If my experience has been such, how can I say that cache is a web developer’s friend?  Well, obviously, cache speeds things up.  Sweet.  Need to solve a performance problem?  Try throwing some cache at it.  Cache increases the scalability of frameworks like Rails and Drupal.  Great.  The power of cache is not to be undermined by any foolishness on my part.  I would like to talk about another benefit to having lots of cache, though.  If you are wise, using cache might save you hours of work.  Let me relate another one of my bungles.

I’m pretty new to Drupal.  How was I to know that certain directories within sites/default/files/ were overwritten by Drupal’s own caching (O, how thick the irony!)?  I decided that I would cut out the middleman and work directly on the server.  I placed my stylesheet into sites/default/files/css/ (at this point understanding practically nothing about Drupal theming and styling) and began cracking away for two or three hours.  Naturally, my page was gorgeous.  I was proud.  Things were great.  I showed my project manager.  He gave it the go-ahead.  We went live with the page.  I backed up the server.  My PM messaged me asking what was wrong.  I said nothing.  He said, “Refresh”.  I did.  I said, “Crap.”

It was gone.

My stylesheet was niftily destroyed by Drupal’s caching mechanisms when I backed up the database.  Two or three hours of work down the drain.  My real downfall was my next move:  I hastily uploaded a scrap of the file I had on my local…AND REFRESHED MY BROSWER.  Next, a good developer friend of mine, upon hearing my plight, yawned and told me to check my  browser cache for the file.  !!  Clearly, my blindness for the obvious was in operation.  I typed

into my address bar, navigated to the file, and clicked with glorious anticipation…only to be let down by a string of hexadecimal.  The only thing you can access that way is the fingerprint of the file.  I immediately ran the following:

(because I usually don’t think where Ubuntu would logically store things and rely on locate far too much) and navigated to my .cache folder only to be dismayed as I opened a hexadecimal fingerprint of the file I needed.

Alas, it was time to bring Google to bear on the situation.  Since Google Chrome and Chromium are my browsers of choice I did a search on:

which lead to this little guy from NirSoft. What a fantastic solution?! ChromeCacheView.exe allows you to get your cache out of the bank by saving files from your Google Chrome or Chromium cache. I was saved! Well, at least that’s what I thought until I opened the stylesheet and realized I had overwritten my cache when I uploaded that scrap of the file! That’s when I got a terrible sinking feeling in my gut. I would have to redo all of my work.

The rework aside, I learned a valuable lesson. When your file disappears off the server, pull your local version of the file from your cache before uploading a new file to the server and letting the server overwrite your browser’s cache. You might just get lucky by accessing the most recent version of the file and saving yourself some extra time.

If you’ve been following along closely, you’ll have noticed that I mentioned both Ubuntu and a .exe file. Well, there’s a solution for that! Wine is a cool way to run Windows programs on Ubuntu (among other operating systems). I used ChromeCacheView.exe without a hitch on Ubuntu 10.04 with the latest version of Wine. You can see the entry I made at the Wine AppDB here. Here’s another tip if you’re using Ubuntu+Wine: your cache folder is most likely in one of these two places:

You’ll have to change the cache folder in ChromeCacheView.

Happy Cache Raiding!

At first glance, One would probably think that using CSS or JavaScript to control the zooming would be the solution. However this is not the case. Apple has implement a special META tag to handle this.

<meta content=”width=320; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;”/>

Other mobile browsers are implementing this as well, including the upcoming Mobile Firefox(Fennec) for the android OS. This should help to make it easier to design sites with consistent behaviors across multiple mobile browsers.

Typical iPhone App Development Timeline

Architecture & Planning – 2.5-3 Weeks: During this phase of the project all facets of the app are thought out. Beyond a simple idea of what the app needs to do and how it needs to look, what other resources are needed? Does the App need to connect to an outside database? Push or Pull content? The entire app is mapped out from start to finish. The more that can be done in the planning phase in terms of thinking out content and functionality will make the rest of the development process go much smoother. We have that it should take 2.5 to 3 weeks for this phase, though the larger, more complicated the app, the more time it will take obviously.

At the end of this phase, you should have a mapped out architecture of the app, an “app map” if you will, as well as wire frames for the app.

