Flat design is a minimalistic design philosophy, focusing on: color palette, typography, and minimal effects. Simplistic, or flat design, is not realism; abandoning shadows, gradients, textures and bevels. This “less is more” attitude parallels earlier trends, trends that adopted realistic visual elements. Deemed the “skeuomorphic era,” design once treasured an interface modeling picture-perfect representations of physical objects: skeuomorphism. However, the “flat revolution” has altered the three-dimensional aesthetic previously utilized by applications.

Design is not synonymous with UX. UX, user experience, means generating elegant interfaces that promote a user-friendly experience. Design, however, incorporates function and visual appearance. Integrating the two requires an understanding of the mind and behavior; psychology.

User experience, UX, means generating elegant interfaces that promote a user-friendly experience. What makes an interface, well, elegant? Simplicity: Consistent, balanced design with a clear directive will guide user exploration. Tasks should be completed efficiently with minimal user activity. Responsivity: Generate optimal viewing experiences. Layouts should be adaptable, that is, responsive to their environment. Relatability: Understand your demographic, and encourage feedback. Without consideration of your audiences’ needs, design flops. Inevitability: We make mistakes! Testing your product, and allotting for user error will prevent future frustration. UX is necessary for producing pleasant interactions with your interface, but why?

User experience, UX, means generating elegant interfaces that promote a user-friendly experience. UX aims to satisfy targeted demographics, demographics critical for strategizing your design process. Alright. But, what is my targeted demographic? Good question! Consider addressing these questions to evaluate an audience…

Here’s part two of an overview guide to using Sinatra, Haml, and Postgres to quickly build a simple inquiry form web app & deploy it to Heroku.

The Views module has been a cornerstone of Drupal ever since it was introduced in 2006. In honor of its being rolled into the core application in Drupal 8, we’d like to share some tricks we’ve been using to make views even more flexible and powerful. Since a large part of our focus is on integrations, and we like to use Drupal as a front-end, we’ve learned to love Entity API and Views. In this post we’re going to show you how easy it is to create a Mysql view, define an Entity for it using Entity API, and use that Entity in a View.

Agile development means many things to many people. To some it means SCRUM, to others, XP, to yet another group it could mean a mash-up of both or even just a home-spun collection of general practices and methodologies. To many people Agile is often simply a buzzword, one upon which meaning is ladled liberally from second-hand conversations or short, pithy, phrases. To a developer, such as myself, Agile methodologies are both a blessing and a curse. The issue is that while the process may be agile, the written lines of code can be far less flexible.

Prior to Drupal 7, developers had generally relied on Ubercart to provide eCommerce functionality for the websites they built, be it for their own company or a client’s. Other options did exist, but none were truly able to compete with Ubercart as a full-fledged shopping cart solution, primarily due to the level of (community) developer support that escalated its growth and propagation. Unfortunately, Ubercart is built in a way that does not always encourage modification of its core behaviors. Anything is possible, certainly, but the cost-to-value relationship of fundamentally altering Ubercart’s workflows or approach to customer and order management does not always make good financial sense for the investor.

Here’s the first part of an overview guide to using Sinatra, Haml, and Postgres to quickly build a simple inquiry form web app & deploy it to Heroku.

At SingleMind, we’re integration geeks. Our geek nerves tingle over custom systems integration projects, Yahoo Pipes, Zapier, If This Then That and so many others. We use Redmine as our issue management system and Harvest for time tracking and billing. We found ourselves wanting to use the time tools inside of Redmine, but were unable to efficiently manage the overhead of keeping two systems’ time in sync. We tried out a couple Redmine plugins that could leverage the Harvest API. However, we quickly found that the plugins we tried used admin-only features of the Harvest API, so our employee users could not make requests to the Harvest API and thus not use the plugin with any efficiency. Unable to find any suitable Redmine plugin, and also being Ruby on Rails geeks, we set out to develop our own Redmine plugin.

Download and install the necessary tools. Download & install Vagrant (currently using Vagrant v1.1.4). Download & install VirtualBox.