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By Mike

Web development focused agency, not all-in-one shop

More and more often we have to deny projects where customer asks to do banal HTML/CSS work. Of course the job isn’t all bad, from time to time we get to do real fun stuff too. One of these things is getting a set of brand new wireframes, ready to be converted into html. Starting off with a clean slate, taking with you what you have learned from your previous projects and having no legacy to worry about. Starting of from zero can be really comforting from time to time. But in all other cases, you do not learn anything new doing markup. Perhaps the roots of the problem goes to what type of persona you are: someone can do monotonous work from day to day other is constantly looking for new challenge, wants to set itself ambitious goals and achieve them. This is definitely about us.

Don’t get me wrong. We have a true taste in design and always focus on best user experience possible, but in most cases we rely on professional designer. Moreover we prefer to work with designers who can make all HTML code himself, not just provide a Photoshop file. In such a case, final result has outstanding quality.

Any person do whatever he loves much better. Our passion is in complex and highly loaded projects. Not many people has similar experience and skills (except for start up owners). Try to Google them. Almost 95% of search results are design agencies or so called all-in-one shops. In most cases they are not able to solve non-trivial, complex task.

But that’s just our take on things, I’m pretty interested to hear what part of your job you like best. Don’t hold back.

CONTINUE READING May 8, 2012

By Mike

Quora Boards

In one of our recent blog posts we said that are going to gather in one place all links to the best companies / individuals whom we have pleasure to either work with or we simply know or just whose portfolio we really like. All this we have decided to join in one place – Quora Boards. We will continue to expand this list with new “discoveries”. So who feel interest – you are welcome.

Web Development Agencies We Love

Our Favorite Web Design Agencies

And more…

CONTINUE READING April 11, 2012

By Mike

Good people we find surfing the web

Very often while working on large projects it is hardly possible to cope with everything self-sufficiently. Many teams do not keep designer in-house, some are doing web or iPhone development only, but the project for example may need Android or Mac desktop clients, or a very high quality design, which can only be provided by very professional studio. In this case you start looking for references.

It’s like building a grand building. Never happens that from the very beginning to the end it was a single contractor. There are always best people where everyone is doing the work he is GURU in.

Therefore, we decided to have a separate section in our blog called – Regards, where we will list some teams that we had a chance to work with or whose portfolio we really like.

We sincerely hope that this will help you one day!

CONTINUE READING February 24, 2012

By Mike

What typically some vendors skip from estimate to make it cheaper but as result you pay this piece at a later stage

In this article I would like to talk about approach in estimation process and how to drill it down. The problem is relevant both for customers and providers alike. Very often customers ask to prepare proposal several providers at the same time to compare and then make final decision. The reality is that very often price factor plays a significant role. Knowing this, some providers are clearly starting to dump in order to win tender and just “get involved” into the job. Some is too optimistic in their estimates, some may not consider certain necessary functionality, other do not have enough expertise etc. As a result, the project does not fit into agreed time frame and customer pays more, possibly even more than bid other providers.

Where is the golden mean, what items sometimes are not taken into account the artists and what you should definitely pay attention for comparing proposals.

CONTINUE READING February 23, 2012

By Sergei

Android & ProgressBar with text

Standard Android SDK equipment provides developers with a wide range of components that can be used in application development. It is difficult to say how complete this set is and whether it meets all developer needs, however the platform itself is quite actively develops so we can expect that this set will be improved and expanded very often. And of course if something is missed in this set, you can always do it yourself

Among all this diversity you can find ProgressBar. This component is widely used to visualize the progress of a certain process or any other data. It needs almost everywhere. The component itself is quite simple and easy to use, but has a few nuances. For example it does not allows you to show some text on top of it. In case you need to do something like this:

CONTINUE READING February 23, 2012

By Sergei

Android & how to use animated GIF

To date Android platform supports a sufficiently large number of media formats. See documentation here. Among the declared graphic formats you’ll find the one we are interested – GIF. Generally speaking this format does not cause any difficulties until you’ll try to use a GIF file with animation. In this case, the standard class ImageView displays GIF file as a usual static image. Doing search you can find forums stating that Android platform doesn’t fully support GIF, that animated GIF files cannot be used. Nevertheless you can still solve this problem and I’ll show you how.

CONTINUE READING February 7, 2012

By Yury

Scaffolding in Yii: thoughts about Gii

Those who have ever tried using Yii Framework probably heard about auto code generator – Gii. Clients may sometimes offer using it on an early stage for building prototype referring to the fact that somewhere they heard that it greatly simplifies the development process and saves time. I’m not follower of this approach and would like to share with you it’s major drawbacks. At least you would know typical nuances and can better examine your choice.

CONTINUE READING February 6, 2012

By Mike

Micromanagement and it’s drawbacks

I think many of you have faced with the problem of micromanagement when someone exposes you to excessive control, trying to know your every single step and be aware of everything. This is not always done with malicious intent, sometimes people just do not understand the consequences and from their point of view it should help. Everything has its own edge. Lets talk about advantages and disadvantages and now to avoid this.

CONTINUE READING February 6, 2012

By Mike

Fixed pricing or hourly? Pros and cons

Every agency has its own preferences regarding work methodology and payment method. There are two typical options: by hourly rate or fixed budget. Both methods has its own advantages and disadvantages. All this nuances affects the process and each must be approached differently. We often try to be very flexible with our clients and often our choice is made based on project conditions and client’s preferences. In this post we would like to explain how to make right choice and of course list nuances to consider and discuss with your client in advance.

CONTINUE READING February 6, 2012

By Yury

How to deal PHPUnit and http headers ?

If you have ever tried to cover phpunit with some method that call header() function, then you’ve probably faced notice like “Headers already sent”.

That happens because phpunit fetches result for each test after it was completed to give you interactivity of testing progress. To prevent such flow you have to define custom phpunit printer class that would fetch tests summary only after they all will be completed.

CONTINUE READING February 6, 2012