Mmm…food

Hey everyone,

I had almost finished a long blog post about modules and object copying in Javascript when I picked up Douglas Crockford’s Javascript: The Good Parts.  It’s a great book, and I highly recommend to anyone serious about writing good code.  However, it completely demolished the issues and plans I described in my post; instead of writing a highly classical module system, I’ve decided to go with a more functional/prototypal system.  After playing with that for an hour or three, I’ve decided not to rewrite the MealImage class right now; instead, I’m going to give the style a try as I write modules for page state management, language support, and image display.

Good news: I’ve finished test coverage for the MealImage javascript class, the most complex piece of front-end code I expect to write for the project.  Test-writing was quite an undertaking, clocking in at about 2100 lines of code for about 560 lines of code+comments, but is well worth it.  Knowing I broke nothing by changing out the underlying HTML renderer from Jaml or by universally changing == to === is well worth every minute I spent on tests over the last month.  I’ve taken notes for a blog post on unit testing in Javascript and will start that soon.

Nothing much has happened on the Devise front — I’ve been mostly focused on Mealstrom, and Alex has been busy too.  I’ll get to that no later than January 30th, when we plan another all-night hackathon.

That’s about it.  I’ll be focusing on adding new features to Mealstrom again and finishing the meal editing page so that you can test it out on the beta site.

Enjoy your weekend — find something good to eat.

Alex

Hi everyone,

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I can’t say I’m sorry about that, since in my absence I, well, got married (and it was a pretty awesome wedding — once I gather the photos, I’ll post up here). Now that that’s over and things are as back to normal as they get, I’ve been looking forward to getting back to Mealstrom and continuing to make this a better application.

The first of those improvements, I’m happy to announce, is now live: enhanced signup forms for iPhone users, allowing you to sign up for Twitter linking straight from your iPhone. I’ve been laying the groundwork for a more robust mobile website, where you can update your entire account and view meals, and this is the first example of it. (There’s a lot of work left to go into it.) Future versions of the iPhone app will bring the signup process in-app (via an embedded browser) and add Facebook Connect. It’s slow going, but it’ll get there.

Speaking of the iPhone app, version 1.3 snuck into the app store while I was busy. It’s released! Go play with it! More details soon.

That’s all — I’m off to bed, and to rip apart and rebuild the iPhone app this week. Have a great week, and happy eating!

Alex

Mobile Signup

Mobile Twitter Signup

Mobile Signup

Hi everyone,

I recently enhanced the format of the Facebook stories you publish with Mealstrom.  The goal with those posts is, of course, to make them as visible and as interesting as possible for your friends and assorted hangers-on.  Purely anecdotal evidence from my own meal blogging seems to show that the new feed story works — a lot more likes and comments per story — and I hope you’ll find the same.

Mealstrom’s previous story format kept a very light user message, putting most of the story into the title and the body.  This was in keeping with the my (too conservative) understanding of what was allowed and with the older version of feed stories.  As you can see, though, it produced a visually soft result, filled with gray and small text.  No good!

Old feed story -- staid.

The new Facebook story uses your meal description as your user message — the big, black, luxurious block of text that shows so prominently.  Many thanks to my friend Luke for suggesting that change.  It’s a big improvement.

New feed story -- snazzy!

The story title now also includes the picture count to tell viewers if there’s more to see when they click through; previously, your amazing fifth picture might as well have been a blank wall, for all anyone would see it or know about it.  Thanks to previous though then-unmentioned updates, viewers can now share your meal, view your meal blog on Mealstrom.com, or start their own.

Naturally, this isn’t the end of the (feed) story.  The newly blank space under the pictures is going to be perfect for showing whom you ate with once I roll out friend tagging.  It may also show what you thought of your meal (via the new Eating Habits tools mentioned in a recent post), where specifically you ate, or other cool new things.  You’ll get finer control over what gets published as these changes roll out, too.  (Anything you’d want to see published?  Leave a comment!)

