97 karma · joined July 18, 2009
note: I'm the author of Penkala
Short answer: yes, people do build real apps with these frameworks.
I stumbled upon JavaScriptMVC (CanJS was extracted from JMVC) 4 years ago when I was building application with a lot of front end code, I think we had around 10k lines of JavaScript in various modules. Trying to build something like that without a framework was a huge pain, and JMVC helped here a lot.
In last few years (after I started working for Bitovi) I worked on pretty big enterprise level applications, and besides being able to build things in cleaner way, a huge plus was ability to allow less experienced developers (from the companies we did consulting for) to implement stuff with familiar structure and without needing to care about memory leaks, zombie events and similar stuff.
IMO CanJS is the best framework currently available, but I'm extremely biased. In the end I don't think it matters which framework people choose because they will get a lot of value just by using any of them.
That said, I would never again use a DOM-centric approach for frontend apps. Live binding is a huge game changer and data centric apps are (in my experience) less buggy and get stuff done with less code.
source: Bitovi employee / core contributor
I had this problem (although in pretty mild variant) before I started to train. And the best part is that you can take it slow if you want. You can just introduce yourself and focus on the technique, and after few sessions you will start to talk to people, and maybe even connect with some of them.
I still get anxious when I come to the new club, but it lasts shorter every time.
One note: You should show tweet form on click. It uses unnecessary space, and there was duplication when form is shown below the logo and link is shown above the logo.
I hope you like it.
1. Remove animation on frontpage. As you said, your customer want to know how it works and how much does it cost. Leave only how it works slide.
2. Add call to action
3. Create FAQ page where people can read about your service and put very visible link on frontpage.
I created a mockup of this solution and you can find it at http://212labs.com/retro/longlongago.png . I think this should already help with bigger conversion, but you should probably do some A/B testing to find right formula for your customers.
Things that I've done:
* Search is now placed in Agent locator, I believe it is a good practice to group similar features
* This design is more application like. It should resize itself with page. That way there will be no multiple scrolls
* User info panel is designed.
I hope you like it
Part B - There are many sites that write about UI and UX, they should be googleable :)
Part C - I'm doing both development and design of our apps. I think that designers that don't code can't really design good app because you must have all of the interactions under control, and for that you must understand how things work both on server side and client side. I don't think they should know how to setup server and deploy app, but there must be some understanding of how things work.
Part D - When I started working as a developer, I worked in web studio that also did great design. But they also gave me the ability to try and design stuff along them. They taught me about typography, layouts etc. I even did some print stuff because I wanted to learn it. Little by little pieces started to fall in place. I'm far from great designer, but I can design things that are nice and usable. The biggest problem is that I really like boxes. When I'm designing stuff I'm automatically placing things so they can be easily sliced. But I'm working on it.
My advice is to just start working on some designs, and to find some friendly designer that will help you with constructive criticism.
I've added some whitespace, rearanged some elements, and slightly changed colors to get more vibrant look and feel.
Also videos are now displayed in tabs so you can have short description about each video. I hope you like it.
Also there are situations when you are only a employee of a company, and you want to try some app before you recommend it to management. In that case your app won't even have a chance to be recommended because I can't try app without credit card.
IMHO trial is the best option.
Well you could use it for anything where you need references and annotations near your content. For instance, you could be writing speech, and you could keep your references in comments, or you could use it for simple manager of your contacts, with each comment being a summary of your conversation. It's pretty flexible, and I want something more powerful than Notepad, but still simple to use.
One other use is writing down of martial arts techniques. You can write the technique down, add videos and pictures of technique that you found on the internet, keep log of your progress in comments etc.
Edit: I plan to create as many export formats as possible. Also you will probably be able to create public version of page.