bring back to work, things like the scrum management process and getting php installed on our servers so we can use those cool little scripts for hCard and hCalendar transformations. Not to mention continuing my fight for changing our site from asp.net to django (never happen, but I can dream!).

Tantek’s talk enlightened me to the Sandbox theme for wordpress, which I’m now using on this design refresh, it’s chock full of lovely microformats.

Well that’s two fantastic days of web stuff over with. Wednesday, Andy Clarke held a fantastic workshop on markup and CSS for our development team, which has really opened the team’s eyes to the possibilities inherit in good semantic markup and separation of presentation from structure. It’s going to be a pleasure working on future projects that follow up this workshop. So I’d like to say a big thanks to Andy for taking the time to work with us on this.

Today was the Highland Fling conference, which was simply amazing, Alan White and the rest of the people involved did a brilliant job putting together both a fun and informative day on progressive enhancement and I’d like to extend a thank you to all involved with that too. I walked away with lots of notes and tons of ideas in my head. Most of which relate to this site and improving it, it’s gonna be fun!

Working as an internal web designer/developer as I do, it’s often easy to lose sight of the bigger picture of the web world. Standards and new technology tend to get pushed aside due to the tight deadlines that tend to occur. Because of that I can find myself very disillusioned with my job, I think that’s why conferences like these are so important. Hearing other experiences and even that other people are having the same ideas and have the same belief in what the web can be is invigorating and re-establishes for me why I wanted to become a web designer in the first place.

Wee post to express my thanks to Jonathan Linowes of Vaporbase for the advice on the issues I had with Ruby on Rails.
After reading the first page of his RoR setup, I went through the hidden files on my user directory. Noticing how similar the conent of .bash_login (amended for ruby) and .bash_profile (generated by MacPython) I ameded the latter to include the statements of the former and I now have both a working version of Ruby on Rails and Django. Love it when a plan comes together.

Now to test my true nerd power as I simultaneously develop a site in both Django and Ruby on Rails and let the client choose…..