That’s that for today — have a great 4th of July (bbq for me!) and happy eating,

Alex

PS Bonus retrospective: to give you an idea of how things were when I was your age, check out the original feed story format.  It’ll give you an idea of how much better things are now.  Egregiously, you didn’t see the whole meal — I hadn’t yet accepted the value of being fully open and giving users the power to completely share their data, so the feed story cut off at about 300 characters (without even a “more” link).  There was also no way to share a post (not that the current way is great; Facebook needs to open up the popup share form their own posts get to use).

Like discovering ancient cave paintings.

Hi everyone,

I’m happy to announce that Mealstrom 1.1, our long-awaited first update, is now available!  This update hugely improves the application, making it more table, less buggy, and better looking.  While there’s not a lot by way of cool new features (boo), I’ve significantly firmed up the code to make a founation for future updates, the first of which is almost ready (yay).  Think of the app as being like a mango.  When you first brought it home with version 1.0, it was hard and unripe but promised better things to come.  Now, with version 1.1, you’re holding a soft, ripe, and delicious fruit.  (Yeah, that’s a terrible analogy, but I’ve been eating a lot of mangos recently.)

New UI

I wrote about this a month ago when it was first submitted, but I’ll recap the updates here in the format I’ll use going forward.

Significant updates:

• Picture uploads have been improved; images sent over 3G are less compressed and hence look better online, and images sent over wifi are not compressed at all.
• You can now sign up through the app via an iPhone specific webpage (something that should have been in v1).
• The UI has been updated, grouping different parts of the form in a more logical way, and generally improving the look and feel.
• The app acts appropriately when there’s no network connection, queuing your meals for later transmission with an appropriate message.
• Many stupid and annoying bugs were fixed.

Known bugs:

• When you add more than three pictures, enabling scrolling in the picture view, the application no longer allows you to magnify or delete any of the images.  Fixed in 1.2.
• When you transmit images over a 3G connection, image orientation is lost — any vertical pictures will become horizontal.  Fixed in 1.2.
• If you transmit more than one queued meal at a time, you’ll get a message at the end saying that a transmission error occurred, even though all meals were successfully sent.

That’s about it — time to get back to cooking, preparing for a wedding, and, of course, preparing the next Mealstrom update.  I’ve been focusing a lot on the iPhone recently, but plan to get back to the website after two more updates (1.2 and then 1.3, which will incorporate Facebook Connect.)

Have a great night and happy eating,

Alex

iPhone Signup Page

Old UI

Hey everyone,

This week’s big feature, I’m happy to announce, is the submission of Mealstrom 1.1 for the iPhone to Apple.  This updated version — the first one I can truly call ready for the masses — fixes a number of glaring bugs with the original and also has a couple of enhancements:

• UI improvements: the UI (along with the rest of the program) was overhauled between the old alpha release and this post-beta version, but this version polishes it up quite a bit, from the fade effects on app load to the better look to some of the buttons.
• iPhone-based signup: the first release, sadly, didn’t give any of the users who downloaded Mealstrom from the App Store any way to sign up from their phone, short of navigating my iPhone-unfriendly site or waiting till they had a real machine in front of them.  I’m sure I lost users for deferring that feature.  No more!  When Apple approves this release, you’ll be able to sign up from your iPhone and be directed back to the app once you’ve finished the process.

In addition, I’ve also done a lot of preliminary work on rebuilding the meal entry and meal viewing pages on the website.  File upload is being segmented (a la Gmail before the snazzy progress meter); next I’ll be improving the whole layout and moving the images into a lightboxed gallery rather than loading them in their huge glory directly onto the meal.  The final segment in this rebuilding process is to integrate the new Facebook story publishing form and, for the first time, add the ability to tag our friends.  I don’t know how much I’ll get done this week, but I hope to roll out at least the file upload and lightboxed images by this update next week.

I know there’ve been a few bugs that some of you have found on the website.  Thanks for your emails as always; I’m going to put some better error monitoring in place so I can catch these quicker as well.  This is a small site run on the side, so there are bound to be bugs here and there.  Thank you for your patience — things will only get better.

