Part I of this video explores the problem and what we are looking for in a solution. Part II (coming soon) goes into detail on a particular solution using Rails 3.1 and Angular.js. Source code for the demo application is available from the Centresource Github account.

Angular.js + Rails: Part 1 from centresource interactive agency on Vimeo.

The writeup sums up our intention for our bi-monthly Interactive Mixers perfectly:

What sets the "interactive web and mobile marketing" firm apart...is a casual vibe that doesn't feel cliquey or like a networking meat market.

Couldn't have said it better ourselves. We strive for a fun and casual environment for friends to gather and form new connections. No pressure, no awkward ice breakers... just fun.

Speaking of our mixers, don't miss our next get-together on November 3rd. Be sure to RSVP, and bring some canned food for our friends at Second Harvest Food Bank who will be in attendance. We'll have more great food and of course, great free beer from friends like Yazoo and more. And hey –– they both made the Best of 2011 list, too! (Second Harvest won Best Non-Profit and Yazoo won Best Brewhouse – not too shabby!)

We're thrilled to share this list with so many great people and places around our favorite city. Again, big thanks are owed to Lance Conzett for the kind words and the humbling addition to this year's best and brightest roundup of Music City!

If you look at any web gallery online these days, the most popular colors are most likely mustard yellow and gray.  Look at this google search for example:

This got me thinking about who is responsible for these bursts of popular colors where a whole society will embrace that color scheme and roll with it. It all began in 1963 and it was quite a year for color enthusiasts.  The International Colour Authority was formed by a panel of international color specialists that would gather twice a year in London and select the upcoming color palette for the design world.  Their color selections would be published 22 months ahead to ensure the earliest color trend prediction known to any artist or designer.  Around the same time in the 1960's, Pantone Inc. was developed and created a a standardized color reproduction system that revolutionized the color trend world.

The ICA believes that color selection is vital to the success of an organization and is a pre-eminent factor in establishing whether a product will or will not sell.  The colors used within your organization has the power to influence whether we feel happy or sad, warm or cold and even stylish or conservative.

Here is a brief video on the effects of pantone colors within our society:

It's no coincidence that mustard yellow is the hottest color for design this year.

When thinking about rebranding your site or business, try researching the most current pantone colors or the projected colors for the upcoming year.  The Pantone 'mafia' can persuade our minds into gravitating to or from a business just by the use of color!

Presenting the top 5 "Must Have" items for a happy lifestyle as a sales person

1. Hand Sanitizer - At any given networking event you'll shake roughly 30-50 peoples hands. Do the math and germ wise you would fail a petri dish test. So in my car I keep a small bottle of hand sanitizer that I bring in my coat to any networking event. Think about this - after shaking hands with all those people, what's the next thing you do...EAT. Gross!!! Put your hands near your mouth. So the trick is to use hand sanitizer right before the handshaking begins and before it's time to eat. One delightful side benefit is that by the nature of the hand sanitizer's alcohol, it will dry your skin and help prevent the dreaded sweaty handshake!

2. Theme Song - Every sales person will tell you their favorite part of their job is winning a deal. There's nothing quite like the rush of hearing a client say they trust you enough to work with you organization. All of the late nights and proposal revisions have paid off. As a way of celebrating we've creating a unique experience shared by all. That's right...a theme song. Every sales person should have a theme song that's played our a loud speaker system anytime they win a new deal. My recommendation would be "ThunderStruck" by ACDC but the choice is up to you. Not only will this make you feel great, it will also alert the rest of the office as to your collective success! But beware new hires - your theme song may say alot about you so choose wisely.

3. Evernote - I know a billion articles have been written about the value of Evernote for organization but as a sales person you're constantly finding yourself in situations where you wish you could recall the name of that company you read about, or that stat you saw on your favorite blog. I keep folders in Evernote with titles like "Feedback Tools" or "Competitors." Anytime I see something that I'd like to remember I file it away and pull it up on the fly in a meeting. It will make you look wicked smart and all that parking spot in your brain to remain available. Having specific examples to share off hand can make or break your "street cred" in a sales meeting.

4. Sketch Pad - Maybe this one doesn't appeal to everyone, but enough with the legal pads!! They aren't even easy to use. You always get that awkward fold over on the top sheets or even worse the taters remains of papers once proudly used. Another things annoying is that no matter what line of work you're in, you probably find yourself drawing sketches or illustrations on your lined paper. it gets very confusing to the client with vertical, horizontal and slanted lines going all over the place. Instead, do yourself a favor and buy a nice sketch pad. No lines, great paper quality and neat, easily removed edges. You can't go wrong.

