Movinglabs Weblog

Export Excel files

Sun, 05 Jul 15 00:00:00 +0000

We've improved FlexLists export abilities. First of all we've given you more options when exporting CSV files. Furthermore you are now also able to export Excel (xlsx) files. We are planning to improve our import options as well.

Brand New Observu Coming

Thu, 17 Mar 11 00:00:00 +0000

Since the start of 2011 we have been working on a new version of Observu. Contrary to the current version it will be a paid service. We made this decision because we were unable to provide the service level we desired and required without charging you. The new Observu will combine website monitoring from multiple servers with on-server monitoring using a collection agent that keeps track of your server health. Furthermore Observu will provide API access for you to input additional measurements and extract custom reports. All of this will be combined with the best reporting and notifications we can imagine. You can read up on our progress on the Observu Blog. I highly recommend getting on the mailinglist if you want to be in our beta program as soon as it launches.

Print Details

Tue, 14 Dec 10 00:00:00 +0000

We have added a small, but requested feature to FlexLists: you can now print individual entries as well: click an item in the list, at the bottom of the details listing a 'Print Item' button will appear.Furthermore we fixed a small access bug. In some cases, users with a READ_ADD key were also able to edit entries, by doubleclicking a row. We have now secured FlexLists against this.For those interested in more advanced search queries, we've added a section to our FAQ:Can I search specific fields? Yes you can by using "column name":"your keyword" as a query. Furthermore you can combine parts of queries using AND and/or OR. e.g.: status:Busy OR status:"Not started" you can also exclude certain parts e.g. -status:Done for columns with spaces in them you need to put quotes around the name e.g. "assigned to":Michiel AND -status:Done

Save Your Queries

Tue, 13 Jul 10 00:00:00 +0000

This new feature has been on our todo list for quite some time: storable search queries. If you do a search now, you can click 'Save Query As...' to store your currrent query as a View. You can either store it just for yourself or (if you have adequate permissions) for all list users.Some examples of queries to store (on a todo style list):-status:Done archived:0 (Todo items)status:Busy ( All active items)This new feature is combined with a small layout change, hopefully adressing two important issues:Users unable to find their archived itemsNew users unable to find out how to add items to an existing list

Organize Your Albums

Tue, 13 Jul 10 00:00:00 +0000

Some of our PicturePush users had problems organizing their albums properly. Therefore we introduce: Album Groups. To add albums to a group, you can click the 'edit' icon next to an album and then choose 'Add to Group'. This will open a dialog to choose the group name (or an existing group) Grouped albums will show under a seperate group header on your gallery index.

Brand New Server

Thu, 11 Mar 10 00:00:00 +0000

We moved PicturePush to a brand new server, which should be faster and physically closer to the servers that serve the images, Unfortunately this move did cause a disruption in our service yesterday evening/night. Everything is up and running now, so if you still notice anything strange please let us know. For those interested: it has both solid state drives for the database and normal disks for temporary image storage and 12 GB of ram. The CPU is a lot faster than the one on the old server, so resizing images and recoding videos should be quicker as well.

Update your Status

Mon, 05 Oct 09 00:00:00 +0000

A nice thing about social networks such as Facebook and Twitter is to keep up to date on the life of your friends. Because TeamSpinner is all about keeping up to date on your project, we believe that the new status feature will further improve tracking your projects. It works just like on all other social sites, but with a twist: you can attach messages to a specific project. Your messages are than only shared with other members of that particular project.Go check it out and tell us what you think.

Have More Fun In A Group

Thu, 01 Oct 09 00:00:00 +0000

This feature isn't particularly exciting, but we have postponed it for a long time. TeamSpinner now has Groups. You can create a group of users and then assign that whole group to a project. This makes it much quicker for teams to use TeamSpinner. We are working on more exciting features to keep your project members up to date, which we hope to present soon.

Projects on the road again

Wed, 16 Sep 09 00:00:00 +0000

Today we've released a minor update on TeamSpinner. Just a few small things that are hopefully better now, for now, it's mostly layout. However, we are looking for a major improvement soon. We aim to provide much more project management tools and ways to integrate external data and applications into TeamSpinner. Think of issue tracking tools, source control, etc. We hope TeamSpinner will become the center of project information.To keep moving, we need your feedback! What whould you need to give your projects a spin?

Moving to S3

Tue, 08 Sep 09 00:00:00 +0000

For some time we have used Amazon S3 as back up for our pro users on PicturePush. However, with the growing amount of users we decided that it was time to switch to S3 for all storage. The reason being that we got tired of managing our own storage: disks got full at unexpected times, etc.The approach we followed was to first get all files into S3 using the backup scripts we already had for the pro-accounts. Then we wrapped al our code that touched the image files. So we ended up with a filesystem based storage api with methods like: getLocator($image, $format)putFromFile($locator, $file)getToFile($locator,$file)getToTemporaryFile($locator)exists($locator)exists_local($locator)readfile($locator)filesize($locator)etc.Furthermore, we needed to account for metadata storage such as filesize, resolution, etc. because we could no longer get these from the files directly. Implementing all these abstraction was the most elaborate part of the transition. (If you ever do anything with files: wrap it! ) After this, the actual switch to using S3 was trivial. After a few days of bug fixing everything seems to be stable and quick again.As we needed to preserve our existing URL structure, lazy image generation and session based authentication ( for private images ) we could not serve from S3 directly. To keep things quick, we decided on using a large local cache for the most common files. This enables us to serve files fast and using our existing infrastructure without relying on it for permanent storage.Because of this switch to S3, we can now focus on stuff that really matters: features and speed. For example: To further speed up the serving of images, we are now experimenting with custom CDN nodes. Hopefully we will start some nodes in the US soon, so our US customers will get a much better experience.

More Filtering Options

Tue, 31 Mar 09 00:00:00 +0000

Today we worked on extending our filtering options to other parts of FlexLists. Starting today you can now also select which items to show on the widget by configuring it on the 'Publish' tab. You could for example show a list on your website with priority 1 items only by entering 'priority:1' as a custom filter and putting the code in your site. Furthermore the printing option will now print the current selection as you see it, instead of the whole list. So you can quickly compile a list using a search query and print just those items.An other thing we added is the option to hide the time on the date/time fields. You can hide it by checking the 'Date Only' checkbox in the field properties dialog. (available through the 'Fields' tab)Finally we fixed a few issues with the date picker and optimized the loading of the list data a bit to be on your screen even faster.

Safety First: Daily backup

Mon, 23 Feb 09 00:00:00 +0000

Although we store all your photos twice at PicturePush, this might not be enough to handle small or larger disasters. Therefore we decided that we want to keep your photos even safer. Starting today, all photos uploaded by pro-members will be backed up daily to Amazon S3. It's a very reliable service to store data. It uses multiple datacenters to spread the data, so we feel that we will be able to recover your photos in almost any event. So if you want your photos to be really really safe, upgrade to a pro-account.