Design Phase – 3 Weeks: The design phase is where Comps are created to show how the app will look. Color schemes are implemented, “comp” images are inserted and place holder text is generally used at the start of this phase with it being replaced by the actual content either at the end of this phase or during development. We work with our clients to understand their branding message and carry that through the app. During the design phase you need to be careful as having too many people involved in the design process can slow down the app, especially when you begin “Design by Committee“. This phase should take roughly three weeks, but like I said, can be slowed down if timely feedback is not received by the client.

At the end of the Design Phase you should have full design Comps which will be developed during the next phase.

Development Phase – 4-8 Weeks: This part of the project has your designs being turned over to the developers so that they can properly code the application. The various pieces are hooked together including navigation, user interaction, database integration, web services and eCommerce platforms. Any and all functionality is built in to the app, all coding is performed and pages are properly linked.

At the end of the development phase you should have the first version of your fully working app.

Testing Phase – 1-1.5 Weeks: The testing phase is one of the most important parts of the projects. Some clients want to cut down on the testing phase or eliminate it altogether to save time, we HIGHLY discourage doing that. The testing phase ensures that the app works properly, all databases are connected, there are no broken links in the app, and everything works as was designed. If an app is pushed through to deployment and does not work it will be caught by Apple and rejected. Even worse, if the app does sneak through and does not work, a few poor reviews can really hurt an apps chance of success in the App Store. During testing, we test on any and all devices that the App will run through simulators and live devices, including the iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone 3Gs, and iPhone 4.

At the end of the testing phase, everyone should be confident that the app works as expected and has the highest chance of success in passing through Apple’s approval process.


Deployment Phase – 6-14 Days: This is the point where the app is submitted to Apple and awaits approval. While approval times have greatly improved since the App Store was first launched, we generally tell our customers to expect anywhere from 6 to 14 days to have their app approved. It is possible to try and expedite your approval, but with roughly 500 apps being submitted on a daily basis, we see this rarely happen.

At the end of this phase you should have a fully functioning app ready to be downloaded from iTunes.

Planning is the Key to Success

This outline is what we see for the typically app development. One should expect roughly 2.5 to 3 months from start to finish to develop a typical iPhone app. Some apps may require more time, while others may be able to be pushed through the process a little faster. Keeping open communication between project managers and the client has allowed us to keep on track with development timelines and deliver apps on time or early in most cases.

For more information you can view the “Building an iPhone App: A Crash Course” Webinar that we put on earlier this year or give us a call to learn more about developing apps and receive a quote.

Baltimore, MD – August 30, 2010 –  Accella LLC today announced that they have joined the American Advertising Federation (AAF) Baltimore chapter.  The AAF Baltimore began in 1918 as an organization to serve the professional community and promote excellence in regional and national advertising.

The move for Accella to join the AAF Baltimore represents their commitment to working with the advertising agencies and organizations in and around the Baltimore area.  “We have begun working with more and more marketing and advertising firms in Baltimore and wanted to find a way to show our dedication to the advertising industry,” said Jason King, President of Accella.  “We team with many of the organizations to help develop websites or mobile phone applications for their clients, joining the AAF will hopefully give us a chance to collaborate with more agencies in the area.

Linda Stanley, Executive Director for the AAF – Baltimore added “we are excited to welcome Accella to the AAF.  Over the past year we have put in a lot of time and energy in building up the programs and services that we provide to our members; we are seeing a steady increase in our membership numbers.  Accella has worked with several of our members already in partnering to produce websites and mobile phone applications, I think they will be a valuable addition to our organization, we are looking forward to a successful relationship.”

Accella will be sponsoring the upcoming AAF – Baltimore Happy Hour on Wednesday, September 1st at Dela Rosa’s in Canton which is open to all AAF members.  “We don’t want to simply join, pay our dues, and put a logo up on our website,” said John Rainey, Vice President of Business Development for Accella.  “We want to take advantage of all the benefits that the AAF has to offer, meet the other members of the organization, and become active in the chapter.  Hosting a kickoff happy hour is a great way for us to jump right in and meet a lot of the members.”

