Rave: Axure & Ubunto

Rave: Axure (Prototyping)
PictureForLife.net is close to completion. I'm really excited about this. It will be more than just a standard photography site. Thanks to my friends at Akcelerant, they turned me on to this prototyping software from Axure a couple months ago. It's a great piece of software for designing applications. I've never been a fan of wire framing because to be honest....I found it boring because they're basically just some pictures of what screens will look like. What sets Axure apart is the fact that you can put some code bits behind the wire frame. Thus, allowing one to be able to see interactions between components.

There are basically two approaches you can take. You can start designing screens and interactions (i.e. wire frame) or you can start with a flow model which utilizes a flow chart approach. I chose to go the wire frame route. Once you're done, you can have the system generate a specification document. That's the icing on the cake. I don't write specifications -- NEVER!. This system does it for you.

Going forward, I will use Axure. It's a wonderful tool in the toolbox.

You can check out the prototype for the website. I've developed this site using Flex and FileMaker. The next phase will include a FaceBook application to my site. I've been working with the FaceBook API for the past couple of weeks and it's powerful and very easy to code in. More on this later.

Rave: Ubunto
A colleague recently told me about a Linux flavor called Ubunto. It's a simplistic flavor of Linux. I've installed Linux before and I've always struggled with them. Then, trying to install instances of php, ruby, apache, and MySQL was painful. Installing Ubunto only took 10 minutes to install and get up and running. I installed this in my parallels system using a linux kernel 2.6. The download of Ubunto is an ISO file. Once you mount it on parallels - a working version comes up instantly. It's like doing a try before you buy approach. I played around with it and all I had to do is click on the "install" icon. I answered a few questions and then it was done.

Once Ubunto was installed, I installed PHP, Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and Apache2 via a couple of commands I was up and running. Literally took me 10 minutes to install these applications.

Ubunto comes with OpenOffice installed. It also comes with Gimp which is an underrated imaging application.