Toluu : ParticleTree

ParticleTree

Particletree is the beginning of something. This place, this collection of knowledge, is a gathering of forces, a sharpening of skills.

Introduction

While I’ve highlighted best practices and resources on how to pitch your ideas in the past, I thought I’d take some time to share exactly how we prepare for our demos when we’ve been invited to showcase Wufoo at conferences, events and VC boardrooms. We’ve spent a lot of time refining and practicing our workflow for presentations and after doing this a number of times now, I think we have a method that seems to produce results that we’ve been pretty proud of. While the amount of prep work we do probably isn’t for everyone and might be overkill to some of you, hopefully there will be some tips in here that will help you in your own presentations and demos.

For all the examples in this article, I’ll be referring to the prep materials I generated for a 7 minute demo we were asked to do this past summer at the National Society of Collegiate Scholars Convention in Orlando, FL. Because we (the founders) have demoed Wufoo countless times, we had one of our new hires, Tim Sabat, do the presentation to get some experience under his belt. Because th

Beautiful Code RoundupOctober 22

Over the last few months, the Wufoo Team has been steadily refactoring their code base to work with a new more flexible and more powerful API we’ve developed on the backend. In that process, I’ve had the opportunity to rewrite some of Wufoo’s oldest code from the founder’s earlier, more hectic days.

One thing that’s really nice about working with Wufoo is that the attention to detail doesn’t stop at just our UI. Whether it’s the efficiency of a query or the tools we’ve developed for backend development and benchmarking, the team is equally fanatical about making the code on the inside as beautiful as the design on the outside. In fact, whenever one of us is creating a brand new feature or interacting with an old, inflexible piece of code, we’ll take the additional time to ensure that it’s clean and readable for any future programmers working on that code.

The thing I like about our rewrites is that the focus isn’t solely on making it work. We also always strive to make it easy to work with—basically, creating maintainable code. Now, making sure our new code is clear and easy-to-read can be a tedious process that slows down the initial pace of development. But, we’re all firm believers that while the last programmer to write a piece of code might not have known any better, it pays off when Alex, the Programmer of the Present, is nice to Future Alex, the guy that’s going to hav

Be Kind to the Color BlindOctober 20

Introduction

Hi, my name is Chris Campbell and I have a color vision deficiency. Like roughly 7-10% of all males, my deuteranomaly makes it difficult to differentiate between some colors, like red and green. Color deficiency, or color blindness as it’s commonly referred to, doesn’t mean that I or people with similar conditions cannot see certain colors. They’re not invisible and I don’t see in black and white (a condition that is actually very, very rare). I can still use crayons effectively, find meaning in beautiful sunsets and even enjoy clear blue skies. What it does mean is that certain colors in the visual spectrum look a lot like one another and so I have a hard time sometimes telling the difference between certain colors and even shades.

Because of this, designing software and interfaces that will also work effectively for people like me takes a bit of concerted effort. Of all the elements of design (line, shape, size, texture, etc.), color is probably one of the most used elements to pass on informational states. This is probably because it allows a designer to say many things without having to change the form

Rich Application Architecture RoundupSeptember 29

When Chris, Kevin and Ryan approached Alex and I to develop Wufoo Unplugged, a desktop application to view Wufoo form data offline, we ended up choosing .NET because in addition to it offering the features we needed like multi-threading, file system access and pre-built Lucene libraries, it was also the technology that Alex and I were the most familiar with at the time. We weren’t officially part of the Wufoo Team then (Unplugged was basically our hiring interview) and so we weren’t asked to develop in an environment outside our comfort zone. As you can imagine, choosing a Windows-only solution left a number of Mac users feeling a bit left out. And so hoping to help out other developers thinking of creating their own desktop applications that will work on both PCs and Macs for their web services, I thought I’d do some research into the current state of cross-platform Rich Application Architectures and present my findings here.

Adobe AIR

Adobe AIR has made great strides in providing a cross-platform application architecture that sets a new benchmark for web developers dreaming about making things “better.” This environment provides a way for web developers who are comfortable develo

Calculating Color Contrast for Legible TextSeptember 23

In the past on Particletree, we’ve shared some of our favorite resources and guides for helping the color challenged and uninspired get their chromatic deliciousness on. As a designer, getting to choose the colors is often the part of the job I like the best. However, there are times when it’s nice to be able to write some code to help make some of the decisions for you.

One of my favorite implementations of using programming to supplement the color picking process was done by the clever Canadians over at Dabble DB. All you have to do is upload your logo and their application will automatically pick the colors based on the information contained in the image and create a theme for their web app that will match the logo.

It’s an impressive feature that helps the user focus on getting things done rather than worry over the details. While I won’t be going into all of the ideas they used to implement their feature in this article, I do want to take some time to talk about how you can get a legible contrasting foreground color for