• Read more about Looking Ahead: 2012 at Intridea

2012 is here and Intrideans celebrated the end of one year and the beginning of another across the world - in Shanghai, NYC, DC, San Francisco, Italy, and places in between.

We could write a customary "year in review" post detailing the various milestones we met in 2011; how Inc 500 rated us as the 33rd fastest growing privately-held software company in the country; or we could talk about the explosive growth of our team, how we penetrated the enterprise software market with a new suite of enterprise collaboration tools and the design awards our talented UX team won throughout the year for our site design.

But we won't do that. Although we're incredibly proud of our growth and achievements in 2011 and would love the chance to rant on about them we realize that you've probably already heard enough about them. So instead we're going to look 2012 directly in the eyes and and share with you what we see:

• A Growing Family - We definitely have our work cut out for us; as our reputation for delivering quality, innovative applications for clients has grown, so has the demand for our services. Thus, in 2012 we'll be focusing on bringing more remarkable, driven and diligent designers and developers to the Intridea team. To our advantage, we can look in every city (and country) for the right people. With that in mind, if you think your presence on our team would be mutually beneficial, consider applying to work with us!
• Upgrades - In early 2012 we'll be releasing an interactive community section of Intridea.com, designed to keep our readers up to date on all the events in which we are attending or presenting, provide open source training documents and slides from presentations, give news and updates on our open source contributions, and more.
• Open Source - We ramped up our open source work in 2011 with Omniauth, RefactorMyCode, Grape, Hashie, and our financial support of other projects like Pry - a full-featured alternative to the IRB shell for Ruby. In 2012 our team will be focusing on maintaining these existing open source projects as well as making time to create new open source gems and plugins from the code we're writing for upcoming projects.
• Maturation - As Intridea enters its fifth year we'll be fine-tuning our internal processes, optimizing our development methodologies, and identifying the areas in which we can improve. We'll be implementing an ongoing cross-training program between developers and designers. 2012 will be a Wonderland in which designers learn the basics of Rails and developers learn the tenets of good design, for the purpose of increasing the depth and complexity of everyone's talents, leading to more well-designed and well-architected applications.

Of course you'll also be seeing us at the usual round of events, presenting at conferences, hosting and supporting user groups around the country, and sharing our technical knowledge with you via our blog. We're looking forward to all that the coming year holds.

As our Intridea East members would say, ???? (Happy New Year)!

• Read more about What's the Real Future of Web and Mobile Design?

Rails. No, really.

The future of web and mobile design is in Rails, Sinatra, Django, and other RESTful web frameworks that can be used to leverage design power across multiple platforms, making it easier and faster (translate: more economical) to design for web, mobile and desktop.

Our UI/UX team was stationed up in NYC for the Future of Web Design conference last week and we were able to chat with some really awesome folks who had innovative and inspiring ideas about web design.

The atmosphere of FOWD was energetic and there were a lot familiar buzzwords being tossed around; “Mobile”, “responsive”, and “HTML5”, were the most prominent. I did hear two presenters (Steve Fisher and Josh Clark) talk briefly about content manipulation and APIs, but I was surprised I didn’t hear more on this topic.

When I took time before FOWD to consider what my own vision of the future of web (and mobile) design was I immediately thought of Rails and other RESTful APIs. In fact, the future of design is tied closely with the future of web development. More and more companies are demanding robust, scalable web applications that have the functionality to manipulate and generate content. And they don’t need just one application, they need several: a desktop app, a web app, an Android app, an iOS app, etc. And yes, they want those applications to be aesthetic and intuitive, but gone are the days when a business needs just a static, well-designed page to reach and engage their audience.

Using a RESTful API for design makes perfect sense. Let’s manipulate data in one defined way, but allow that action to take place over any platform. Obviously an HTML view is not always going to be the perfect experience for every platform, but in using a RESTful API all you have to care about is a connection to transfer data. You can swap out the HTML views for a native iOS or Android interface, and then you just have to think about the data transfer.

And isn’t that what we need with any application that deals with time-sensitive content? New York Times is on board with this idea (developer.nytimes.com), as is Facebook (open graph). As web designers we need to think about how to build our own APIs for our applications so we can more easily and more fluidly design corresponding mobile (and desktop, etc) applications.

But how does Rails play into this? Most people think of Rails as just a means for developing web applications; but what about that RESTful architecture that it’s built on top of? It’s perfect for extending mobile apps as well. You can easily use Rails as an underlying method for serving up CSS and styles for multiple platforms. Why not let Rails be the foundation for web and mobile design? When it comes down to it, Rails is an API right out of the box. You just need to style it as one.