Signal Chains (beta)

Matt and I have been working on Signal Chains for a few months, and are finally somewhat ready for the public to see it. I’m going to create a crisis here to make what we did seem so much cooler:

The Problem: Audio gear is expensive. Few brick and mortar stores carry expensive audio gear and will let you get your grubby little hands all over it before purchasing. Conversely, when people post audio samples online, you’re not always sure what is involved. Is it really that mic that sounds that way? Or is the preamp they’re using coloring the sound?

The Solution: Signal Chains is essentially a way for audio engineers (or those who call themselves audio engineers) to share their signal flows through audio samples, documenting each piece and process involved. It does this by providing a somewhat standardized method of doing so.

Read More »

I just rolled out some “enhancements” to the theme of this site. I felt like the sidebar was getting crowded, so I added some navigation to the top of the page and eliminated some messiness.

“Links”, “About”, and “Contact” actually load in the content of their respective pages. Hopefully this makes my website look less pathetic due to the small amount of content.

“Music” and “Tags” show content from the sidebar, which is hidden if JavaScript is turned on. It all degrades pretty nicely.

The biggest challenge was achieve appropriate behavior of the resizing and hiding of header content; most notably when loading one set of information into the header without closing the box first. It’s all handled in the nav.js file using jQuery. I know there are quite a few redundancies in there, so if you’ve got an idea on a better way to achieve these results, fork the Master Plumber Chyrp theme which is entirely available on GitHub. Either way, I’m going to sit back and enjoy the fruits of my labor by continuously clicking menu items.

I also recreated the sidebar background with a tighter wire grid look. The old one’s sloppiness had been bugging me for a while. The background is a recycled use of this image: which I created for another project.

I hope it’s all pleasing to your eyes. Mine are tired of looking at it.

Rails Rumble 09 Judging

Well, Operator didn’t pass the expert judging for Rails Rumble 09. Only 22 apps did. We did get some nice feedback, though, and there are some things we’ll definitely keep into account as we continue development. Here are our judge comments:

Private Alpha? How are we meant to judge it when it’s not open.

- Zach Inglis

I was really bummed when I read this. Mostly because nowhere in the Rumble rules does it say “Your app must be open for user registration and give them all the goodies they want”. The demo was fully functional, and it accomplished everything we wanted. There’s no way of knowing if he even played with the demo. Operator is powered by Twilio, and requires an account with them to work. Matt and I footed the bill for this, purchasing a number and paying per-minute for test calls. I’m willing to bet money that no one would have signed up for a Twilio number just to test our service. On the other hand, perhaps it wasn’t the best idea for us to build Operator with goals of winning something in RR. I also could have really used a question mark at the end of his question.

The visual design on this app is wonderful, though things do feel a bit spaced out and overly large sometimes. I’d prefer to see more calls on a single page. The phone interface worked nicely and showed up on the site instantly. I was hoping to see a way to classify messages as completed, or a way to integrate with other issue trackers, but I assume those are planned features. All in all, a very nice app.

- mojombo

My favorite feedback. He was positive and provided some suggestions. Most of all, he CALLED THE PHONE NUMBER. I can’t tell if any of the other judges did. This means he actually used the application fully. If he does that, he can say whatever his heart desires and I’ll respect it.

The visual design is a bit “large” in places as Mojombo says (I think Mojombo’s scores should double up as I seem to share all the same comments, lol). However, this is a great technical achievement given the time frame.

- Peter Cooper

Very nice guy. I talked to him on IRC a bit after he gave us a score. I would have liked some more in-depth suggestions, but these judges had to go through a whole bunch of apps in very little time.

This is damn cool and I’d love to see the code and learn how it works.

- gilesgoatboy

I guess this is pretty self-explanatory. We got an average rating on appearance from him, which I could have used a little explanation/suggestions on, but life goes on.

Last night when I was checking an outsiders collection of app scores, we sat at the number twenty spot. Today on the list posted for public voting, we don’t sit there. It was a wise move by the judges. I think the public wants to play with something they can fully use.

On the other hand, KC locals Microbrew Certified Partners (awesome name) made the cut with their app Lowdown, which Matt and I will definitely keep using. It’s pretty darn slick, so go sign up as a voter and give them some votes.

Rails Rumble 09: Operator

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, and you can read about it in our blog post.

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!