Intereactive Web Design - Sugar Land, TX

Alot has happened in the last month or so around our little company. And while so much of it seems like steps backward, I feel like we’re progressing forward more than ever. Here’s a rundown of everything that has been going on the past few months with us both good and not so good and hopefully you’ll see why the blog has been so dead as of late.

The company

A year or so ago we scaled back our client based work to set our focus on an idea for a web application that we really believe in and believe can help solve alot problems (and create some form of world peace). That change also brought a new opportunity for Phil to work for a great design company called Springbox in Austin as an Art Directors, but continuing to head up the creative direction here at Intereactive. Over the past year our interests have taken different paths and as of this April, we all came to terms with the fact that Phil will no longer be here at Intereactive. Major bummer. We left on probably the best terms ever, so I can’t complain at all. In fact I believe trying to plod ahead when people aren’t “into it” really hurts you more than anything. If you are a fan of Phil’s work please check him out over at philcoffman.com.

Mootools to Jquery

On a more technical note, the aftermath of our time at the SXSW conference left us with a major change to our JS framework. Chris and I went in to a Javascript panel where John Resig (creator of jQuery) was speaking and we both left with a very uneasy feeling about using our current framework Mootools. Let me make one thing very clear… We still love Mootools. And honestly, it’s very hard to pinpoint our exact reasons for switching. But chiefly among them was that we felt that while Mootools is a very strong framework, jQuery has a much brighter future. There seems to be much more involvement in releasing new code and more innovative ways in solving some of the problems. We’ve currently re-written all our code within Mosaic using jQuery and it’s much shorter (for whatever that is worth). There are definitely shortcomings in the animation side of things, but all in all we are very happy with the move.

Focusing on the basics – a PHP framework

We are mainly a PHP shop that has been writing code since before most people knew what a framework really was, so when it came time to start writing an application we pretty much already had our own lean, mean framework that we were already familiar with. The last few months we’ve taken that framework and really oiled the gears and shined up the fenders and made it into a full blown MVC framework using syntax that we are familiar with. With Chris’s insistance, we’ve broken it out of the application, made it it’s own project, and given it life through the name “Akira”. The name Akira comes from the name of the Commander of the Black Lion (the core leader) of Voltron… so in turn, our Akira is also the core of what makes an overall project work and function properly. Well that and we’re just geeks at heart. It’s something we can quickly plop onto a blank slate and have an idea fleshed out in less than a day. Just yesterday I coded up an entire home finance manager for my personal use in less than 5-6 hours using the framework.

And before we get the request… no, we won’t be releasing it to the public. It’s honestly no better than CodeIgniter or Kohana… we are just familiar with the methods and syntax of our own stuff so it’s faster for us to write. If you aren’t using a framework.. Use one! I suggest Kohana.

Errata

So in summary… we lost a badass designer (very sad), switched to an awesome JS framework (very happy), and spent way too much time developing Akira (very very happy). There are countless other things that have sidetracked us over the past year such as redefining our goals, having kids, taking vacations and going to conferences. But now I believe we have the focus we need and the tools to get there. It’s amazing how change can be so frustrating, but once you are through it, it is so freeing. We’ll be reworking the Intereactive site soon to be more inline with who we are now and also be showing off some features of Mosaic in the blog in the next few weeks or so.