20.000 PicturePush signups!

Sat, 07 Feb 09 00:00:00 +0000

Today photo sharing site PicturePush reached the 20,000th signup. The site doubled it's member base in just over 8 months. Member number 20,000 received a free two-year upgrade to pro-membership to celebrate. With this occasion I have taken the opportunity to write something about our current state of affairs and plans for the future: The site started in 2006 and has now grown to hosting over 1.3 million pictures taking up over 2 Terabytes of storage space. All of this using 2 storage/web servers and a database servers which together process the 54 million requests each month. Most of these requests come from Poland, The Netherlands and the USA. Currently the main focus is on increasing reliability and availability. The recent outages have emphasized the importance of this effort. An important step is the addition of very reliable backup for pro accounts which will become effective in the next few days. In 2009 PicturePush will further focus on it's pro-members by introducing more options for publishing and copyright protection. All members will profit from an ever increasing effort in improving usability and the integration with mobile and social platforms.

New Upload Page

Wed, 30 Jan 08 00:00:00 +0000

A lot of our beginning users were confused about the difference between the normal upload and the multi-file upload. Furthermore the installation of Java for the latter, posed a problem for some. Therefore we have tried to integrate the two into the new upload page. It is based on swfupload. We hope it is easier to use and more clear what exactly is going on. If you have any problems, or liked the old ones better, please tell us.

Protect your images

Wed, 28 Jan 09 00:00:00 +0000

For PicturePush pro members there is a new feature: add a copyright string to your images. You can set the text to show, and on what format of images to show it, in your profile. We also improved the effect of the 'Downloadable originals', from now on it does not only hide the download link, it actually completely disables downloading of the full size image for anyone but you.We hope this improves PicturePush for those users that care about the protection of their most beautiful images. Please let us know what you think.

Updates for PicturePush

Sat, 24 Jan 09 00:00:00 +0000

Today was a day for some updates on PicturePush:A short introduction text is shown on top of your galleryLarger thumbnails on the gallery index page for each albumChoose your own cover thumbnail for each albumMake comments on your photos private or just for friends (pro members only)

Customize FlexLists web export layout

Tue, 28 Oct 08 00:00:00 +0000

Some users ask to customize the layout of the FlexLists web export script. Therefore I created a small guide:It is currently partly possible to customize the layout of the web export ( available from the Publish tab). You can not do it directly in the FlexLists website, but if you are familiar with HTML/CSS there are some things you can change.Basically the output of the FlexLists web export script looks like: ............ .............. ................

field name 1
field 1 value

So if you insert the following code before the from flexlists:You will see a different appearance. Have a look at: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/propidx.html to see possible properties and values that are allowed in this small piece of CSS. To explain a bit: the first row are the table properties, the second row the properties of the header cells and the third row are the properties of the other table cells. So this particular example gives the table a standard width of 500 pixels, makes the header have a dark background with white text and left-aligned text. And finally adds dark borders around the data cells.

PicturePush Milestone

Wed, 20 Aug 08 00:00:00 +0000

A reason to celebrate: PicturePush has just received it's 1 millionth upload. It took us two year and one month to get to this point. PicturePush has very much improved since the start in 2006. We like to thank all of our members for using our service and especially those giving us feedback to further improve the site.

Timezone detection

Mon, 04 Aug 08 00:00:00 +0000

For a long time ForLater.net has been unchanged. It was the first MovingLabs application and by far the most simple one. However, the time zone dropdown has been incorrect for a while due to daylight saving and it allways defaulted to our server timezone. Because most users are from an other timezone, this might have resulted in some timing errors in the reminders. To prevent this, we have made a very minor change: Your timezone is now detected automatically using JavaScript, although you can still change it manually. We hope that you appreciate this small improvement.

Change of plans

Mon, 21 Jul 08 00:00:00 +0000

Due to the rapid growth of PicturePush and our involvement in an other soon to be released project, we have not been able to focus on the development of BloxDB. As we believe strongly in honest business I rather inform you now, then having everyone wait for something that will not come as soon as expected.We still believe in the project, but for the next few months our focus will remain on our existing projects. This will strengthen our common platform which will in the end benefit BloxDB as well. Basic features intended for BloxDB will be implemented as part of FlexLists, which is more and more becoming a light version of BloxDB.I hope this post clearifies the current state of BloxDB's development.

Photo Printing

Mon, 07 Jul 08 00:00:00 +0000

After a lot of considerations we decided to start a photo printing Beta using ColourMailer. You can now print your photos on PicturePush using the button on the right of the photo. By default you can only print your own photos. However, you can go to your Profile/Preferences and change who can print photos. It can be set to Public, Friends or just you. We hope this is a valuable addition for those of you posting event photos.

Changing the locks

Fri, 27 Jun 08 00:00:00 +0000

We made a change to the FlexLists secret URL approach. We no longer use the keys for normal list access, this means that the secret key will no longer be displayed in the URL bar. And will not be used at all, as soon as the list is in your user account. This means that if you do not share your lists the key is not handed out anymore. In the future we can now also make it possible to use secret keys for individuals and make them revokable. Which will make it more in line with the sharing options used in other sites. An other addition is the possibility to export CSV files for subsets of your data. So you can for example search for a keyword and then export only that part of your data to CSV.

Account Limits

Fri, 20 Jun 08 00:00:00 +0000

PicturePush is growing faster and faster. As we are quickly running out of storage space, we will temporarily add some constraints to the site. The first is that starting now you are only allowed to upload 200 MB of pictures over a period of four weeks. This is always measured over the past 28 days. So if you uploaded 160 MB in the past days, you can still upload 40 MB today. The total amount of storage you can use remains unlimited.This is a temporary measure to give us some time to increase our storage capacity. To help yourself and us, you can upgrade to become a pro-member. It will give you back the unlimited upload and helps us improve the service.

Top request: password protected albums

Mon, 02 Jun 08 00:00:00 +0000

There is one thing that has been asked for a lot: Can I share an album with someone without having to share it with all my friends? Starting now, you can protect an album with a password (enter it in the Album Access dialog) that opens up private albums to only those who have the password.Please note that the password gives people extra rights, so if you have a 'for friends' album. And you protect it with a password. Now the album can still be viewed by all your friends, but also by those who are not your friend and do know the password.As our pro-account offering was somewhat limited, we have made this feature available to our pro-users only.

