Teambox

Which path should you take?

Pablo Villalba — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:19:07 +0000

[Alice to Cat] “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

This time [the Cat] vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.

Alice has lots of cute metaphors about life. Got some time to read?

Thirsty for more? Keep on reading

Teambox in the Green

Andrew Brown — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:26:39 +0000

I’ve been writing stories the past week and everything is in the green!
By the time we launch we won’t be running with scissors any longer.

I don’t know why, but I just like using Mislav in my stories.

If you want to try the new version of Teambox 2, it’s up at app.teambox.com

Usability fails

Pablo Villalba — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:57:02 +0000

I had a good laugh with these. Straight from the FAIL Blog:

Teambox’s headquarters

Pablo Villalba — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:30:40 +0000

Some pictures of Teambox’s new offices, in Barcelona. Feel free to pay us a visit, whenever you wish. We love meeting new people!

There’s plenty of space here, and we’ll soon organize some open events so any developer can join us. Ruby is great, but other platforms are welcome too.

Keep an eye on our blog to learn more about Fun Fridays and DevSurfing, two upcoming projects that will make you feel like a beginner again.

Can you see Andrew in the pictures?

Multi-monitor goodness!

The mouse that wanted to be a keyboard

Pablo Villalba — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:25:18 +0000

I really hope this project is a joke. It reminds me of that saying, “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. And so they added more and more to the mouse, forgetting that some inches away you have, well… a keyboard.

Quoting the OpenOffice Mouse site: “You can do far more with this mouse than most people are likely to realize at first [...] You can launch applications from the desktop, and in your browser you can fire up a specific Internet site with one button, then close it with a double-click on the same button.”

But why use the mouse for that? You need macros? Well, that’s why you have a keyboard! Shortcuts! Hotkeys! Bundles! Launch keys! And guess what -if you are using open-office, your hands are probably already on your keyboard.

Teambox 2 scheduled for November 16th

Pablo Villalba — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:18:31 +0000

It’s been some time since we announced Teambox 2 was in the works. Since Andrew joined the team, it was clear how we could all benefit from a new product rewritten from scratch.

Teambox 1 taught us many lessons, and in the way to the new version we’ve done things as they should have been in the first place.

What’s new?

Feature-wise, the focus has been on collaboration. Teambox 2 replaces the group chat for a Project Overview wall, where you can post updates like in Twitter.

Tasks have undergone a major evolution, and they are now full-featured conversations. This way, it’s easy to plan and keep track of the whole history of the task from the beginning to the end.

The whole interface has been redesigned to have quick access to recently used items. The sidebar is used for project navigation.

What will happen to my data?

All your data will be migrated to Teambox 2, so you will be able to benefit from all the same features and more! Because of this, Teambox will be down for maintenance during Nov 15th.

A cleaner and leaner code

The Rails community has evolved a lot since Teambox was born. So have we. The new release has cleaner templates with HAML, tests with RSpec and Cucumber, fewer dependencies and has been structured in an organized way.

Being an open-source project means having a solid code, easy to understand and extend. You can still use it for free online, or download it for use in your own server!

It’s been a long way, and we’re happy to walk it with you. Without your support, feedback and contributions we’d have never been able to do this. We really hope you enjoy Teambox 2!

Which header actions do you prefer?

Andrew Brown — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:36:29 +0000

We have many headers for tasks lists, tasks, conversations, pages but what would be considered to be a better design?

1. Always show ‘Edit and ‘Delete’ links on the right hand side

2. On hover show ‘Edit’ and ‘Delete’ buttons on the left hand side

Leave a comment in this post with your vote.

Piloting an airplane

Pablo Villalba — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:43:35 +0000

I studied aerospace engineering because airplanes are an amazing mix of every possible high-tech industry: Advanced composites, radars, fluid mechanics, electronics, economy, operating systems…

But it didn’t come until later that I noticed that airplanes were also about design for human interaction. The pilot is constantly overwhelmed with information, and it’s important to let him focus on what’s important.

