It’s been a while since I posted anything here. I did do a lot of blogposting however, albeit on another site. A site that I have been working on for the past 8 months:

Quplo - A new way to create interactive prototypes

I’ve been working at Q42 for about 10 years now, and it’s been a blast. I’ve been blessed to work with a  team of professionals that are equally passionate as I am in writing web applications and sites in a way that it makes sense.

One of the things that didn’t always make sense was the process of doing so. Especially in the field of customer expectations and designer collaboration. Don’t get me wrong, we work with some excellent designer firms and I’ve met a great deal of wonderful people. It’s just that the fields of webdesign and development are somewhat isolated fields of expertise that I’ve always wanted to bridge. With Quplo, we’ve tried to do that.

Pixel perfect

One of the things I’ve heared many times by respected designers is that they expect developers to understand the fine details of the designs, and make it “pixel perfect”. I am actually designing a game myself (using Quplo by the way) and I hear myself saying exactly that. It comes from love for the job and what you’ve made, and you’ve put a lot of thought in pixels, margins, highlights, etc. It all ties in together.

Embrace web technology

But the same rule applies vice versa. We’ve had many discussions on how a certain design was tough to implement and would require a lot of extra (polluting) elements, css and images. Of course, now we have HTML5 and CSS3 and stuff will gracefully degrade, but it’s not always clear to designers or the client what to expect.

Bridging design and the web

Luckily, these past few years we’ve been able to teach designers “our way” of the web as they have taught us their way of design details. It’s two worlds coming together. Now all we wanted was the right tool to accomany this.

We use a lot of tools here at Q42, ranging from Balsamiq Mockups, Fireworks, Photoshop to different IDE’s such as Visual Studio or Eclipse. None of those tools was aimed at working specificly on HTML, CSS and Javascript with the only goal to quickly create an interactive version of what was mocked up or designed and to show how it would work in the browser.

I decided to build that tool, and I did so together with Rahul Choudhury. The result is Quplo.

Now I can go on about how that went, what obstacles we needed to overcome where we are now, here’s the summary:

We’re doing great. Over 2500 fronteers have found their way to Quplo, and people sign up on a daily basis. We’re trying to be very open about every aspect along the way, so if you want to catch up on it and read about what I’ve been up to then I suggest you read Quplo’s blog and start at the bottom :-)

If you’re short on time but still want more info, I suggest you’d read these two posts:

Our Philosophy: design in the browser

Why we’re not building yet another visual prototyping tool