Feature of the Week: Account rebuild!
Hey everyone,
Here’s the feature of the week, as promised: a rebuilt account screen. While I don’t have a picture of the old one for comparison (woops!) let’s just say that this is a vast improvement. Instead of one long, homogeneous form, account management is now broken out into individual topics, each with their own layout, explanation, and processing logic. As a user, you get (or will get) a lot more context on how your account work and what the settings do; as a developer, I get the ability to easily extend the account screen to new topics (meal preferences, additional services like LiveJournal or Blogger, etc.) and simplify maintenance.
Go check it out: sign up for an account, add Twitter or Facebook, set up MMS or email. Pretty neat. Of course, you probably won’t use it too often: this one’s more about laying groundwork to expand the site in the future than it is about adding awesome new knobs and gears for you to play with. Over the next weeks and months, when features like tracking and analyzing specific meal details, location, Facebook Connect for the iPhone, etc., this update will be paying off. This work also generated some Facebook Connect/Rails code that I hope to expand to a real plugin sometime.
Also, I fixed a bug with Google Maps that prevented you from adding a location to a meal, and am at work on version 2.1 of Mealstrom: the iPhone App, available now in soft launch mode from the App Store. It has two or three bugs that are mostly already fixed and will be pushed out with a prettier interface as soon as I can. Once that’s done, it’s publicity time.
That’s it for this week — I’ll be dogsitting in Marin County this weekend without a computer, so no updates until the following weekend. Between the iPhone update and some new Facebook integration, hopefully I can get two small updates out and stay on track.
Stay well and happy eating,
Alex
New Account Page
New Email and MMS Page