Pretend to be a new user time after time

Sun, 01 Jun 08 00:00:00 +0000

As PicturePush and our other services mature, we receive bug reports. This is a good thing, as it helps to improve the services. However, what we found out is that even with a lot of users, you cannot rely on your users to report bugs. Especially in the beginning, but even now, some bugs have been really serious and must have been seen by hundreds of people over the course of weeks, sometimes even months. Now you would say, how can this happen? You use your own services, right? Yes, we do. However most of the serious bugs were related to new users, bugs or unclearity in signing up, cases without data, etc. So they only occurred to people new to the service, exactly those without a good reason to report bugs. After we found this out, we introduced the practice to very regularly do the whole process of signing up, doing the first steps and canceling ourselves. And it really helped to improve things, sign ups have improved and people have responded more positively to the service. Even if it are not bugs, every time we find something unexpected that was not as smooth as it could be. Therefore my advice to you: don't just eat your own dog food, go out and buy it every week as well.

Downtime expected for FlexLists

Sun, 01 Jun 08 00:00:00 +0000

Tomorrow FlexLists will be down for maintenance. Normally this would take only a few minutes, but this time we will convert the data in all lists as well in anticipation of new features that will be introduced later this month. Because we want you data to be safe, we can't have anybody accessing their FlexLists during this conversion. If everything goes well, none of our changes will be visible to you. If you are wondering what those features are that we are preparing for:Be able to archive items (great for 'done' items in todo lists)Have sublists (e.g. have a list of comments for each task in your tasklist)Some extra field types and options Upgrading your FlexList to BloxDBEdit 02 06 2008: The update is completed, it took us a bit over two hours. If you encounter any errors, please contact us.

FlexLists Update

Fri, 09 May 08 00:00:00 +0000

As I announced two days ago, we are in the process of turning FlexLists into a BloxDB light. As we feel the new GUI is much better, I have moved it to the actual site for all of you to enjoy. The most important changes:Tabs on the right with 'Share', 'Configure', etc.Slightly different color schemeDelete multiple items at onceDetail view no longer duplicates the fields shown in the main listDrop down menu's to hide less used options such as 'delete list'Need to be signed up to create a list (This removes the need to explain how to return to your own list)Use email to share the URLs is now preferred over direct linking (People tend to loose those URLs if you don't mail them)If you notice any bugs, errors or want to suggest further improvement, please let me know.

Towards BloxDB

Wed, 07 May 08 00:00:00 +0000

This weblog has been quiet for a while. The main reason is that we are working on some new projects and libraries. A project that we announced a few months ago is BloxDB. Unfortunately we were not yet able to put a lot of effort in it, so you will have to wait a bit more for the release. BloxDB will target it as an upgrade to FlexLists. As we want to make the transition as easy as possible, we are now in the process of moving FlexLists a bit towards, what we could say is a BloxDB light. It will have the same interface for the data as BloxDB, but with less features.For those of you interested in the latest developments, it is available online at: new.flexlists.com it uses the same data as the FlexList site, so you can login using your existing account. Feedback is greatly appreciated.

Really beta software

Tue, 04 Mar 08 00:00:00 +0000

It just became very clear that Teamspinner is still beta software: it was not working at all in Internet Explorer. We are very sorry for this and hope that those encountering these problems will give it another try.If you would like to know more about the actual JavaScript problem that caused this massive failure I have written an article about it on my personal blog.

Spin Faster

Sat, 01 Mar 08 00:00:00 +0000

You might like Teamspinner because it is so simple and wiki-like. However, it was still not as simple as many available wikis. So to make you work even faster we have added two things: Default Page setup: Instead of creating empty pages, by default a new page will get Text, Files and Comment blocks. And the second one, to make it into an actual wiki: If you type [[Pagename]] in the text area, it will transform into a link to the page with the same name. Not much special, but we hope it helps to make everything just a bit smoother.

Clone Your Lists

Sat, 01 Mar 08 00:00:00 +0000

So you created a nice FlexList for your niche application. And now you want the same thing again? Up till today you had to recreate all those fields from scratch. Based upon a request of one of our users we introduced a 'Copy this list' button what does exactly that: create a new list with the same fields. So once you've got a project management list that works, you can use it for all your projects, by cloning it.

Delete Comments

Thu, 14 Feb 08 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes the time is exactly right to implement a certain feature. This week we got three requests to be able to remove comments from an image. Of course it should have been possible already, but it wasn't. Therefore we have now implemented this trivial feature. You can delete your own comments plus all comments on your images.Furthermore, I have restructured the menu a bit. It should now better present what is really important.

Progress

Wed, 30 Jan 08 00:00:00 +0000

We are working hard towards a first beta release of BloxDB our online database product. Last week we finalized the GUI design. The screens are currently being converted into HTML, CSS and JS to make the GUI look and feel nice, smooth and responsive. We expect to show the GUI to our subscribers within the next two weeks. So if you want to take a peek and have not subscribed yet, please do so at www.bloxdb.com .In the mean time we are also working on InfiniScale.net to support BloxDB in the area of data storage. This will keep all data safe and quickly accessible.

VoteLists cleaned

Mon, 28 Jan 08 00:00:00 +0000

VoteLists was in need of a huge cleanup. First of all, hundreds of spam lists have been removed (more will follow, but it is hard to screen those remaining by hand). Furthermore the design has (yet again) been adjusted.Finally, a few weeks ago we have added a feature which enables you to make the number of votes on items in a list unlimited. This will allow you to use the list to create sorted lists by moving items up and down as you like. Which can for example be nicely applied to priority lists. One of our users has reported use as a tool in a group process. Go check it out!Do you have additional ideas to improve Votelists? contact us or add it to the features votelist.

Growing pains

Fri, 04 Jan 08 00:00:00 +0000

PicturePush is growing, with almost 5000 members and 300.000 photos. Some users experienced a noticable slowdown of the site. Therefore we have added an extra server, to provide more power to serve all users. This is a temporary solution until we will switch to our InfiniScale platform. We hope this improves the experience for all of you. (If it is still slow, please contact us)

Guest Passes

Tue, 11 Dec 07 00:00:00 +0000

Maybe the most requested feature for PicturePush was to give friends access without the need to sign up. Now you can! You still use the existing Invite page, but the user is not only shown the registration form, but also a 'guest pass' link. For the duration of one session they can see your 'for friends' images without signing up. Afterwards they can still sign up and become your friend.

Advertising

Sun, 05 Dec 99 00:00:00 +0000

You may have seen the new advertising blocks above the PicturePush albums yesterday. This was a short experiment which has ended today. Advertising is moved back to the bottom of the page, because we did not see any improvement worth the inconvenience. If you want to enable us to improve our services even further, please upgrade to Pro membership, as a bonus we will then no longer serve ads on your gallery.

What's Next?