5. Extra Clothes - I'm not one for clumsy food mishaps, but I keep an extra dress shirt handy at all times. It just lives in my desk. You never know when you'll spill mustard on your shirt but I'm betting it's 20 minutes before the biggest meeting of the week. If you are prone to spills, I'd also recommend an extra pair of pants for your office. High quality dark jeans are perfect for this. You can dress them up or leave them casual - either way they are flexible and work in a pinch. I also keep a bottle of Shout in my desk for the instant repair of stains. Tide Pens are great but I always lose them. A giant bottle of spray is tough to misplace!

So there's the initial list of "Must Have" items in a sales person's bag of tricks. Feel free to add your own to this list by commenting! More to come soon!

1. The user knew the purpose of the site
2. He or she found the information they were looking for
3. They loved it so much that they alerted the masses through their social networks of this so called 'said' site. (Hey @Jimmy!  Check out this awesome site that sold me insurance and looked hip to the jive!)

What might you ask makes these 3 successes magically come together?  That magic would be something called the 'User Interface Design'.  Good user interface design can make a product easy to understand and use, which in return yields a greater user acceptance.  A designer should make the user's experience as simple and efficient as possible to accomplish the company's goals.  A question that stumps me at times is, how can I make this site efficient for a user yet still make it look intricately designed?

Here are a few things to think about when designing a good UI site:

1. Design with a purpose:

Most users don't read the fine print, they scan the page until they find what they're looking for.  When designing with a purpose (ie selling insurance, raising money for a non profit, promoting a new record), make that area loud and clear.  Imagine that very important section as a "hey! look at me!" flag on the page. Your job as a designer is to get rid of the question marks and direct the user straight to the point.

2. Use your words:

Much like I'm doing in this post (wink!), make use of different writing styles by using bold, italics, and short segments of text.  Also, talk business.  For example, if you want a user to use your product, apply phrases like "sign up" rather than "start now".  By using appropriate action words, this will encourage an actual action on the user's part.

3. White space is your friend:

The human brain automatically compartmentalizes words and images into separate pieces of information.  The use of white space can dramatically help the user's eye to perceive important information without being crowded and distracted by the lack of space.

4. Usability Testing

After you have completed your designs, usability testing is one of the best ways to quickly test if other people than yourself understand the site.  This will bring to light the most obvious errors that you did not see yourself.

Shoply is an example of a site that has a great user interface.  If you look at the below image, you'll notice that the design applied each of the 4 techniques I mentioned above.

• The designer designed with a purpose.  Immediately I knew this was a site I could purchase unique items from local businesses.
• They 'used their words'. I knew exactly what new items were featured, where to search the marketplace, and where to click if I wanted to open my own shop.
• The white space made this site easy to navigate and is super easy on the eyes.

In the end, there truly are a lot of factors that go into making an amazing website.  I hope a few of these tricks can help any fellow designers think about the importance of good user interface design.

We are ecstatic to announce that we've once again made the Nashville Technology Council's Tech Awards Nominees List! Not only is our agency up for Company of the Year, but our own Brandon Valentine and Lyndsay Rush scored noms for Developer of the Year and Social Media / Blogger of the Year, respectively.

Even better, some of our clients made the list, too! Our friends at Vaco are up for Company of the Year, and healthcare start-up darling Stratasan is up for, well, Start-up of the Year. We're thrilled to have helped these great companies grow and succeed, and feel humbled to be in their midst.

Check out the list of full nominees here. Also, you should really register so we can see your smiling faces as we (hopefully) win that evening!

First, add heroku to the development group in the Gemfile and bundle install.

If this is a client site, you will want the client to own the
application, so we'll sign in as the client from the beginning (you
can also use "heroku sharing:transfer" to move an app to another user
later):


$ heroku auth:logout (only if you are already using heroku)
$ heroku auth:login
Enter your Heroku credentials.
Email: client.email@address.com
Password: client-password


Then create the production and staging apps:


$ heroku create --stack bamboo-mri-1.9.2 mysitename
$ heroku create --stack bamboo-mri-1.9.2 mysitename-staging


Then add yourself and anyone else on your team to the heroku apps:


$ heroku sharing:add your.email@address.com --app mysitename
$ heroku sharing:add your.email@address.com --app mysitename-staging
$ heroku sharing:add team.member@address.com --app mysitename
$ heroku sharing:add team.member@address.com --app mysitename-staging


Now you can sign out as the client and sign back into your own Heroku account:


$ heroku auth:logout
$ heroku auth:login
Enter your Heroku credentials.
Email: your.email@address.com
Password: your-password


Next, we need to update project_root/.git/config so that we can deploy
to the production and staging apps. Do this by copying the "heroku"
block to a new "staging" block and updating the url to the name of the
staging app. While you are at it, you might want to change "heroku" to
"production" so that it is consistent with "staging":


