Jonno has been with us for almost four months now, so it’s about time we welcome him to the team.

Earlier this year, our good friend Justin Halsall recommended Jonno when we were looking for a second designer. We liked his style and thought he might be a good fit for the company. So far he’s been working on a major website redesign project as well as a few minisites for our own projects which will be released in the near future.

Jonno has been living in Rotterdam for nearly his entire life, but he now considers moving to Amsterdam. In his spare time he keeps himself busy with ballroom dancing, fitness, and even more design.

People are always curious how we build our applications, what gems we use, and how we do authorization. We’ve posted bits and pieces in the past but with Rails’ project template support we ran out of excuses to just show the codes.

You can find the code at GitHub, but a better way to check it out is to create a small app.

$ rails BookCase -m \
  http://github.com/Fingertips/rails-template/raw/master/fingertips.rb

As I’m typing this up I’ve noticed a hundred ways to improve the templates. If you have ideas or patches, please post them to the GitHub issue tracker.

For a project we worked on recently the user needed to categorize works of art into disciplines and movements and tag them. We developed a little control panel that is easy to use for first time users and powerful for daily users.

We used standard form elements to make them recognizable and implemented functionality on top of that using JavaScript.

A lot of stuff happens in that video so I’ll explain a bit about what you’re seeing. You can add new items using either the drop down or the text field. Once the item is added, you can toggle it using the check box. Text fields allow you to add any value, but assist after a while by suggesting values previously filled out by others.

We don’t use spinners for background processing because it’s visually distracting, instead we add something to the interface when you add something and disable check boxes when they’re active.

We’ve made sure the panel stays consistent with the information on the server and kept interaction with the server at a minimum. When you select the same item twice nothing happens. If you select a previously unchecked item it doesn’t create a new item but instead it checks the item already on the page. If any communication with the server fails, the controls are reset to their previous state.

Finally, we make sure ‘Browse’ tab is always up to date, otherwise the user might think we lost her carefully filled out information.