Thu, 22 Nov 07 00:00:00 +0000

You might have seen that we listed BloxDB as our next project. So what is it? In short: it's the pro version of FlexLists. However, it is so much more, that it needed a new name and project. The key difference is that you can combine multiple lists into an application. So, for example, instead of a single list for your tasks, you can also add a list with your clients and developers that you can then link to the tasks. Even more interesting are sublists, which allows you to add a list inside an item. For example, you can add a Notes sublist to the tasks, so each task can have a list of notes attached to it.Furthermore, BloxDB will be more secure: lists will no longer have a secret url by default, so if you want everything can stay password protected, only available to the users you want. Sharing will become fine grained: you can give a different secret url to each person and withdraw the access if you no longer want it to be available. To improve collaboration, each application will have a 'discuss' option which will allow a mixture of comments and chat. Secure access will be provided as an extra.Finally, BloxDB will greatly expand the possibilities to use the data in other places, for example using the API, a form on your website, widgets and more.Do you want to keep informed? Please subscribe at www.bloxdb.com.

Unexpected downtime :(

Fri, 16 Nov 07 00:00:00 +0000

Today our server had unexpected down time. The reason was that the disk was full. We are very sorry that it happened and are taking measures to prevent this in the future.

New Skins

Sat, 27 Oct 07 00:00:00 +0000

I have created two new skins for picturepush for you to choose from: silver and white. You can try them if you are logged in and go to your preferences.

Windows Hosting

Tue, 23 Oct 07 00:00:00 +0000

We normally don't use Windows servers for hosting, but a lot of people do and one of our partners developed a wonderfull control panel to make things much easier. We have taken this product and will offer you this product as HostScreen. It's a really great hosting panel for Windows with support for resellers, domain owners and admins. We even take care of the installation for you.

More Support

Thu, 18 Oct 07 00:00:00 +0000

Some of our users at PicturePush had occasional problems uploading some types of movies. Especially mp4 movies. Today I spent a few hours updating the conversion software and these problems should now be gone. Additionally I enabled support for the gp3 format (used by some mobile phones). From now on we advise you to use MPEG 4 for encoding the videos.

More Cleaning

Fri, 12 Oct 07 00:00:00 +0000

Lately PicturePush was becoming slower and slower and loads of the server higher and higher without a clear cause: the amount of users did not rise significantly at the days it slowed down. However some apache processes were using an insane amount of memory (relative to the others) Yesterday I noticed something strange in the log files: an image that took ages to serve, created by a user named Zx54feyszlFc, but it was only a small jpeg of 100 times 100 pixels. However, opening it myself it did not stop loading either. I found out that it was 27MB in size. A quick look through our database showed there were hundreds of these files. After restarting apache, within seconds, multiple of these files were requested again. Based on the naming of the files (...xvid1, etc), it were parts of movie downloads disguised as jpg files.After removing all these strange files and the corresponding users, our server load dropped significantly and PicturePush is immediately much more responsive again. From now on we will monitor this more closely and hope to prevent it in the future. And to continue yesterday's cleanup, I've also changed the homepage of FlexLists to give it a more professional feel.

Time to clean up

Thu, 11 Oct 07 00:00:00 +0000

Allthough the FlexLists interface has changed several times, I still was not happy with it. Today I moved some things around and removed the dark gray blocks from the color scheme. I've also added a bit of javascript to scroll the details into view immediately after you click them. I'm quite happy with the result.

Start Your Own PicturePush?

Sun, 09 Sep 07 00:00:00 +0000

Do you dream about your own photo and video sharing site? Don't have the time or the money to develop it from scratch? We now offer you a risk free solution:Rebrandable PicturePush Photo and Video Sharing We use the proven technology from the PicturePush site to offer you a hosted and rebrandable photo and video sharing solution.

Track your Changes

Thu, 27 Sep 07 00:00:00 +0000

We already had the nice overview of the changes on you portal homepage in Teamspinner. Now we do think Teamspinner is great, but you can't expect users to go check it every hour. So I have added a very very advanced feature: an RSS feed.

Attention to Teamspinner

Wed, 26 Sep 07 00:00:00 +0000

Our project collaboration and information management tool Teamspinner has been in beta for a while now without much happening. We did not even actively use it ourselfs. Because eating your own dog food is a great principle and we needed to manage our growing amount of project information we forced ourself to use it from now on. So as a result you should see the changes comming soon. A few changes that are already applied after a few hours of intensive use:Switched to normal pages instead of AJAX (it's so much easier to mail these URLs )Sorted the 'Updated' overview by the most recently updated project firstFixed bugs with slashes in the textsRenaming of projectsAre you a user of Teamspinner? Please let me know what you need!

Fresh Design

Tue, 18 Sep 07 00:00:00 +0000

I have just changed the design of this website to reflect our change in direction. From now on we will focus more on our platform that we use to improve the development, scalability and reliability of our current and future applications. Please tell me what you think.

Xinu tool

Fri, 20 Jul 07 00:00:00 +0000

About a week ago I noticed a very nice tool listed on Techcrunch to check statistics about your website: Xinu. Unfortunatly the service stopped, however the sourcecode was released. We love usefull tools, so we decided to host it at xinureturns.com. Go check it out. All credits to the original author.

Screen Space

Mon, 16 Jul 07 00:00:00 +0000

Our statistics showed that there are not many 800x600 users left. To take advantage of this I have added a third column in the PicturePush layout. It shows everything you can do with an image, replacing the links below the image and the 'edit image' popup menu. Icons are added as well so you no longer have to think about what 'rotate left' and 'rotate right' are going to do to your image. On those pages not showing a main photo the column will be used for news.If you experience any problems due to this change, please contact me.

Did it make you angry?

Fri, 13 Jul 07 00:00:00 +0000

Since the introduction of Votelists we had some complaints about the red color scheme. Therefore I have changed things around to a more calm blueish tint with a few red accents here and there. Go check it out! Hope you all like this better.Unforunatly we had to remove the tagcloud from the site because it was filled with spam, even with the captcha to fight automated submission.

Tag everything

Fri, 06 Jul 07 00:00:00 +0000

PicturePush has so many beautifull photos by now, but they are hard to find. Therefore we changed the tagging policy: everyone can add tags to every picture, much like the comments. Offcourse you can still remove tags that you don't like on your photo. Furthermore you can you to 'Preferences' and hide all tags that are not your own if you want to.I hope all of you will start adding descriptive tags, so it will become easier to search and explore PicturePush!

Win a Canon Digital Photo Camera

Thu, 05 Jul 07 00:00:00 +0000

Because PicturePush will have it's first anniversary this summer we are going to give away a brand new and shiny Canon Powershow A570 IS. To own this camera you must sign-up and upload your most beautifull pictures. We will select the winner. Find out more now!

PicturePush Uploader Beta

Wed, 13 Jun 07 00:00:00 +0000

For those of you interested in the development of our new PicturePush upload tool, there is now a preview available at: http://www.picturepush.com/test/ppuploader.jar You can download it and if you have the Java runtime environment you can simply start it by clicking on it. (Only the English version is currently working) This upload tool will enable you to: create, rename and delete albums upload photos and videos resize photos while uploading tag and categorize pictures you upload All feedback is greatly appreciated.

