We’re working on a new version that we call Viewbook V3. An innovative website creation application is the core of our service. See v3.viewbook.com to get an impression.

RUBY / FULL-STACK DEVELOPER
Viewbook V3 is a complex single-page JavaScript application that’s powered by, Backbone.js, React and other technologies. For the backend, we use Ruby on Rails and MongoDB.

We need an experienced Ruby / Full-stack developer to strengthen our team. We are poised to enter the beta phase, and we need help to make the software production ready.

We would love to work with you if you have experience with:
* Ruby on Rails
* MongoDB, Mongoid and modelling schema-less databases.
* JSON rest API’s
* oAuth
* Deployments and monitoring

It would be a bonus if you also have strong Javascript skills, but it is not required.

This position is open to freelance developers.

APPLY
If that sounds like you, or if you think you could contribute in other ways send a note to rien@viewbook.com. I look forward to hearing from you.

Screen detail of iPad retina (left) vs. iPad 1 (right)

Here it is, the new iPad! As you all know, this iPad features a retina display, a display of which you cannot distinguish individual pixels. And it's true, this screen displays its content in print quality, it's absolutely stunning. In our opinion, it is somewhat close to a revival of the first photographic technology: the daguerreotype. In short, not just a new specification, but a completely new experience of photographic viewing.

There are some downsides to this though. Since the resolution is so incredibly high, as much as 2048 by 1536 pixels, whenever you want to get the most out of this, you'll have to serve it huge images. As a result the file size and load time from the web will of course grow along with it. To give you an example: On the iPad, by default, images are being served with bounds of 1024 by 1024 pixels. This will result in a filesize of about 250 kilobytes. With a width of 2048 pixels this

would give you a file of about 1000 kilobytes. That's four times larger (this is logical since it's four times the amount of pixels).

Click here for an example to see just how big 2048 by 1536 pixels is on your 'regular' screen when shown one on one.

With text there's no need to feed the iPad with a larger resource since text consists of vectors that are being rendered on the fly. So with image display, the question is; what's the best way to deal with this?

We think that image quality is number one, so we've optimized the mobile gallery so that it will load the HD images when being visited with the new iPad. And it looks great. The HD files we're rendering fit 1920 by 1080 pixels, so most of the time this will result in images with an effective size of 1620 by 1080 pixels. This means that they will be upscaled slightly on the iPad, but it looks superb and it's the one way to minimize loading time a bit.

We're currently working on optimizing the iPad Portfolio app for retina screen accompanied with a set of other tweaks and fixes. Besides that we're looking for a suitable solution for the website pages containing the collection thumbnails and possibly your logo.

So now we have all the flexibility in the world, it's easy for everyone with basic HTML skills to update the site, we have version control and simple deployment using GIT and it forces us to make the site compact and maintain less content, which is finally a good thing. Plus the site is super fast.

Met de web-based Viewbook editor kunnen gebruikers makkelijk zelf portfolio websites creeëren op een geheel visuele manier (drag & drop) en een desktop achtige ervaring. Gebruikers kunnen lay-outs aanpassen, modules plaatsen en pagina’s stylen.

De volgende versie (Viewbook V3) van deze tool is volop in ontwikkeling en het is de bedoeling dat je gemotiveerd bent om in ons nieuwe systeem te duiken en nieuwe pagina onderdelen en modules te gaan ontwikkelen. Dit betekent dat je veel gebruik gaat maken van jQuery, backbone.js en voor een deel XSLT om HTML te genereren. Maar hiernaast ontwikkel je ook graag user interfaces samen met een kritisch creatief team en kan je jouw werk goed cross browser debuggen. Aangezien het gaat om een creatie tool is enthousiasme voor onze brede creatieve doelgroep (fotografen en designers) een pre en verwachten we dat je affiniteit hebt met interactieve web-based applicaties (AJAX).

Expertise
Junior/medior met ruime ervaring en kennis van:

* Javascript en jQuery ontwikkeling (inclusief jQuery UI en plugins)
* HTML(5), DOM en CSS(3)
* Interactieve web applicaties (o.a. met AJAX, JSON)
* En natuurlijk moet je jou werk goed cross browser kunnen debuggen

Viewbook is een creatieve omgeving in het hart van Rotterdam. Met een klein team (10 man) wordt er hard gewerkt aan het maken van mooie applicaties en interfaces, waar je ook direct feedback op krijgt vanuit de gebruikers. Elk jaar verdubbelt onze wereldwijde gebruikersgroep wat betekent dat we constant bezig zijn met nieuwe dingen ontwikkelen en het verbeteren van ons bestaande systeem. Het is dus heel dynamisch werk met een klein team waarin je resultaat ziet van wat je doet.

Als je interesse hebt stuur dan een email aan rien@viewbook.com.

English

At Viewbook.com users create portfolio websites to present their work to the world. We’re looking for a new person to join our development team. This can both be a freelance or employed position (3 to 5 days) and you're located in The Netherlands.

With the Viewbook portfolio website editor our users are able to manager their work and create portfolio websites with a desktop like experience. In the next version of Viewbook (Viewbook V3) the website design editor will become much more interactive, giving the user options to edit layouts and add many modules.

Viewbook V3 will be built using jQuery, jQuery UI, Backbone.js, React and the application talks with RESTful Ruby on Rails webservices. It would be great if all of this sounds more or less familiar to you. We put a lot of effort into making our apps simple and beautiful, so you must have a desire to create perfect things.

We’re looking for someone who is passionate about creating highly interactive Javascript applications and has the following experience, or is eager to learn and learns quickly.

