Archive for November, 2008

This week we proudly launched the new site of StadHuis – a housing agency which operates in Breda and Tilburg. The site had a complete redesign while sticking to their corporate identity.

The goal was to greatly extend the usability of the website for both visitors and maintainers but also automate lots of tedious tasks (like emailing). So now you can filter your search, register on-line, pay through iDeal (creditcard coming soon) and signup to visit the studio or appartment of choice. Many, many options are only visible to paying members.

The site was made with Drupal.

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I stumbled on a very interesting study about the iPhone on Veerle’s blog linkdump: Analysis of the iPhone user experience, based on observing novice iPhone users.

The analysis (PDF) shows the lessons to be learned about the user interaction design on the iPhone. Very interesting for anybody who is involved with design for interaction. There are more usability experts who analysed the iPhone. Even my former faculty at the TUDelft now uses the iPhone as a case for usability lessons according to these sheets. I wonder what their results are…

By the way, my own current smartphone is the HTC touch diamond. And although it works a lot faster since I upgraded the firmware, I still think it’s a piece of crap – speaking in terms of usability. Especially when you go past the HTC ‘touchflo’ interface and become surrounded by the usability-inferno called windows mobile.

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Recently, we did some work for Spotted by Locals. This site contains a series of cityblogs – 17 cities in Europe in total (and more to come). Each blog is maintained by a select number of hand-picked (face-to-face) locals who really know the hotspots in their town and love to write passionately about them. This way, a high quality level is guaranteed.

Spotted By Locals also understands social media. You can stay up-to-date using the RSS feed, by subscribing to their monthly newsletter or become a fan on their facebook page!

So the next time you’re going to visit Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin or maybe Zagreb or Ljubljana and you want to find that special bar, restaurant or shop be sure to check Spotted By Locals and explore those cities like a local! (before everyone else finds out about it! ;)

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Last friday we went to our first DrupalJam right here in our hometown Breda. It was a bit like a mini-mini-drupalcon. A lot of familiar faces and a lots of Drupal-talk. We could only attend the afternoon program, where we took part in:

• Ber Kessels initiated an ‘iDeal payments’ group which should become the central place to find information on iDeal implementation through Drupal. Another goal would be to create a generic iDeal module which could be used in Drupal through an API. In contrast to current modules which are Ubercart-only ideal plug-ins.
• OneShoe presented a showcase on the new GroenLinks (political group in the Netherlands) website which will be completely powered by Drupal. Impressive to see that Drupal can indeed handle a site with 300 subsites on different subdomains. (hint: take a look at the domain access module…)
• Clemens Tolboom explained the advantages of having a command line in Drupal by using modules like drush and the extension he made for it: the drush module manager (handy!). Nobody in the room actually saw his presentation due to failing hardware, so if you missed it you can download the pdf from his site.

There was also some discussion about: Acquia, the pace of new Drupal versions (module developers can’t keep up which makes it difficult to use the most up-to-date version of Drupal) and about Drupal beginner’s mistakes and upgrading a Drupal 5 site from 6. Currently I’m in the process of upgrading a 5 site to D6 – when it’s done I’ll try to summarize the process and things to watch out for.

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