About the American Advertising Federation – Baltimore
The American Advertising Federation (AAF) Baltimore was founded in 1918 as a Women’s auxiliary to the men’s Advertising Club.  It survived the Great Depression, and several wars then merged with two other organizations in 1973, The Art Director’s Club and the Maryland Industrial Marketers.  The AAF Baltimore’s mission is to be an advocate for Baltimore as a strong advertising community and respond to the needs of its members through continuing education/information programs, networking and social opportunities as well as legislative issues that confront the advertising industry. For more information visit www.baltimoreadvertising.com.

About Accella LLC
Accella LLC is a leader in the design & development of interactive websites and mobile applications.  With customers in a broad range of industries, Accella has experience in CMS, CRM, eCommerce, widgets, and API integrations, mostly on open source platforms.  Headquartered in Odenton, MD, Accella has locations throughout the Mid-Atlantic region and services clients throughout the United States.

The place to start is of course in the help section of GitHub. You will need to install Git, generate a keypair and set you username and email into Git. Look to the help section for step by step instructions. Once you have that setup, you’re ready to start working with Git.

$ cd myProject
$ git init

First, we have to setup our project directory to use Git. The code, ‘git init’, will do this for us. For my situation, I did not want to touch the master branch. I only wanted to work in a separate branch. I did not even want to fetch the files from the master repository.

$ git add .
$ git commit -m 'comment goes here'

This code will add all the files in the directory to be committed and then commit those files with a comment. This will add the files to the master branch. However, I don’t want to change anything on GitHub in the master branch. Not to worry though, we haven’t connected to the remote URL. So, at this point it is only committing locally. Now that everything is established locally, let’s look at our branches.

$ git branch

This will show you all the branches you have created, as well as list the branch you are working in with an asterisk. For now, it should only show ‘* master’. We are currently working in the ‘master’ branch. My instructions were to not touch the master branch. So, let’s create a new branch:

$ git branch newBranch

You have now created a new branch named, ‘newBranch’. If you now type ‘git branch’, it will list ‘master’ and ‘newBranch’. However, you’ll notice that ‘master’ still has the asterisk next to its name. We are still working in the ‘master’ branch. To switch to our new branch, use the ‘checkout’ command.

$ git checkout newBranch

Now we are working in the right spot when we commit our project. We are going to be committing our project to a remote location, so our next step is to define that location.

$ git remote add origin git@github.com:user/repository.git

This will add our remote location so when we commit our changes, it not only commits them locally, but also to the server. You can find the URL to use at the GitHub repository page. The word ‘origin’ is the name of the remote location that we are adding. So, in the above example, we are adding the remote location ‘git@github.com:user/repository.git’ and naming it ‘origin’. And now, the final magic command to get our project into GitHub:

$ git push origin newBranch

Remember, ‘origin’ is the name of our remote location that we have saved, and ‘newBranch’ is the name of the branch that we are creating/pushing to. The project is now on GitHub in a new branch that we created just for the project. If you have any tips or suggestions for achieving this task, please do share.

Unlike David Letterman’s top 10 list these reasons really have no order of importance.  So, what are some of the key reasons that website or mobile projects stagnate or fail?  Let’s take a look:

• No “champion” of the project on the customer side. It is critical to have an internal sponsor of the project to ensure smooth communication and project follow through.
• Decision by committee; this can sometimes stagnate a process that is already complex due to the technical nature of the project itself.  Having a large committee making decisions on the customer side is normally a very bad idea.  Keep your team to 3 – 4 people max to ensure effective and timely execution of the project.
• Defined Statement of Work; let me be clear, what we do takes a nebulous idea and we turn it into a digital reality, however having a well written document to guide the mobile or website project is essential.  A pre-defined statement of work is very helpful to keep everyone in line with the same expectations.
• Design failure; having a good direction of design is also a great idea.  Design is much like artwork, at the end of the day, what you like as the business owner others will pick apart, but that is okay.  Don’t get muddled down in round after round of design thinking you will find the perfect “look and feel”.  There is no such thing, just finding the one that works for your company and customers is the main goal.  Many times it’s best to trust the experts that you have hired instead of dictating a design from just one point of view.
• Failure to Budget; make sure that your firm has set aside the proper budget to fund the project.  Most interactive companies require some sort of substantial down payment of 30% – 45% to begin a project.  It’s also a good idea to have a little more set aside for any additional ideas that may come up during project development.
• Staff turnover; this can really be a problem in some cases, if the internal champion on the project leaves during development then the forward momentum can be lost.  Make sure your internal champion has a second to take over in the event of staff turnover.
• “Going on the Cheap”; okay……to be fair I understand that everyone cannot afford to use a professional development firm.  There are great freelancers out there, but make sure that if you use an individual freelancer or college student that you get some assurances or references.  Our firm receives a fair amount of business that started out with clients being to frugal.  At the end of the process in many of these cases they ended up paying the same as if they had initially just gone with with a professional firm, which was mainly due to time delay’s and cost over runs.