* Deep experience with JavaScript & jQuery
* Deep experience with HTML(5) and CSS(3) and the DOM
* Familiarity with RESTful webservices and JSON technologies
* Experience with MVC and libraries such as Backbone.js
* Previous experience developing interactive GUIs, using HTML, JavaScript, CSS, DOM
* Solid understanding of cross browser and cross platform limitations and solutions

Viewbook is a small company (10 people) located in the Netherlands. We are very passionate about what we do and we grow quickly, so it matters a lot what every Viewbook team member does. We get direct feedback from our users on what we do so you will the results of what you do immediately.

If you're interested send and email to rien@viewbook.com.

A strange titled book gave the answer. 'The Four Steps to the Ephiphany', self-published by Steven Gary Blank. The book gave us a 'model' that explained at what 'stage' we were and what was to be expected as 'next steps' in the future. It pretty well answered all of my questions above. Wow! Yeah. Really it felt like a revelation.

What the book basically does is tear down the idea of the 'overnight success' and instead present a process of 'discovery and validation' before even going further with your idea. This is what we used to think about, when executing an idea.

First you 'define the concept' then 'develop the product', 'alpha and beta test it' and finally the 'big launch', Bang! How sad this 'big launch' almost never brings the succes you thought it would bring. But more important, what happens when you've launched?

Steven Gary brings us a new model. It's very simple:

1. Discover your customers
Finding out who the customers for your product are and whether the problem you believe are solving is important to them.

2. Validate if the customer really wants your product, pays for it!
Do you have a proven and repeatable sales process that has been field-tested by succesfully selling the product to early Our average payout ratio is 97% and we offer over 400 online casino games including 30 varieties of Blackjack, more than 100 Slots, customers?

3. If so start activities that create more customers
If you can definitely say a loud 'yes' to the steps above you can start spending money on promotional activities.

4. Then grow your company
Time to structure your company when it grows.

Well that's very simple, almost obvious. Yes it is, but it's oh so tempting to think your product will be 'the next big hit', without discovering thourougly what your customers want and what you are really solving for them. We were somewhere between step 1 and 2 at that moment. As with most products you do not have one clear target group, but a lot of segmented groups. It's a challenge to find the right focus for your product.

Steve's ideas gave us a 'framework' to think better about where we were as a company, when to invest in what. He gives many more insights, like what type of market you think you're in and what this means for your marketing and positioning. In essence it's about 'learning and iterating versus linear execution'. This stuff wil definitely help you when you're starting your own startup or when you just tarted.

CSS turned out be very powerful for us:

We wanted the website to display perfectly on many screen-sizes, from extremely small like the iPhone to extremely large like the 27″ iMacs. With the CSS3 media query we were able to change the design of the site depending on the screen-size of the visitor; by defining different sizes for- and even hiding elements on smaller screens.

In the tour section you can see

this in action. Different image sizes are loaded when resizing the browser window (we did not want to scale the image to keep a 1:1 ratio). There's a default fallback in 'normal CSS' for browsers that do not support the media query. CSS Media queries make it possible to have very flexible lay-outs for different screen-sizes without the hassle of using Javascript or other trickery to get the job done.

When loading a gallery with 30 images of 500KB, Mobile Safari simply refuses to display the last 10 images. A problem that already occurred in a previous version of our mobile galleries.

To guarantee properly loading of images in larger galleries we are optimizing our images for Mobile use. Special more compressed images are generated, to solve the resource limit in Mobile Safari, but also to make loading on mobile networks much faster.

Check his post here: How to work around the Mobile Safari image resource limit

to locally store an image gallery for offline use. Great in combination with the ‘Add to Homescreen’ functionality that the iPhone an iPad provides.

Implementation was simple using the Apple Developer docs and the great tutorials here, all worked great. Except when downloading more than 5MB of data, the process simply hangs. Damn, that’s not a lot. Apple’s documentation does not say anything about a caching limit. Posted a question about a caching limit on StackOverflow, but found no definitive answer on the cache limit of Mobile Safari’s Offline Application cache.

After sending an e-mail to Apple Developer support I did not get a definite answer on the 5mb limit, but “that there is no supported way to achieve the desired functionality given the currently shipping system configurations” .

My e-mail:

Name: Rien Swagerman
E-mail: rien@viewbook.com
Company: viewbook.com
iPhone Developer Program

Team ID: none
Follow-Up ID (if referring or responding to an open issue): none

DESCRIPTION OF PROBLEM
When using the manifest file for Safari Offline Application Cache there seems to be a limit of 5mb to cache (iPad and iPhone). Is this correct?

We want to provide offline image galleries to our users (on the iPad and iPhone), synced with their viewbook.com galleries, but this needs more data storage than 5mb. Is this possible (in the near future)?

For us it is a strategic choice to either use Safari, or if not possible create a native app for the iPad and iPhone.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE
Use manifest file that loads more than 5mb of files.

NOTES AND ATTACHMENTS
None.

———————————

Thanks,
Rien swagerman.

Apple’s response:

Hello Rien,

Thank you for contacting Apple Developer Technical Support (DTS). Our engineers have reviewed your request and have concluded that there is no supported way to achieve the desired functionality given the currently shipping system configurations.

If you would like for Apple to consider adding support for such features in the future, please submit an enhancement request via the Bug Reporter tool at <http://bugreport.apple.com>.

Thank you for taking the time to file this report.  We truly appreciate your help in discovering and isolating issues.

Best Regards,

Vanaja Pasumarthi
Apple Developer Support
Worldwide Developer Relations

I think it’s time that we share some of our experiences. Some will be about software architecture, Ruby, CSS, Javascript, others will be about web based software and being a tech company in general.

So if you are a developer, or know any friends who might be interested,  grab the RSS feed and share your thoughts.