• Read more about Intridea Gets a New Look

Today, Intridea.com got a brand new look and feel. The goal behind the redesign was to improve the user experience with a cleaner and more attractive layout. I'd say the goal was met and exceeded with better organized content, careful use of white space, and a more vibrant color scheme. Visitors will still find all the major menu items and frequently used links in the same place; they just might stand out more and look a little better.

Before and After

Key Features:

• Enhanced Usability
• Greater User Experience
• Consumer Focused Interaction Design
• Warm Balanced Visual Design

New Sections

Services

In this section you'll find a run down of the Intridea process as well as the detailed services we provide to each of our clients. Did you know Intridea holds regular training classes based on cutting edge development practices?

Portfolio

Our new portfolio section showcases a variety of stunning web and mobile applications Intridea has built for clients, products and open source projects. Clicking on any showcase item will reveal a full description of each project. If you like what you see here, contact us and we'll help you bring your next project to life!

Blog

We've paid special attention to our new blog section. With a focus on design and usability our new blog aims to give you the best information in an easy-to-read format. Looking for an old article? No problem. You can easily access old posts directly from the right sidebar.

Contact

Our contact us page has been redesigned to help you get a hold of us quicker. Select any of the options from our contact form and include a short note. One of our helpful client service representatives will follow up with you promptly. If you prefer to reach us by phone, you can call us at 1-888-968-IDEA. We look forward to connecting with you!

About

Intridea would not exist if it wasn't for the talented group of people we have here. We're like family. Each of us are extremely grateful for one another and we hope you'll find this new section helpful for learning more about what we do here at Intridea.

Please let us know what you think about our new look by leaving us a comment below.

• Read more about Skeet: A Twitter Client for Chrome

For users of Google Chrome there are a number of useful extensions that enhance your browser in a myriad of ways. Skeet for Chrome is a new Chrome extension that provides a lightweight, simple, and usable Twitter client right inside your browser.

Skeet is a simple, usable Twitter client for Chrome based on our recent launch of the Present.ly Chrome Extension. It uses OAuth to connect to Twitter so your password is safe and it gives you dead-simple access to your home timeline, mentions, and messages.

We hope you enjoy using Skeet. It’s 100% open-source and we aim to make it the best Twitter client for Chrome. Install it today!

To keep up to date with the latest news about Skeet, follow us on Twitter at @skeetapp

• Read more about Mobomo's Barg Upender at NVTC Social Media Speaking Event

The Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC) presented their Social Media Committee event on Feb 26th, 2010, and Mobomo's founder/ CEO Barg Upender was a panelist.

Shashi Bellamkonda of Network Solutions moderated the panel, which included Brian Dresher (USATODAY.com), Phil Bronner (Novak Biddle Venture Partners), Amber Harris (Discovery Communications), and Barg Upender.

The panel, aimed at marketing and sales people, covered tips on how social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs are being used by businesses for customer interaction. Some key points discussed by the panel included:

• The importance of social media metrics measurement.
• How to deliver interaction to customers through social media channels, and how this differs from traditional marketing campaigns.
• Treating social media campaigns as if you are launching a new product or service.

If you're interested in knowing more about mobile social media marketing options for your business, please contact us.

• Read more about Maintain: State maintenance like woah

Managing and maintaining state is a fairly common pattern (and problem!) in Ruby web apps. That's probably why there are so many libraries out there that do it.

The way we use state machines is fairly simple - rarely do we touch on concurrency and its friends. Really, we want to do a few basic things:

1. Give states a name ("new", "deleted," "flagged")
2. Test whether or not an object is in a given state ("alive?", "dead?").
3. Run code when states change (from "happy" to "sad," self.buy_ice_cream)

And you can do that pretty easily with any of the existing Ruby state machines. It's not pretty, but you can do it.

But there are a few cases that don't help.

- What if you wanted to maintain two separate states in a single class?
- What if you wanted to call something "new" but save it as "0"?
- What if you wanted to know whether or not one instance's state is further along than another's?
- What happens when you want to store complex state that isn't just a single value?