Photo and Video Categories

Tue, 22 May 07 00:00:00 +0000

Tags are great to organize your photo's and video's but they can be hard to use when you just want to browse the media created by others. Therefore PicturePush now supports Categories. You can put each photo/video in one of our categories and people can browse those.

Do YOU get FlexLists?

Sat, 05 May 07 00:00:00 +0000

Some people complained that FlexLists was too complex. They felt thrown into the deep with an empty list and all the text to read. Therefore I have moved all the sharing/returning/managing fields into a small wizard. You walk through it when you first create the list and later can return to it using the normal buttons we allways had.

Better FlexLists Lists

Mon, 30 Apr 07 00:00:00 +0000

We have been thinking about a particular improvement of the FlexLists user interface for a while. Scrolling up and down between the list and the detail area was quite a pain when done often. Especially when lists become larger than the height of the screen. Our idea was to expand the current row with the detail information instead. This new GUI is now implemented, so go check it out.

Redesign : part 1

Thu, 26 Apr 07 00:00:00 +0000

In the last few weeks I have redone PicturePush a bit. The main goal was to improve skinability and make room for more menu options and at the same time unclutter the header. To do so we introduced a new XML based template system which compiles to PHP. The new design only contains two color specific images: the logo and the header background. This makes it possible to completely set the design in stylesheets and therefore can be controlled by the user in the near future. So please stay tuned for part 2, which will be mainly your part.

PicturePush Milestone: 41148

Thu, 19 Apr 07 00:00:00 +0000

Ok, 41.148 pictures is not really a proper milestone, but 1.000 members is. If you are wondering why the newest member has ID 1283... that's because we had to remove a lot of spam accounts before we introduced the captcha into the signup process.

Comming Soon: PicturePush Upload Tool

Wed, 18 Apr 07 00:00:00 +0000

We are currently working on an upload tool to replace the applet we currently have for batch uploads. It will be able to run standalone on your computer and uses the WebDAV interface to communicate. Some features we came up with:Batch uploading with options to resize and tag the whole batch at onceMove, Rename and Delete images and albumsDrag and drop uploading from ExplorerCross-platform (Java)Improved GUI with thumbnails to actually see what you uploadMuch more...We want this to be the best upload tool you have ever used, so please send me your suggestions so they can be part of the first release.

Structuring CSS Files

Fri, 30 Mar 07 00:00:00 +0000

At MovingLabs we always try to use semantically correct XHTML combined with elegant CSS stylesheets. We like to have a clear overview of things and therefore try to minimize the amount of code. Our XHTML often directly reflects the hierarchical structure of the content. We demand a similar structure for the layout however CSS being a rule based system does not support hierarchical structures by nature. This could lead to cluttered source files. An example

My site

Nieuws bericht

content...

This XHTML structure would go with a CSS file like this: .container {border: 1px solid black;}.container h1{ color: red; }.news {border-top: 1px solid black;}.news h2{color: blue}.news p{ font-weight: bold;} There is a clear relation between XHTML and CSS, but with large stylesheets it can become unclear what should go where and what inherits or overrules what. Therefore we use the following convention for layout of the CSS files: .container{ border: 1px solid black; } .container h1{ color: red; } .news { border-top: 1px solid black; } .news h2{ color: blue } .news p{ font-weight: bold; } The whitespace does not have a semantic meaning but it makes the file more readable. Furthermore this structure gives any rule a single intuitive location in our file. Using this structuring helped us reduce the amount of properties we used because it's now immediately clear what properties are redundant. Besides this hierarchical structure we also favor grouping similar properties on a single line: .container{ position: absolute; left: 0px; top: 0px; margin: 5px; padding: 10px; font-size: 15px; font-weight: bold; } Grouping them allows to have a clear structure without taking up all those lines which makes it hard to see the hierarchical structure we are in. Applying these conventions reduced the size of the stylesheets, the time we spent on making them and even more the time we needed to maintain them This is a translation of an article by me on my dutch weblog published on 13-03-2006.

Unexpected Downtime

Fri, 23 Mar 07 00:00:00 +0000

Today all of our sites were unreachable for almost two hours. This outage was the result of network problems at our provider. Everything seems to be up and running again. We are very sorry for the inconvinience.

User Interface Tuning

Fri, 16 Mar 07 00:00:00 +0000

I have done a bit of redesigning on the FlexLists interface. There is more color and improved error messages for empty lists. Have a look at the demo list. Please tell me whether you like it and what else can be improved!

Book Suggestions

Tue, 13 Mar 07 00:00:00 +0000

I have created a list with the books every programmer must read: You can add your own suggestion as you like. Not everything is directly related to coding, but those might be even more useful.

Improved PicturePush Search

Mon, 12 Mar 07 00:00:00 +0000

We have improved the PicturePush search. You can now select the area you want to search. This can be your own gallery, the whole site or the gallery you are currently viewing. We hope this makes it easier to find what you want.

Sharing VoteLists

Mon, 12 Mar 07 00:00:00 +0000

VoteLists did not yet reach it's critical mass to become interesting. Therefore we made it easier to share VoteLists. Below the lists you will find an easy to copy link and codes to create a top 10 listing to put on your weblog, website or a forum. It looks like this: Let me know what you think about it.Edit: We also added tags to the list so you can find those interesting lists.

VoteLists again

Fri, 09 Mar 07 00:00:00 +0000

Votelists has been online for almost a year now and I would like to bring it under your attention again. We have fixed a lot of minor issues and redid the layout a bit. If you have any suggestions please add them to the VoteLists Features VoteList.

How does a nerd promote a cool, feature rich, non marketed website?

Fri, 09 Mar 07 00:00:00 +0000

Our site www.picturepush.com is around now for a year; it is a photo-sharing, Ajax, web2.0, community, hypeterm 1, hypeterm 2 etc site. It was not designed / made to be a hyped site; it was made because we don't like any of the existing photo sites. So it was made by nerds, for nerd reasons. Even though it is one year old, it only has 666 members when I write this; while we like to use it ourselfs very much, it seems it is a waste not to promote it in some way, as we still think it is a very nice, userfriendly and usable system we created from scratch. Features: Photo sharing (duh)Video sharing, including conversion to flash and thumbnailingAll Ajax (no complete page reloading on most of the features)Webdav/applet/form photo uploadingTaggingCommenting GradingCommunity features; friends, photo rights Hotlinking allowedMultiple languageGrowing storage (like in Gmail)Free So my question is; how can we promote the site so it gets interested people. As we seem not to be able to do this. There are many of the same type of site, many many are much much worse but get a lot more members and attention. What is your opinion; what should we add/change to market it, if anything and how should we market it?