Have a great week and happy eating!

Alex

Updated iPhone UI

iPhone Signup Form

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

Hey everyone,

Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite finish this week’s feature of the week.  I’m very close to a complete rebuild of the account management and signup system (you can see the prototype below), but hit a few snags in final testing.  I’m hoping to get it done in the next day or two, and will post all the juicy details then. 

This is an appropriate time to introduce myself a little bit (not too much, since it’s a bit late and tomorrow’s Monday).  Hi everyone!  My name’s Alex, and I’ve been working on Mealstrom for about six months now alongside my day job as a software engineer at a San Francisco startup.  I put in as much spare time in nights and weekends as I can, which is also slightly more time than my husband would like.  I’ll be adding new features and fixing bugs pretty quickly, overall, but there’re going to be a few weeks with a few big projects that aren’t going to come in on time.  I love the project, though; I use Mealstrom every day and am really excited by all the things I have planned, so the improvements aren’t going to stop.

Hang on, let me know if you have any thoughts or ideas, and there’ll be a lot more to play with soon.

Have a great week and happy eating,

Alex

New Account page

This week, I’m glad to announce two new features:

• New graphics for the home page and for the iPhone app, and
• Submission of Mealstrom to the iTunes App Store!

I spent some time this week developing a new flow for the home page to replace the old text-based description of how Mealstrom works.  The site has gotten more complicated and powerful, and it was about time the home page reflected that with a cool image.  (I’d hoped to make this week’s feature a complete update of the site’s information, but have chosen to push the rest back to another week.)  You can check it out the home page.  In a subsequent feature, I’ll make each link clickable so you can learn the details about each step in the process.

(before)

(after)

Along similar lines, I built new graphics into the iPhone application.  Gone are the days of horrible black loading screens and Apple-released application backgrounds: say hello to some logo-inspired graphics featuring my IKEA-brand table, three utensils, and some strategically-placed lighting.  I haven’t rebuilt the iPhone page on mealstrom.com yet, but I will soon.  In the meanwhile, the change in the login page should give you a sense of the before-and-after.

And on a related note, I’ve submitted the application to the iTunes store!  It’s still very beta — stable, but not by any means done — but after a lot of thought I decided it was time to draw a line, call what I have now the core feature set, and publish.  (Otherwise, I’d just keep iterating and it would never get to Apple.)  It should take a week or two for approval, then the whole world can download and play with the project.  (I hope the world likes it!)  Keep your eyes peeled — I’ll post an update here once it’s approved.

In the process of readying the app for submission, I made a few critical improvements to how it talks to the website; those are going to be at the core of a subsequent feature of the week, one that will substantially improve the level of flexibility and customization of the application (and the website).  Other near-future projects include:

• Facebook Connect for the iPhone integration: this came out yesterday and I’m very excited to add it to the app.  Look for that over the next week.
• Implementation of a tabbed view for account management, and improved look and layout for tabs both there and in the profile.
• Updated informational pages on the home page centered around the new site flow image.

That’s it for this weekend — have a great week and happy eating!

Alex

I’m going to set a goal for the project to launch (and blog about) one new feature a week.  Sometimes they’ll be big features, other times they might just be a small tweak or backend improvement, but no matter what, at least one improvement a week.  This week’s new feature is profile tabs, driven by a request to have a way to see an individual user’s entire meal history.

By breaking out the profile into several specific sections (right now just an overview and the meal list), I can provide that info in a meaningful (if not yet formatted) way.  The tabs are fetched via AJAX as you request them and then cached them locally.  This is a broadly useful enhancement — once the tab switching has some decent formatting, I’m going to roll it out to user accounts as well to make it easy to manage your overall settings, email and MMS access, Facebook and Twitter linking, and some planned meal tracking options.

You can see the new profile view in any profile — for instance, http://www.mealstrom.com/user/profile/alex.

See you next week,

Alex

Info tab:

Meal list tab: