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.

This morning we had a meeting with a potential new client. When he asked us to name the companies we’ve worked for recently, I realized we haven’t posted much about the work we’ve done in the last year or so.

Mostly, we’ve been working on larger back-end and some internal projects. We helped Brighter Planet build a web application that allows people to keep track of, and then reduce, their climate impact. They’re now up and running, and slowly moving their Rails development inside the company (they’re hiring).

For Prada we built an auction system which has been used to sell unique prototype pieces. This project is now also being maintained by an internal developer at Prada.

Boom Test Uitgevers, a publisher of psychological tests, asked us to design and implement an architecture that allows third-party developers to integrate Boom’s tests safely and easily. We decided to split their existing Rails project into a separate account management and multiple test scoring applications that talk to eachother using ActiveResource. See the Account Manager and Scoring API documentation for an overview of how this works.

For another tests publisher, Bohn Stafleu van Loghun, we designed and implemented three different testing products, one providing diagnostic tests for psychotherapists, one that allows teachers to screen schoolchildren for psychosocial problems, and an early warning instrument for use in eldercare.

For a large NGO we built a suite of small campaigning tools that integrate with their web publishing platform.

We also created two e-learning applications; Dr.Stat, a statistics course developed by the University of Amsterdam, …

…and Basics, currently being used by the educational publisher Boom Onderwijs to create various courses.

For Mountain Goat Software we designed and built Planning Poker, a fun estimation tool for distributed agile teams.

Finally, we also did a few regular website projects, for example Rijnboutt Van der Vossen Rijnboutt, Hendriks Schulten architecten, and Uitgeverij Luister.

The website we created for Rijnboutt Van der Vossen Rijnboutt is on the shortlist for the ArchiNed ‘best architect site’ award. It’s one of the 15 sites selected from a total of 135 entries.

We’re very proud of our work, but this couldn’t have happened without the effort put into keeping the site up-to-date by the people at RVR. Great work!

If you like to get a feel of the content management tool we’ve written for them, you can watch a short screencast (QuickTime).

You can vote by clicking the ‘stem op deze site’ button next to your favourite entry.

Last week we’ve started working on ‘Rhubarb on Rails’, a new version of a Greenpeace application for running letter writing actions. It’s going to replace a PHP based tool that was a quick replacement for an old Zope application that decided to roll over and die somewhere in the fall of 2005.

The nice thing about working for the Greenpeace development team is that they thoroughly get the Agile development methodology. Even better is that they do a lot of their work ‘in public’ as you can see on their Work in Progress weblog.

Rhubarb will be released under an Open Source license, so it can be used and improved on by other big NGO’s or small local organisations. You follow our work and download the source from our development site.

Update: The project has been renamed to ‘Write-A-Letter’.

A university that shall remain nameless wanted to provide its students with an easy web-based way to store, share and publish documents online. They’ve decided to go with a hosted solution based on Sharepoint Portal Server. This only works properly with Internet Explorer on Windows, so you’re out of luck if you own a Mac, if you run Linux, or if you like to use Firefox. It’s also slow, clunky and somewhat confusing.

Oh, and the TCO for this solution is €16 per student per year. So with 30000 students, this system will cost the university €480000 each year.

We created a simple demo application (QuickTime screencast) to illustrate how we think this application should work. Our estimated TCO for a full-featured version is €4 per student per year, so with 30000 students, the total costs will be €120000 per year.

The requirements called for 250MB of storage for each student, so a big part of our TCO estimate was based on a cool 15TB storage and a huge amount of bandwidth.

In the last few week we’ve been playing with the Amazon S3 storage service and we’ve created a version of our demo application that uses S3 as a storage back-end. Amazon charges $0.15 per GB per month for storage used and $0.20 per GB of data transferred. This translates to a rough yearly estimate of $45000 (that’s currently about €35600) for storage and bandwidth.

Now let’s combine this figure with a one-time investment of €40000 for the development work and €2000 yearly for hosting, support and maintenance of the front-end application. For the sake of the argument, let’s spread the costs our over 3 years. This gives us a yearly cost of about €60000 and a TCO of about €2 per student per year.

With S3 you only pay for storage and bandwidth you’re actually using. This means you probably never reach this figure because most students will never use their full 250MB and the system will only slowly fill up.

This is all just a rough estimate, so I am likely to have it completely wrong. But probably not so wrong that you ever need to spend nearly as much money as this university is doing now.

To compensate for the current lack of a proper portfolio, here are some screencasts of the work we’ve done recently:

• Adding an article to the Rijnboutt Van der Vossen Rijnboutt website.
• Ajax drag-and-drop sorting for the slideshows on the Hendriks Schulten architecten website.
• A small demo for a community site we wrote as part of a proposal.
• Examples of questions and feedback for some tests and questionnaires.