PicturePush Milestone

Thu, 08 Mar 07 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday the number of images on PicturePush crossed the 25.000 mark. There are many many beautiful images uploaded in the last months. We want to thank all our users for these amazing photo's and their valuable feedback. To keep growing and offer an even better service we cannot do without your feedback. Please go to the forum and leave your message. You can also vote for new features (or add more) on the PicturePush Features Votelist.

Something Extra

Thu, 01 Mar 07 00:00:00 +0000

We have decided to increase the limits of the free PicturePush accounts. The old limit was 2000MB. In our new policy you will get 6.7MB per day you are a member. (starting with the same 2000MB at day zero) So that comes down to about a 200MB increase every month. If you need even more space you can allways upgrade and get unlimited space. The ads are removed as a bonus.Last week we also moved to a new server. After some initial configuration problems everything now seems to run smoothly and much more stable than the old server. These new servers are also backed up daily to secure your valuable content.

Doubles

Sat, 24 Feb 07 00:00:00 +0000

We observed that a lot of people uploaded the same photo's multiple times on PicturePush. We did not know what it was until recently a user reported that it was due to clicking the 'Upload' button in our batch upload utility multiple times. It would start multiple threads uploading the same set of pictures. We have now fixed this and also fixed the buggy progress indicator. So now it will nicely run from 0 to 100% corresponding to the real upload progress instead of jumping back and forth in large steps.This again proves that we really need your feedback to fix and improve things. Don't hestitate to mail us with your annocances, crazy ideas, etc. We love to hear from you.

Expected downtime

Thu, 22 Feb 07 00:00:00 +0000

Today the Movinglabs Projects will be moved to a new and faster server. A short downtime is expected. We are very sorry if this causes any problems to you. We will try to keep the downtime to the absolute minimum.Update: the move has been delayed due to technical problems, it will now happen during this weekend.Update 2: the move was successfull, we are however still experiencing some occasional performance problems which will be fixed as soon as possible.Update 3: The problems seem to be resolved, if you still experience any slowness please let us know.

Remove the Ads

Sat, 17 Feb 07 00:00:00 +0000

Currently we are showing Ads on PicturePush to support the site. If you have beautifull pictures on your gallery this might be a bit of a disappointment to have those Ads right next to them. Therefore we now offer a Pro account without advertisements. Furthermore upgrading will provide you with UNLIMITED storage capacity. More advantages for our Pro users will follow soon.

Comments

Fri, 16 Feb 07 00:00:00 +0000

PicturePush allready had a comment function for a while but there was not much activity. Users complained that it was imposible to see which photos had new comments and also imposible to easily return to photos one has commented on. To overcome this problem we have added a Comment page to the menu (only when logged in) which shows your latest comments and the latest comments to your photos.(Note that last week we have also enabled comments on this weblog using HaloScan)

Broken Special Characters

Fri, 16 Feb 07 00:00:00 +0000

We are very sorry but we might have broken some of the special characters in some existing texts in PicturePush. These are now only visible as question marks. We needed to do this in order to support more special characters present in languages like Lithuanian, Iranian, etc. For new titles, descriptions, tags and comments you can now use allmost any character you can think of without problems. If some of your special characters have been replaced by question marks you can simply edit the text and replace them with the proper one.

Oh no... forgotten...

Wed, 31 Jan 07 00:00:00 +0000

Why didn't we think of that before? PicturePush is up and running for about 8 months now and we just forgotten it... One of the most essential features for any site that uses a login system. We forgot to put the 'Forgot your password' link in to remail the password to the user. But now that's fixed, so you can now all start to forget your passwords :)We have also fixed some minor flaws with tagging (comma seperated tags were added as a whole) and the zip file upload (tags were not added at all and movies were completely missed as well) feature. By the way, did I tell you about these features we also added in the past few weeks?Choose a skin for you own Gallery (click 'Profile/Preferences to do so)See an overview of your friends photo's on the 'Your Friends' pageSearch for Members on the Members page (or using the general search at the top)Rotate, tag, move and delete multiple photo's at one by checking the checkbox in the lowerleft corner and then selecting the appropriate action in the menu above the thumbnailsWe are updating daily to keep up with your needs.

My case for using plain PHP

Tue, 30 Jan 07 00:00:00 +0000

Nobody likes the way PHP code looks, it just does not feel right if you have ever seen anything else. The libraries are horribly designed, there is no consistent naming, variable ordering and no nice interfaces for database access. So from an objective viewpoint I would never use it, still at Movinglabs we use if for all our projects. Why???Just get started In PHP you can just get started, no need to setup anything, just write a line of code and it works. Ok, you need to install a webserver, PHP and a database, but using a (free) hosted environment you could even get around that. This is important because the idea for your new small project might be gone by the time you have found out which framework to use, how to set it up, how to solve all those dependencies, etc.No framework boundariesEver coded a beautifull framework in e.g. Java, everything works, you can build things SO quickly and ellegant. And then... there is this tiny important feature which made you redesign the whole thing again. With PHP there is allways an easy way out, it might not be pretty, but it's allways there. This means every next feature will take approximatly as much time as the size of that feature, never unexpected cost of reworking your strict framework.Choice What is important is that PHP gives you a choice how you want to do things. You can create a very nice library for the things you are going to use in other projects, while hacking a setup script together which you are only use once. All in the same language. If you are capable off using advanced text search and replace tools you can easily refactor the most horrible application. Stuff can be moved in any way you want, no restrictions. You could put all your code in a single file and get away with it. (You might just have a wonderfull text editor which is very capable of jumping up and down to the right parts of the code) Instant response An advantage of all interpreted languages and therefore also PHP is instant response to your changes. Webapplications often have a lot of easy to fix, minor errors, it's horrible to go through the whole build cycle every time you fix (or allmost fix) a bug. Large support There is so much development going on with PHP that there is allways a solution to your problem. Anything you can think off has been countered by somebody before. Libraries are available for anything you like and there is allways a way to hack it all together. Even PHP itself includes allmost any function you can think of. This also holds for hosting, you do not need your own dedicated server. You're application can be deployed allmost anywhere. No limits PHP might not be perfect, it might not be the fastest way for all cases, it never looks clean and the compatibility between version 4 and 5 is horrible. In the end, PHP just behaves as it should, as a tool, never limiting our creativity or frustrating the process.

Pictures first

Thu, 25 Jan 07 00:00:00 +0000

PicturePush is all about the photos and videos therefore we redesigned things a bit to make more space for the actual image information. The main/detail image now covers 50% more area. And the thumbnails are square and a bit taller, giving much more information, especially for portrait images.The page with all your albums is also a bit different now. The full width of the site is used to list the albums instead of the small column on the left. Especially for those of you with more then two or tree albums :) The 'Your Friends' page has been extended to show you friends of friends so you can discover those relations much easier. They might be your friend too!For suggestions you can leave a message on our forum.

