Archive for January, 2008

Searching for the perfect admin tool

Published by
mattking
at January 26, 2008 in Design, Usability and Software. 2 Comments

Writing web applications for almost 10 years, I can’t count how many admin tools I’ve written. Having worked on so many, I’ve developed a programming pattern for creating them. However almost every time I make a new one, I find myself trying a new layout and navigation style.

Frequently I look at GoPlan, Basecamp and Wordpress (3 tools I also use quite often) and notice how similar their layouts are. Is this because they are doing the right thing? Or is it because they are lazy and copied each other? Should I be modeling my admin tool layouts like theirs? As a developer, I don’t have as much time to think about those things. I’m too busy making the tool work.

I am curious why so much time is spent by designers creating the front-end of a web site, but it’s usually up to the developers to create the layout for the admin tool. The usability and design of admin tool should be just as important as the public facing web site. An admin tool should be a continuation of the site look and feel, but in my experience it looks like a completely different site.

Some people say I have fairly good design sensibility. However I am not as good as a lot of designers who do it full time. This probably applies to most web developers. So next time you’re involved in creating a web site with an admin tool, consider asking the designer for at least a simple layout and style guide for the admin. They don’t have to create a design for every page, just a mockup of a sample layout that shows all types of form fields with labels, typography treatment and a navigation system. It will make a developers life much easier.

What is your experience as either a user or developer of an admin tool? What works and what doesn’t?

Track Trimet on your iPhone

Published by
mattking
at January 22, 2008 in iPhone, Software and Productivity. 11 Comments

Recently I started riding the bus again full time…if not to save the environment, but to save my nerves from dealing with traffic. After a few days I was reminded about one of the things that bothered me about riding the bus: I hated not knowing exactly when the next bus was going to arrive.

This time around I have my iPhone, so I am able to use the tracker on Trimet.org to see when the next bus came. Except it was really difficult to use on such a small screen. I was able to find out when the next bus came, it took me 2-3 minutes to do it.

So I decided I was going to write an iPhone app to do the same thing, but with a much simpler and easier to use interface. At first I was just going to scrape the Trimet site to get the information. But then I came to find out that Trimet actually has a really nice API to all their tracking information!

So I present to to you the Trimet Tracker, an iPhone app that allows you to easily find out when the next bus is going to arrive at your stop. Just enter your Stop ID and you’ll get a list of all the arriving buses (or MAX or Street Car), what time they will be showing up, and how long you have to wait. If you don’t know your Stop ID, you can also do a quick search by picking a route and selecting from all the stops on that route.

To make it even easier, you can also save any stop to your favorites list so you don’t have to enter a Stop ID or search for your stop again. Just hit ‘Favorites’ and select which stop you saved.

Obviously this tool isn’t for the masses…how many people are riding Trimet with an iPhone? Even if no one uses it, this tool has already saved me the a couple times from missing a bus. That’s worth the whole 4 hours it took me to develop it.

For the technically inclined, Trimet Tracker was built using the Camping microframework, IUI for the interface, and a few lines of custom Javascript.

One final thought: I now firmly believe that Portland is the geekiest city on the west coast. Even our transit system has an API.