Being all about the user

That phrase is often used and is a fairly obvious statement. Aren’t all applications, web or otherwise, built for the users?

Well yes, but I bet you can name a bunch that don’t feel like they were. Maybe this is one of the reasons apps stay in beta so long now.. which I guess makes sense.. that is what the beta stage is for. isn’t it?

Anyway, I diverge. Pingbase is a very simple tool, it only really does one thing after all. It has an object and list model. In this case only two lists; URLs a user is monitoring and people that receive notifications. Each object in each list has it’s own list of objects associated with it, made up of objects from the other list. So to give you an example, a URL object in the URLs list will have a list of people from the People list assocciated with it. And vice-versa.

So basically the Pingbase interface lets you add and remove objects to and from lists, and then to edit those object’s details. As well as a list of people to notify, a URL object also has the URL itself and a label to identify it. A person object is associated with a list of URLs, a first name and last name, and also holds details for each notification type; email address and mobile phone number.

Simple stuff, probably explained in too detailed a fashion :)

Additionally, there are screens for upgrading or downgrading an account and for tracking previous payments.

The main thing about the interface design is that it has to be one that’s obvious. Pingbase isn’t a tool you’re going to use everyday. It’s a fire-and-forget app. Once you set it up, you may not need to ever come back! The only time you’ll hear from Pingbase is if one of your sites goes down. So after a year of not logging in and using the interface, you should be able to come back and know exactly how to use it without having to learn anything again.

To this end, we’ve tried to only show the options you need on each screen and to emphasise the most used functions. We can’t predict how people will want things done, but we can get closer if we remove controls we don’t think are needed.

Trademarking Pingbase

It’s time to get on with the legal work on this project.

As I’m sure most of you have, I’ve been keeping up with Ryan’s Barenaked App blog that follows the build of his latest project, Amigo. When it came time to register our trade mark i followed his simple guide.

It really wasn’t a scary a process at all.

At the risk of starting a meme, I documented the event.

We decided to go for the Search and Advisory Service (SAS) to start with. This application lets you do a kind of feasibility test to see what your chances of being successful are. It’s cheaper, which means less risk, but does mean that overall it costs a little more as it’s not deducted from the total cost. This first stage is costing us £94 inc. VAT. If we pass then the next (and final) stage will cost £200 inc. Vat, which covers us for two classes. This is the infamous TM3 form!

Choosing the classes you fit into is not that easy.. Having sent off the form I got a call from the Patent Office in Cardiff asking me a few questions about Pingbase. They were very helpful and we fleshed out the description a bit more. We ended up submitting it, on their advice, without classes. They’ll work that bit out on our behalf. Very nice of them!

On a side note – this is the first piece of paperwork we’ve generated so far. So far everything has been online, in emails or Basecamp. Having this (although we’ve sent it off now) adds some reality to the project.

Sponsoring d.Construct and the quest for a logo

d.construct is a great opportunity for Pingbase and I’ve been on the case with this for some time. When I discussed it with Andy it all just fell into place.

Then several things happened very quickly.

We agreed the sponsorship in principle and worked out the details, but then Andy dropped a deadline on us. There was an ad going in .Net magazine that had a print deadline 2 days later. This would have been fine if we had a logo, but we didn’t. What we’d been going with so far, along with the whole site design, was always meant to be temporary, and had been moved down the to-do list.. we needed to get th UI finished, and that was a priority!

So Nick came round at 9pm the night before the 8am deadline, and I got to work. Several things were very obvious to do, so we had somewhere to start and an idea of what it should do:

• Relay the idea of the “ping”.
• Be bold and confident.
• Contain the URL (being that we have no marketing yet, and it’s first appearance would be in print).
• Work well in both colour and black and white. And greyscale.
• Scale well
• Not require too many guidelines for usage

Above all, like all good logos, it needed to be simple.

Here’s a few of the early ideas.

 
 

It’s funny to say “early ideas” since we did all the work in a matter of hours!

The incorporation of the “.com” into the logo gave us a few more options. But, if we used it as an intergral part of the logo we’d also be restricted in the future if we ever wanted to simply use the name on it’s own. This was a shame, but what we came up with worked well:

By this time it was 2am so I quickly created EPS and TIF files for Andy’s designer to get into the .Net ad, including a version reworked for a dark background, just in case. Then I switched the logo on the site for consistancy.

All in all it looks like working under pressure like that can sometimes produce results. During the startup stages of Loose Connection we did similar late nights and came up with some of our best work. But if yuo’re going to get things done, you have to use every available bit of time you have!

Hello world!

Hi!

This blog is here to let you know what’s going down with PingBase, our new website monitoring tool.

We’ll tell you how we’re getting on with the build, and then any thoughts about features and implementation. And when we’re up and running we’ll talk about how you can use PingBase to serve you most effectively.

Of course we’ll also be asking your opinions too, so if there’s something obvious we need to do, or you just have an interesting idea, let us know..