WebDAV support

Sun, 21 Jan 07 00:00:00 +0000

We have just added experimental support for WebDAV to PicturePush photo and video sharing . It is based on the very nicely designed HTTP_WebDAV_Server Pear class. If you are using Windows XP you can set it up in the following way: Go to My Network Places, and click on Add Network Place at the top of the left sidebar. The window that pops up is the Add Network Place Wizard. Click Next. On the next page, enter the URL of the WebDAV folder in the box named Internet or network address: http://www.picturepush.com:80/webdav.php/ and click Next. A window asking for your username and password will pop up. Enter the appropriate username(your email address) and password, and click OK. On the next page, enter a name for this share -- this is the name that will show up in the My Network Places listing. Click Finish on the next page, and you're done!You should be able to upload pictures by dragging them into the albums you see in your Webfolder, rename albums and images and move images between albums. We are currently still working on supporting other options like copying and changing properties.

Speeding up PicturePush

Fri, 29 Dec 06 00:00:00 +0000

You might have noticed that the PicturePush homepage was a bit slow lately. Profiling showed that 5 seconds were spend on choosing the single random picture on the homepage. Replacing this by a random selection from only the best rated images reduced the query time by a factor 30. So a wise lesson: do not use ORDER BY rand() on queries that return a lot of results (before LIMIT ofcourse).To speed up a bit more we have spreaded out the images over 5 different subdomains. This should make loading of the albums with all those thumbnails a bit faster. Finally we now provide a list of all members with the number of images and the average image ratings so you can more easily find your friends and other interesting albums.

List the lists

Mon, 25 Dec 06 00:00:00 +0000

Do you like FLEXlists? Are you having trouble keeping track of all your lists? You can now create a useraccount and add any list you create and/or visit to your account. These are then allways listed on the right when you are logged in or when you click 'Your Lists'.Furthermore a simple search is now added. More filtering options are comming soon.

FlexLists updates

Sun, 24 Dec 06 00:00:00 +0000

We have updated Flexlists.com a bit today. First of all the layout has changed to make everything a bit more organized and to create some space for new features. All important actions are now listed in the menu on the right.Furthermore new lists will have a standard 'created' and 'changed' field. This allows you to see what has changed since your last visit and the RSS feed is sorted on the 'changed' field which should make it much easier for you to keep track of changes. Finally we have implemented an often requested feature: you can now edit the name of your list.

Effective website monitoring

Wed, 20 Dec 06 00:00:00 +0000

We too had our share of problems with webservers. Sometimes sites have been down way too long without us knowing. Therefore we have created Observu which is the most simple and effective website monitoring you can think of. You simply enter all URLs to monitor and some text that should be present on the page. (e.g. the first line of your welcome message) Now our system automatically checks your website and immediately notifies you by email when anything goes wrong.

Consyn Form validation

Sat, 09 Dec 06 00:00:00 +0000

We are adding form validation to the Consyn AJAX Framework. We have added this as a demo to Flexlists. This also fixes a long standing bug that prevented you from submitting a form with an empty date field.

Small Annoyances

Tue, 22 Aug 06 00:00:00 +0000

Today we moved FlexLists to our new server. We directly used this opportunity to upgrade it a bit. While working with FlexLists regularly, some things started to annoy me. Especially when saving an item, you were allways redirected to the first page of the list, breaking the workflow when editing items. This is now fixed, making it much faster to manage large lists. We have also started the implementation on a very basic WIKI syntax for the long text fields, so you can write a bit more structured text. If you have never tried FlexLists you can now directly try it with the demo addresses list.Are you annoyed by something? Please tell me!Update: We have added a very basic publishing feature which allows you to display your list on your website with just a simple HTML snippet.

Simple Project Management with FlexLists

Fri, 18 Aug 06 00:00:00 +0000

Everybody probably has had his share of problems with managing projects executed by a remote development team. A key factor is good communication. Offcourse you can write long detailed reports with the exact specifications and then hope for the best. You can use expensive collaboration tools nobody actually uses or you can keep things simple. We have succesfully managed several projects using a very simple approach. The main idea is that specifications are based on the needs of the developers and are never set in stone. To achieve this we set up a simple FlexList with the folowing fields:Description (for a short identification of the feature)DetailsPriority (with four possible priority values)Status (Free text)Notes (More free text)To get started you specify every feature rather globally. Don't spend to much time on it, because you don't have a good idea of where the project is heading anyway. Get the developers started on the high priority tasks. Now the important thing is to have a bit of discipline and keep all communication in the FlexList. So no questions by e-mail, mesenger or telephone. The developers can raise questions by writing them in the Notes field and setting the status to e.g. 'Question'. The only thing you need to do is regularly check the list for status changes. (or use the RSS feed to track it) You can then alter descriptions, answer questions or test delivered tasks.The advantage of this approach is that all knowledge, doubts, questions and bugs are in one place, everyone can easily reference to the list and find what decisions have been made. Because the list is so simple everybody can directly understand and use it, without the need to learn complex bugtracking tools. Furthermore you could tune it to your needs by adding deadlines, hour registration, assignment and more. You can even profit from the time difference because you can easily update the list while they are not at work, so the developers can have all questions answered before the new day even begins. Just keep in mind that specifications are just a way to communicate, the really important thing is to stimulate developers to ask questions, think about the features and the implementation. A polished report will make it much harder to discuss and change the specifications to the current demands of users, developers and your customer.Start managing my project now!

Moving pictures

Thu, 17 Aug 06 00:00:00 +0000

We advertise PicturePush as a photo and video sharing service, the video part did however not yet feel very solid. The Windows Media Player component took long to load and was anything but stable. Looking at the options it became clear that Flash video was the best option. The Flash plugin is widely supported and this setup allows for a very lightweight player.To create the video files we used only opensource software. Most important is the conversion from the original format with ffmpeg. (get started) Thereafter you will need to fix some of the metadata with for example FLVTool2. That's all you need to create proper FLV files.To play these video files a player is required, for now we have chosen Jeroen Wijering's player because it is nice and clean. We will modify it in the near feature to fit your needs. With this new player you can put the video directly in your weblog or website with a bit of HTML.

More on PicturePush

Mon, 07 Aug 06 00:00:00 +0000

Last week we have added even more features to our photo and movie sharing service. First of all a lot of bugs have been fixed. Furthermore we improved communication by giving you the ability to mail with other users and the rest of the world about the amazing photos you might see. Another often requested feature we integrated is the ability to rename your photo's. Do you have other requests? Please tell them.

Adding AJAX with the Consyn Framework

Mon, 31 Jul 06 00:00:00 +0000

To speed up the image browsing in Picturepush we have used the Consyn Framework to add some nice AJAX features. The most noticable addition is the lazy-loading scroller for the thumbnails. It loads the thumbnail pages only when needed while still providing the more natural scrollbar interface instead of the normal paging. Offcourse only the detail area is updated when an image is selected. More AJAX features to speed up the management of your images will be comming soon.