Airplanes can predict, more or less, which maneuvers are potentially dangerous for the flight and prevent you from doing them. Manufacturers choose to do this in different ways:

Alert whenever you’re doing something dangerous, but still do it. Which is potentially dangerous.
Other would prevent the pilot from doing the dangerous maneuver, thus limiting his ability to act against common sense in difficult situations.
Others chose a smarter approach, based in active materials: The control level, which is usually easy to move, becomes stiffer when you’re trying to do something dangerous.

The latter is another great example of suggesting over forcing. We could draw an analogy with web apps. When typing a field that is too long, or a password too weak, pages can:

Tell you it’s wrong, but still accept it, which is noisy.
Reject it and force you writing the required length. Which leads to hard to remember passwords.
Suggest with proper design how long something should be.

I can also see how cars could use this, not to limit speed but to suggest it’s not right to go above the speed limit by making the pedal harder to push beyond a limit. This way, if you are in an life emergency you will still be able to override this behaviour.

For Teambox 2, we chose permissive lengths over artificial restrictions. Although it is true that many may benefit from an very clear length limit in their data, if that’s the goal.

Thirsty for more? Keep on reading

MrProper: Cleaner blocks in Ruby

Pablo Villalba — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:54:14 +0000

I love blocks in Ruby. I use them all the time: each, collect, map, etc. And they’re a great way of making code more readable and fun.

But I don’t like it that when I call them for a nil object, they raise an exception. So I have to add an if around them, and my codes becomes ugly. I get this often when trying to evaluate params for a form that may not have a given field, like checkboxes.

A fix for this would be using an or, so if the object is not defined the blocks will use the empty array and not get run. Like this:

But then I remembered why I love Ruby: You can rewrite everything! So I came up with #is_defined, which you can call to clean up your code in this way:

Since this is pretty cool, I turned this into a MrProper, a plugin that you can download at Github. Just drop it inside config/initializers/mrproper.rb

Note: You could also overload NilClass with methods called each, map, etc. The problem with this is that other libraries may use exception control to manage the flow in part of their code, so these solution could break things by failing silently. Therefore, it’s better to explicitly call a method to avoid errors and be aware that they won’t rise.

Update:
Thanks to @raganwald, @peteforde and @heycarsten for the interesting links. There are better alternatives to this, like andand. I enjoyed the posst about Array-ifying values and Self confident code, too.

Persuasive design: Suggesting over forcing

Pablo Villalba — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:34:26 +0000

This past week we stopped using lighthouse and w’ere just using Teambox 2, to manage Teambox 2. We’re eating our own dog food!

In Teambox 2 we’ve reworked tasks so that they are more like conversations. This is great because it allows you to post links that will be useful for tasks you have to do weeks later, or report what you’ve done by attaching files, or start conversations about important issues.

An issue we initially had with this is, since every task is displayed in the sidebar, that we need to keep the sidebar uncluttured. One way of doing this is avoiding lines wrapping, so you need to have titles as concise as possible.

While forcing the user to do this by limiting the number of characters they can type, it’s not a good idea because sometimes it has to be so. We preferred to suggest the right length by making the font size bigger. If you’re trying to make a field too long, you’ll notice the text gets clipped and that’s a bad thing.

Suggesting is better than forcing. Visual design is better than words. Users can be guided not only by words, but also by design clues. Width and font size help in this case. Colors and placing can be important, too. For everything else, remember to use proper wording for every section and action.

Same goes on for the tweet-like field in the project field, where you can post comments or share interesting links and insight:

Teambox

Which path should you take?

Thirsty for more? Keep on reading

Teambox in the Green

Read also

Usability fails

Read also

Teambox’s headquarters

Read also

The mouse that wanted to be a keyboard

Read also

Teambox 2 scheduled for November 16th

What’s new?

What will happen to my data?

A cleaner and leaner code

Read also

Which header actions do you prefer?

1. Always show ‘Edit and ‘Delete’ links on the right hand side

2. On hover show ‘Edit’ and ‘Delete’ buttons on the left hand side

Read also

Piloting an airplane

Thirsty for more? Keep on reading

MrProper: Cleaner blocks in Ruby

Read also

Persuasive design: Suggesting over forcing

Read also