Until today, you'd need to write that yourself. But now you needn't bother, since I've done it for you. It's called **Maintain** and it's built with a few goals in mind:

1. Be simple.

• Read more about Tweeb Launches - Twitter Analytics on the iPhone

We've been very busy and are proud to announce our next app "Tweeb." Tweeb is a Twitter-focused app for the iPhone. It helps people understand how they are doing on Twitter by giving them stats beyond followers. Check out the Tweeb website to learn more or just go take a look on the App Store.

Tweeb is an interesting app for us not just because we love what it does but because of how it came to be. This was an app that Ken created some time ago. He brought it to us because it had undergone several rejections in the App Store and had serious performance issues. We spent about four weeks completely rewriting the backend and adding a couple of significant new features. Of course, after this work, it flew threw the approval process and into the App Store.

It's not our style to push forward with a launch until we've allowed our users to kick the tires for a bit. Aside from all the feedback Ken incorporated previously, we were able to get some great insights from the first round of App Store users and recently pushed a subsequent update. If you are really interested, go read the release notes for Tweeb v0.9.1.

Version 1.0 of Tweeb is currently in development and should be pushed to the App Store by the end of this week. The best way to get us feedback is through our help desk or via our support e-mail (support at this domain).

• Read more about Redfinger: A Ruby WebFinger Gem

Just yesterday, Google turned on webfinger for all GMail accounts. Today, we’re releasing a RubyGem to help you use the new protocol!

What’s a WebFinger?

WebFinger is a new protocol for extracting public information about a person via their e-mail address. It is meant to complement systems such as OpenID as well as give a simple way to get basic information about a user without having to ask them for it.

E-Mail providers can implement WebFinger by creating a special URL (specifically at /.well-known/host-meta) that is an XRD XML document telling the requester a URL at which they can find out more about e-mail addresses on their domain. Google’s, for example, is http://www.google.com/s2/webfinger/?q={uri}. When the WebFinger endpoint is requested with an e-mail address in place of {uri}, Google looks up information about that e-mail’s public profile and provides it in a standardized XRD XML format.

So why WebFinger when OpenID already exists? Users are used to associating their e-mail address with their identity. It’s natural since an e-mail address is (usually) for a specific person. By putting a protocol in place to find out more about an e-mail address without requiring additional input from the user, a host of options become available.

For instance, if I’m an application looking to authenticate using OpenID, I can ask a user for their e-mail address instead of their OpenID URL (something that will confuse mainstream users to no end). Or, if I want to automatcially fill in basic profile information, I can check to see if a parseable profile page is available in a format such as hCard.

Enter Redfinger

Redfinger is a library built to easily consume the WebFinger protocol. Installing it is simple:

gem install redfinger

Using it is just as simple:

require 'rubygems' require 'redfinger'  finger = Redfinger.finger('youraccount@gmail.com') finger.open_id.first.to_s # => "http://www.google.com/profiles/youraccount"

Redfinger will query the host of the e-mail domain specified, and, if the Webfinger protocol is supported, retrieve information about that e-mail address including such links as OpenID Provider, hCard URL, and more.

How can you use this today? Well, if you’re an OpenID consumer you can use the above code to try to “intelligently find” an OpenID endpoint from an e-mail address. Of course, it will just about only work with Google at the moment (this is an alpha protocol, after all). Or, you could install the mofo gem (a gem for parsing microformats for web pages) and do some neat things with microformats:

require 'rubygems' require 'mofo' require 'redfinger'  finger = Redfinger.finger('account@gmai.com') card = hCard.find(finger.hcard.first.to_s) card.fn # => "That GMail user's full name" card.title # => "The title he/she entered on Google Profile"

Here Redfinger determines a URL that will have hCard information about the e-mail address specified, and the Mofo gem goes out and fetches that address, parsing out the information.

WebFinger is still brand new (Google calls it “alpha”) but it shows some promise for being a great way to make the open web more seamless for users. As always, the Redfinger source code is available on GitHub and RDoc Documentation is available. Check it out!

