kaylarose

It all depends on who your 80% target market is (not who your power user market is).

I assume its not people who read Hacker News (as most of them are just as likely to build forms from scratch).

If your market is marginally techy - but not programmers - then I think you are probably spot on in the current iteration. It is very customizable, and you can build exactly what you need.

If your market is non-techy types that only know how to copy/paste an embed tag, then you may need to test with some simplifications to the workflow. (See Wufoo, they are pretty good at this).

Sorry if my feedback comes off as harsh. This exact idea has been on my "idea list" for a long time, and am really excited to see someone executing it in a nice way.

This is really cool. I like the form building interface when it's in full screen. Very nice design, snappy UI.

However, I can't help but feel that you may want to make the "Quick Tools" section way more prominent than the other sections because it contains the most common fields people might use (and maybe move the file upload to this section).

Edit: spelling

I can't agree with you more - on every single point.

Even dumb forms don't work right with ExtJS. One example: there is no sane (or even insane - but documented) way of setting a default option in a combobox, or disabling individual options. Really?!

Seriously if you feel you need to use some big desktop-in-the-browser framework, look at SproutCore, or YUI, or Dojo, or Cappuccino, or....anything else.

Last time I looked, all the forms-aaS cheap-o plan response caps were pretty low. I usually just end up going with Google Docs Forms - not as nice, but free and unlimited.

This is what I did too. I used the little plastic notches (probably not the right term) that you screw into the wall to mount bathroom mirrors.

Two huge white boards, flat, easy to remove, < $30.

>The edit-in-place model as demonstrated in this post makes so much sense. It seems crazy to have a CMS with a separate backend when the backend can be the frontend.

Absolutely. In my experience "normal" users are much less confused - and more likely to actually manage their content - when they can edit their content in context instead of in an entirely separate interface.

Concrete5 CMS is pretty good at this - though the code behind the scenes is a bit wonky. This UI looks quite nice as well, but again behind the scenes... And I've yet to see a Rails CMS implement this at all (though I'm keeping my fingers crossed - please HN prove me wrong).

>..when I want to dress up or wear a mini-skirt or whatever, I feel like I'm standing out a bit too much..

This is my experience too. Whenever I think about wearing something a bit fancy (that would be totally acceptable in another field) I feel a bit self conscious.

Just talk to people. There are tons of interesting and friendly people at conferences. Even if you are shy or don't know anyone, just remember (especially at tech conference) a lot of the people there are just as shy/uncomfortable with 'networking' as you.

It may not be 'real' version control, but remember that huge percentage of people have no idea that such a thing even exists. If you've ever explained version control to a non-developer the second they actually grok what it is, they instantly see the value.

This seems like a great way to introduce your average user to the powers of version control.

ASAP.

If you are worried about overloading them with technical info, I find it really easy to introduce people to version control with a "Contributing to a Book" metaphor. Where you have multiple authors and editors all working on a book at the same time, and it's important to know who changed what, and when.

Then, have them start using Git/SVN/Whatever to control any papers, notes, or assignments. I've taught multiple non-developer types how to use version control using this method.

IMO Symfony (especially Symfony2) is much more Rails-ish than CakePHP. Cake PHP is Railsish in that it an MVC with psuedo-scaffolding, but Symfony2 is much closer to the real thing.

I keep hoping somebody recorded a video of that talk!

It was great, and I always want to share it when the concept of 'Agile' comes up, but can never find a way to sum it adequately.

I'd never heard of OPTIONS before. Do you have any links, besides [1], to more resource on it? Is this a common tactic, or is there a more standard way to add "discover-ability" to REST apis?

I usually try to mimic this kind of functionality with something like this [2]. But it always seems kludgy.

[1] http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html

[2] http://gemdash.tumblr.com/post/2798389935/restful-api-design [Half-assed attempt at an blog post]

Don't underestimate the value of layer styles. In fact I would say that for most UI design 80% of the "visual style" can be achieved via layer styles.

Just make sure to Name and Group your layers, otherwise you can end up with 100s of layers named Layer N with undecipherable thumbnails. Also it's nice to save your most commonly used layer styles to swatches.

Clickable http://www.crowdbeacon.com/

This is my experience too. I resisted learning Objective-C very much, and tried to avoid learning it via MacRuby. But once I actually resigned myself to really learning Objective-C, I really enjoyed it.