[remote "production"]
url = git@heroku.com:mysitename.git
fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/heroku/*
[remote "staging"]
url = git@heroku.com:mysitename-staging.git
fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/heroku/*


Now, you can push to staging and production separately:


$ git push staging master
$ git push production master


And to push a branch other than master (such as develop) to staging
for a beta reveal:


$ git push staging develop:master


Note that for any Heroku commands, you will need to specify the app:


$ heroku rake db:migrate --app mysitename-staging


I'm a productivity nerd. I've tried more to-do applications and note-taking systems than I can remember, and have built up several ridiculous systems to help me stay organized over the years. I think geeks typically build systems for two reasons:

1. Most geeks have some form of ADD. Seriously.
2. Geeks typically have a lot of complex tasks and projects to manage, and our brains aren't dependable enough on their own to remember everything.

So, we love systems. That's why I was so excited to hear our CEO Nick Holland, in a recent meeting, explain his favorite productivity system to the room. He indicated that our large gathering would easily go off the rails and he suggested we run the meeting on Pomodoros to keep us on track. He explained that a Pomodoro was a time cycle: the group would work for twenty-five minutes without ceasing, and when time ran out, we'd take a five minute break. (And we're talking a full "Class, drop your pencils" break – no focusing on the project during those breaks.)

Pomodoro is the Italian word for "tomato", aptly named after the Italian kitchen timers the system was born from.

I was reminded of a system called (10+2)*5, which cycles ten minutes of work for a two minute break. Do this five times to compile sixty minutes, or one hour of productive work completed. I tried this and honestly found the (10+2)*5 system to be a little too spastic: I'd find myself just digging into a task when the break bell rang. Consequently the two minutes would fly by, leaving me knee deep in reading tweets or checking email but with a system that told me to get back to work.

Currently I use a Pomodoro app from the Mac App Store, which is extremely simple yet customizable. (And offers the essential ability to turn off the timer ticking sound!) There are also great apps for iOS and Android, which can be extremely helpful in managing a meeting like Nick did.

The Pomodoro system allows you a nice solid chunk of time to focus in on a task, dissect it into it's basic moving parts, and take care of it in an organized manner. I choose one task or task group to work on and when the break bell rings, I'm often amazed at how much I accomplished just by refusing to devote attention to anything else.

A little science: our caffeine-riddled and overworked brains often misinterpret a new email or IM message as an urgent need and so we get caught up in things that really could wait in line behind the task at hand. Author Tim Ferriss refers to these as "manufactured emergencies", and many have mentioned our brain's amygdala (or "The Lizard Brain") creating fear about scenarios that likely will not take place. By focusing in on what's really important and ignoring those nagging feelings of dread when you don't check your email every two minutes, you're refusing your base instincts and pushing forward to creating your best work.

There’s something fun and exciting about the process of charting out the best path to get to your chosen destination. You spend time carefully thinking through your stops along the way -- based on what you want to be able to see, how much time you have, and how long you think you can stand to be in the car.

I’ve always dreamed about taking a road trip to California to visit my grandparents in Santa Cruz. According to Google Maps, the trip would take 38 hours (making the trip quite possible in 4 days) stopping each night in Oklahoma City, Albuquerque, and Las Vegas (about 9-10 hours each).

I could program my GPS, book the hotel rooms, and get my mix tapes all queued up... but what happens if something changes along the way?

What if I run into serious traffic outside of Memphis and my 11 hour drive starts to look more like 15 hours?

What if my friend in Oklahoma City calls after seeing I’m drive through and tells me I need to stay with him?

What if I decide on the 3rd day that it’s worth the 4 hour detour to see the Grand Canyon?

What if, while in Las Vegas, I end up [...redacted...]?

These “what if’s” are part of what make road trips so much fun -- the unexpected path that your journey takes as you’re traveling along.

Agile development is much like this road trip.

It’s always good to have a sense of your destination -- knowing (even if only generally) what you are trying to accomplish is always a good first step. From there, it’s important to start plotting your path: figure out the large milestones that should be accomplished along the way. Giving yourself realistic goals to reach is important if for no other reason than to mark your progress -- are you ahead of your plan or behind? Have you strayed too far from the original plan?

The actual agile development process, however, is like life on the open road. Each “sprint” (a specific period of time set aside per development cycle -- often one or two weeks) is like a day in the car: unexpected things will arise, plans will change, new options will appear. It’s important to spend time at the start of each sprint to reevaluate the current situation, and adjust the expectations for the coming sprint accordingly. Perhaps you need to forgo one feature to allow time for another to be fit in. Perhaps you need to add an additional sprint to accomplish everything that you’re wanting to. Perhaps you need to change your final destination altogether as you recognize a shift in your focus. The beauty of agile development is that it gives you the freedom to make these decisions as you go.

You just get to hang on for the ride.