• Read more about Barg Upender on the iPad in the Washington Post

Last week during the all-iPad-all-the-time event, we took some press calls. Barg got quoted by one of our favorite columnists, Rob Pegoraro of the Washington Post in an article entitled, Apple reveals the iPad tablet after months of hype. Is it worth the wait?:

"I think it's definitely going to kill the Kindle," said Barg Upender, founder and chief executive of Mobomo. But he did express a little disappointment that the iPad fell short of the most enthusiastic prophecies -- for example, control by voice commands. "It's a step in the right direction but not as revolutionary as we thought it would be," he said.

In others news, he'll be a panelist at next week's DC Lean Startup Circle event. Barg will be discussing his ideas on applying lean startup principles to iPhone development.

• Read more about ExpenseBooks For FreshBooks - iPhone + Android

Today, Mobomo is happy to announce the launch of ExpenseBooks for FreshBooks on both the iPhone and Android platforms (search "ExpenseBooks" on the Android Market). ExpenseBooks is a simple way to log your FreshBooks expenses while on the go.

As a long-time FreshBooks user, I pitched this idea to Barg towards the end of 2009. While there have been a couple of FreshBooks iPhone apps, they weren't really useful to me. A more natural way to use FreshBooks while not in front of a computer is to capture those things that you do while not in front of a computer. Namely, pay for meals while meeting with people, purchase office items, buy gas for the car, etc. Hence ExpenseBooks was born.

We finished the iPhone version first but decided that we wanted to also give Android a little love. So, we held off on doing the launch until the Android app was also already to go.

For more info, you can read the FreshBooks announcement on their blog, visit their iPhone or Android add-on pages, or just go download the apps. We've got some great ideas in store for ExpenseBooks but will be listening to the community closely. We'd love to hear from you, so be sure to submit support and feature requests at the Mobomo help desk.

For Android devices, search “ExpenseBooks” on the Android Market.

• Read more about Presently Chrome Extension

Today, we're releasing some updates for Presently's Chrome Extension. Current users on version 0.0.4 will notice a few changes in version 0.0.5. Here's a rundown of the update:

• Utilizes full-host accounts. This means that you'll need to enter your full url, including protocol.'
• Doesn't allow updates to be submitted with empty text.
• Maintains threading relationship during inline replies.

If you're not already using the Presently Chrome Extension", give it a try today! It gives you full access to your Presently network, letting you view and post updates and stay up-to-date throughout the day. The small notification icon that sits next to your address bar is unobtrusive yet distinctive enough to offer you a gentle reminder that you have unseen updates waiting for you.

Here's how to get started:

What is Presently?

And if you're not using Presently yet, well that's just crazy! I mean, have you heard of microblogging at all? Twitter? Presently is the perfect microblogging solution for businesses. Try it out today and encourage real-time collaboration and communication between your employees. You'll wonder how you ever lived without it!

• Read more about Apple iPad Development First Impressions

Like most of the Internet, we were glued to the various blogs covering Apple’s iPad event today (gdgt seemed to deliver both the best quality and availability). As soon as the SDK was announce we jumped on it and got to work updating one of our iPhone apps to see what kinds of challenges were ahead of us.

We made all of the basic changes needed to get our HexOut puzzle game running at full iPad size with new high-resolution graphics in just about an hour. I can’t wait to see things running on a real device.

Building an iPhone app that also takes advantage of what the iPad offers (namely more than 5 times the pixels to fill) is going to be more of a challenge when you have a complicated application that has to scale all sorts of UI layouts smoothly. With a game you can generally just substitute bigger iPad-suitable images for the smaller ones that are used for the iPhone version. Developers that stuck with standard table views and navigation layouts are going to reap the benefits of adhering to Apple’s guidelines soon. Highly customized UIs are going to be a lot of trouble to scale up to iPad size.

I can’t talk about many of the details thanks to the NDA (can I even say that there is an NDA?). I can say, however, that I think that the iPad will be the platform to host some of the most important UI innovations of the next decade. I can also say that this is going to be one heck of a casual gaming platform. I also think we will see some really innovative apps for different areas where tablets have been tried before like medical, retail and industrial. We are also pleased to offer iPad development to our clients who are looking to take advantage of this new platform for content distribution and custom applications.