Last weekend marked the third year Matt and I (Relatively Early Development) participated in the Rails Rumble 48-hour-stay-awake-until-your-eyes-bleed-code-and-do-nothing-else-rush-to-the-finish web app development competition.

As usual, we ended up building a tool that we wanted to use internally. This time it ended up being sort of an email toll booth. Matt and I found ourselves pasting company email drafts back and forth to each other for approval before actually sending something. This was a pretty annoying process. The remedy that we blew a weekend on is called Make Sendable, and we think it’s pretty cool.

A Heartwarming Story of Make Sendable Use

• Matt and I have set up a Make Sendable account (red.makesendable.com) which we are both members of. Our company email addresses are associated with this account.
• I have taken on the task of coming up with an estimate for project we’re bidding for and I need to email the client. I draft the email and send it to email@red.makesendable.com from my company email. In the subject, I include the intended recipient’s email enclosed in square brackets.
• The email hits Make Sendable, creates a new message on our account, and shoots Matt and email. The email includes the message and lets him know there’s it’s awaiting his approval.
• Matt visits the message on Make Sendable. While we usually tend to agree on absolutely everything, Matt has some problems with my email. He highlights and comments on specific pieces of the email, offering alternative verbs or correct grammar or crap like that.
• And then, after he picks apart my email, he pours salt in the wound by revising it. The nerve of that guy…
• After a day and a half of self-doubt and career re-evaluation, I come to terms with Matt’s revisions. The guy isn’t so bad after all. I like it all, except for a few minor things, which I comment on specifically.
• I make one final revision that I feel is perfect. Matt sees my genius and thinks it’s perfect too, so he approves the message. Since there are only two people on our team, two votes is a unanimous approval, and the final revision is automatically sent on to its original recipient. We throw a party.
• When the party is over, I sulk back to my computer and take a look at previous revisions to see just where my business sense went wrong. I vow to never write a bad email again, but just in case I do, we have Make Sendable to prevent it from going out.

Things we learned

• “contenteditable” doesn’t work on iOs devices. We ended up swapping out the original message body text with a textarea input on selection. It ended up not working on iOS anyway, so I imagine we’ll just convert that part to a contenteditable div when the contest is over.
• Be extremely clear with your app demo/examples. Judges might not actually use the app.
• Outsource as much as possible. We would never have gotten the email interface in if cloudmailin didn’t exist

Matt and I just finished this year’s Rails Rumble competition. For those unfamiliar, teams are given 48 hours to design, develop, and deploy a Ruby on Rails based web application. Our entry is was Operator.

I did all the visual design for Operator; we didn’t use a single stock image. I didn’t worry about IE at all during this 48 hours, and the site uses a lot of CSS3 attributes that make it prettier. Take a look at our team page for a look at the technologies used.

The landing page was something I threw together in Illustrator. All the icons were made in DrawIt. I’m pretty proud of my little creations and I think it will be a very useful service once we can really spend some time working on it.

I thought this was funny: Our commit graph, shown by the hour, for the weekend.

We finished our development a couple hours before the deadline, and I thought we used that time to push up a pretty bugless app. Unfortunately, after spending some more time with it in Firefox, we noticed there were a couple of hangnails on Operator. Apparently, Firefox doesn’t like console.log unless Firebug is on. Neither does Opera. Neither does IE. Major bummer.

So, if you take a look at Operator in Firefox, playing messages from the answering machine and adding tags to calls via drag-and-drop will not work. Everything else seems to be fine, though, and you can still add tags from the call tags section and listen to messages from within each call. Moral of the story: WebKit rules. Go download Safari or Chrome and experience web how it should be experienced.

Some other entries from the KC RoR Community:

• Twitassist.me
• Lowdown

Great job guys!