Improving PicturePush

Mon, 24 Jul 06 00:00:00 +0000

Last week we released the beta of PicturePush to the public. Since then we have been working hard on several bugfixes and interesting features. We have made it simpler to tag and describe images, added a batch-upload utility, improved security and have added a nice visual tool to crop your images. Everything is focussed to improve the handling of your files because most of us have a lot of images and it must be possible to manage them all. We want it to be possible to have all your images and movies in one central place in the best possible quality, without the need to worry about storage. We are still looking for suggestions so please try our PicturePush service and send us some feedback. You can also try out the dutch version.

What has been keeping us busy?

Thu, 13 Jul 06 00:00:00 +0000

For the past months we have focused on reusability of our code. We have been putting all our existing code in libraries and have focused on making our software more ready to be sold online. Now we are on track to deliver more projects in a shorter time, which is one of our main goals. Software should be fast and always changing; not set in stone as it is usually perceived by other companies. What are we working on? We are enhancing our Flexlists product with some exciting features: sublistsfilterspagesNew projects are coming out of the woodworks also ofcourse: Picturepush; online photo/movie gallery siteTeamspinner; simple and efficient projectmanagementObservu; simple and efficient server web server monitoringWe will be porting and writing our applications in Java from now on as well, as to entertain a larger audience. Prepare to be amazed in the weeks to come!

We are still moving

Fri, 02 Jun 06 00:00:00 +0000

It might look like we have not been moving for quiet some time. This is not because we are not building products anymore, but because we have been working very hard towards the release of the beta version of the eFormcreator Form editor service. The eFormcreator is a Componence product to make all kinds of forms using a real What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) authoring environment.Movinglabs is responsible for the WYSIWYG editor environment and for the overal project management of this project. You can view the demo or register for a free trial.

Tight schedules

Wed, 05 Apr 06 00:00:00 +0000

Today we released the fourth Moving Labs application: votelists. You might notice by now that we are releasing applications on a weekly schedule. And yes that's exactly what we do and plan to do for the coming months. We can release a new application every week, because we can build a new application every week. This is only possible because we focus on the essentials of the applications as I described earlier. Releasing a lot of applications will enable us to focus on the ones most usefull to us and others. As a side-effect we learn a lot about the fast development of webapplications. We can test a product such as the Consyn AJAX Development Framework in all kinds of applications before releasing it to the public. This is valuable experience used to improve both our products and the webapplications.Now we have finished the fourth application in a row, we believe that our theory actually works. The tight schedule combined with the diversity in work keeps us moving instead of being trapped in ever more complicated design of 'the best architecture' or talking about the ultimate application. We are now slowly extracting proven techniques and code from our weekly applications and move these into libraries so we can go even faster and release more complex and usefull applications every week.

No specs?

Thu, 30 Mar 06 00:00:00 +0000

Last time I told you we did not use specificiations. So you might be wondering how we do keep track of things. Well, we now use YourDraft and FLEXlists for that. We write down very briefly what we want in a YourDraft document. Then as we go we constantly think of features we (or our users) would like to have. We add these features in a FLEXlist, give them a priority and just implement the most important ones. Offcourse bugfixes are allways more important then any other feature.Offcourse you might say these lists are our specifications, that's fine. All we care about is that it works. One of the important aspects of these lists is that the features are on the detail level, so you can actually check that it works. Furthermore it is easy to maintain, most specifications written in a document are never updated to the current wishes of the users. They are allready obsolete before implementation starts. Our lists can change, we can add extra fields when we need them for a specific project and give everyone access to view the current (and allways up-to-date) state of the project.

Moving Labs starring E-lab and 2Vi

Mon, 27 Mar 06 00:00:00 +0000

Moving Labs is a new concept created by E-lab and 2Vi. It is an initiative to create effective webapplications. The name represents what we stand for: we want to move! We think that in order to create the best webapplications we need to keep moving forward, in our development process we only do the things that get us to the next step. This essentially means that our focus is on the user interface design and on coding instead of specifications and meetings. Because we do not want to get stuck again and again, we work on a thight schedule of one release every week. Less time just means a smaller application. We can do this, because we allways start with the very essence of the application. If we can't get such minimal system working in a short time, it is not minimal enough. After that we can just keep improving based on experience, intuition and user feedback. Do you still believe you need to specify everything for your webapplication? We don't! Imagine 10 online photo sharing sites, all well specified. If you look at the specifications they will probably look much alike. So the applications must be practically the same... right... So a great application does not depend on the specification. So how do you build great applications? Well, just try them and improve, ask your users, ask your mom! You won't spend time on features nobody would ever use and you will implement things you could have never imagined at design time.So we don't do anything up-front and just start coding? No, there is one important catch. You still will have to do some graphical design up-front. Users just don't see the application in a plain HTML prototype without style. Therefore we create the most basic design in a few hours, have a non-functional HTML prototype and just start incrementally adding our code. All of this without ever getting into a state which is worse then the previous one. (Yes you can do that with the proper tools, just add code and refactor when needed).In the near future we will write more about our projects, the development methods and tools we use to create them.

Movinglabs Weblog

Export Excel files

Brand New Observu Coming

Print Details

Save Your Queries

Organize Your Albums

Brand New Server

Update your Status

Have More Fun In A Group

Projects on the road again

Moving to S3

More Filtering Options

Safety First: Daily backup

20.000 PicturePush signups!

New Upload Page

Protect your images

Updates for PicturePush

Customize FlexLists web export layout

PicturePush Milestone

Timezone detection

Change of plans

Photo Printing

Changing the locks

Account Limits

Archives

Top request: password protected albums

Pretend to be a new user time after time

Downtime expected for FlexLists

FlexLists Update

Towards BloxDB

Really beta software

Spin Faster

Clone Your Lists

Delete Comments

Progress

VoteLists cleaned

Growing pains

Guest Passes

Advertising

What's Next?

Unexpected downtime :(

New Skins

Windows Hosting

More Support

More Cleaning

Time to clean up

Start Your Own PicturePush?

Track your Changes

Attention to Teamspinner

Fresh Design

Xinu tool

Screen Space

Did it make you angry?

Tag everything

Win a Canon Digital Photo Camera

PicturePush Uploader Beta

Photo and Video Categories

Do YOU get FlexLists?

Better FlexLists Lists

Redesign : part 1

PicturePush Milestone: 41148

Comming Soon: PicturePush Upload Tool

Structuring CSS Files

My site

Nieuws bericht

Unexpected Downtime

User Interface Tuning

Book Suggestions

Improved PicturePush Search

Sharing VoteLists

VoteLists again

How does a nerd promote a cool, feature rich, non marketed website?

PicturePush Milestone

Something Extra

Doubles

Expected downtime

Remove the Ads

Comments

Broken Special Characters

Oh no... forgotten...