Like Ruby/Python it has a specific style that gives you a different perspective than other languages. I now find myself using ObjC style-isms in other languages.

That too (the atv increased my Netflix consumption 3-fold).

The influx of Netflix apps and devices just before the Holiday season seems to have been a very smart strategy.

Relevant in the overall big picture of landing pages perhaps, but not to the blog post at hand. That's what "Related Posts" sections are for. If you spend the time to get original content, then you should not be afraid to showcase it.

If you want break up large sections, use visual cues to break up content. Since you mentioned Unbounce, see these[1][2] as inspiration. Note the use of font size and weight, lists, whitespace and images that are directly related to the copy.

If you want more feedback, my email is in my profile.

[1]http://unbounce.com/landing-page-examples/your-landing-page-... [2]http://unbounce.com/landing-page-optimization/marketing-fail...

Yes, but the infographics (term used loosely) add nothing to the article. The article doesn't mention them, or give them any context. At best they are large semi-related graphics re-purposed from other sites whose only purpose is to separate large chunks of text.

This type of visual noise is actually more distracting than not providing an images at all. In my opinion, you would be better to provide images that provide visual context, and illustrate or support his answers.

For instance, in the "Opinion on Landing Pages" section you could provide a screencap of a well designed Full Sail or Webtrends landing page (perhaps with a caption or pull quote of what makes them well designed).

Granted, this one did provide some original content - but all these Ultimate Landing Page articles simply seem to re-hash the same information in a link-baity (with infographics!) way.

Perhaps its just a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that they all originate from SEO/analytics company blogs, and recycle this chart http://www.formstack.com/the-anatomy-of-a-perfect-landing-pa...

I would venture it's a combination of disc-free PS3/Wii and the (Sept.) release of the iPhone app.

Your talk was great! Thanks for presenting at MagicRuby.

Actually I didn't know about that article, but is nice to see the origin of this technique. Mostly took inspiration from HTML5 Boilerplate (also Paul Irish), and previous articles I read. But yes, Paul Irish is awesome, and deserves lots of credit.

I find I rarely need to target any browser other than IE with specific styles, so I usually end up doing something like this, which doesn't rely on JS.

   <!--[if lt IE 7]><html lang="en" class="no-js ie ie6"><![endif]-->
   <!--[if IE 7]><html lang="en" class="no-js ie ie7"><![endif]-->
   <!--[if IE 8]><html lang="en" class="no-js ie ie8"><![endif]-->
   <!--[if IE 9]><html lang="en" class="no-js ie ie9"><![endif]-->
   <!--[if (gt IE 9)|!(IE)]><!--><html lang="en" class="no-js"><!--<![endif]-->

Edit: And then remove the 'no-js' class with js

MagicRuby, Fri-Sat. http://magic-ruby.com/

It's not about "social coding" per-se, but it's in Orlando and it's FREE.

Agreed, especially since one of their core markets is non-tech savvy people. Imagine if you've never heard of MailChimp before, and ended up there via Googling "easy newsletter subscriptions".

User questions: "What does this do?", "Is it complicated?", and "How much does it cost?".

I would venture to say it would be almost and immediate bounce.

On the landing page to have to watch a video at the bottom of the page to figure out what MailChimp is...really?!

Also UC Berkeley has video podcasts of entire courses on iTunesU, with materials available online.

Every time I here about regular Soap clients failing, it's always in regard to trying to consume a .NET service.

I don't know anything about .NET, but I wonder if there is something profoundly different that is going on behind the scenes, or does it just generate crufty WSDLs? Can anyone shine more light on this?

This reminds me of the joke about OOP and monkeys[1]

Really though, I think this is more related to culture that Java (and many Java books) tends to nurture. Anybody that's read a fair share of "Enterprise" Java code has seen FooBarFactoryFactoryFactoryImpl classes.

Hopefully as dynamic languages on the JVM become more popular, this will change. But I find many "Enterprise" developers aren't really interested enough to look outside the box.

"jRuby? I think I've heard of that, what's wrong with Java?"

"It's not a real programming language unless it's statically typed."

[1]http://www.codersatwork.com/

I wouldn't mind it, but - for me at least - on a just-before-unibody-gen MBP w Chrome, it is really choppy. I basically see the first 2 and last 2 frames of the animation.

It's better on Safari, but still, it would be better the disable the animation on browsers where it performs poorly.