These are by no means all of the reasons that I’ve seen clients struggle with projects over years, but they are some of the main reasons.  If you have had a shattered project and would like to talk about your frustrations and how the process can be reinvigorated please feel free to contact us, I’d be glad to help.

It is unquestionable that JavaScript has firmly established itself as a de-facto standard for client-side apps. But how about the back end? And is there really a need for JavaScript in the world of racks of servers running Apache, PHP, Python, Tomcat and Java in huge datacenters? After all, existing technologies have proven themselves. They bear the load of the Internet and quite successfully.

Turns out, old server-side technologies are not designed with real-time user interaction in mind. They are good at serving massive amounts of pages and have caching and scaling technologies to cope with increased load, but they are not really good for having constant back and forth communication with the user, which requires passing small amounts of data every time at a low latency.

Enter Node.js. It was developed by Ryan Dahl and made waves in the JS community last year. Node.js essentially implements the entire web stack with an event-oriented philosophy in mind. No more threads, no more I/O bottlenecks reading from file and database connections, it’s all callbacks. As in your browser.

This opens up new horizons for JavaScript. Not only it can be introduced to server-side, but it can provide some very real speed improvements. The technology is in its infancy at the moment, but the potential is there. Check out talk by Ryan Dahl.

Who knows, maybe in 5 years there will be a massive migration to frameworks based on Node.js. Just like there is a massive migration from static webpages to rich web apps today.

The goal of the webinar is to give a general overview of some of the tools and best practices in using them. Even if you can’t attend, sign-up for the Webinar and we’ll send you a link to the presentation after. To Sign-up visit (https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/340754025).

Hope to see you there, if you have any questions or want to see a specific tool, feel free to write a comment below.

August 11, 2010 – Baltimore, MD: Leading interactive web and mobile application development company, Accella, has been named as a finalist in this year’s list of Best Places to Work in Baltimore by the Baltimore Business Journal (BBJ). The annual list is designed to bring the Baltimore business community together to recognize and award those companies who have gone above and beyond in fostering a fun and enjoyable work environment.

This is the first time that Accella has been named a finalist to the BBJ list. Accella President Jason King said, “being namd along side some of the top companies in the area like Wells Fargo, KPMG, and McCormick is quite an honor. Our entire organization is proud of the work that we do and the way in which we’re able to get it done. We look forward to joining this list many times in the future.”

Accella was listed in the “Micro Business” category of the list for companies of 10-20 employees. Each list was compiled from the results of surveys completed by each company along with independent surveys completed by each company’s employees. The winners of each category will be announced at a luncheon reception on September 16th at the Marriott in Hunt Valley, MD. The full list of finalists can be found on the BBJ website at http://www.bizjournals.com/baltimore/event/14441?mp=3.

About Accella
Accella LLC is a leader in the design & development of interactive websites and mobile applications. With customers in a broad range of industries, Accella has experience in CMS, CRM, eCommerce, widgets, and API integrations, mostly on open source platforms. Headquartered in Odenton, MD, Accella has locations throughout the Mid-Atlantic region and services clients throughout the United States.

We have always pursued innovative projects because we want to drive breakthroughs in computer science that dramatically improve our users’ lives. Last year at Google I/O, when we launched our developer preview of Google Wave, a web app for real time communication and collaboration, it set a high bar for what was possible in a web browser. We showed character-by-character live typing, and the ability to drag-and-drop files from the desktop, even “playback” the history of changes—all within a browser. Developers in the audience stood and cheered. Some even waved their laptops.

We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication. The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web.