Bruno Abrantes

This is a video from last year’s edition of FOWD, but I’ve only just stumbled upon it. 37 Signals‘ Ryan Singer delivers a great talk about Usability in Web Applications. Topics covered range from using emphasis to make your designs more usable up to using human language people can actually relate to. It’s a long video, but definitely worth the watch.

Today I needed to provide a couple of quick and dirty budget estimates for a potential new client. If you do any kind of freelance work, you’ve probably had to do this at some point in your career. The Web Development Project Estimator, designed by the guys over at Astuteo proved to be a quick and easy solution for the task. Using this web application, you can easily lay out the tasks you’ll be performing and how long they should take you (and I emphasize should, because this number is almost always off the mark). Multiply the number of hours by your standard rate, or choose special rates for special tasks (Design Revisions I’m looking at you!), click View Estimate and you’re good to go. Simple, usable applications always get me. In a good way, I mean.

Where2Eat is a web application developed by me and three other friends at this year’s SAPO Codebits. Sadly, we didn’t win any of the awesome prizes they gave away, but we still liked the idea, so we decided to keep developing it.

Basically, Where2Eat is an application that, after you tell it where you are right now, finds the nearest restaurants around the area, and shows them on a map. You can then refine your search, by adjusting the amount of area covered, how much you wish to spend or even what you feel like eating.

Right now, the application is in it’s early Alpha stage, and there are a LOT of bugs left to fix and new features to implement. We decided to get it out at this stage because we really want to be involved with the community from the very beginning. We set up a development blog (in Portuguese) so you can check out the latest version features and fixes and also so you can leave your precious feedback and suggestions (believe me, your contribution is really important!).

A collection of videos and slideshow presentations from this year’s FOWA is online here. FOWA is a conference about, well, the future of web applications. Quite an interesting read, if you’re into this sort of thing.

The other day I downloaded version 4 of Apple Safari, available to developers through the Apple Developer Connection website. Among claims of huge speed bumps and a new Javascript interpreter, I got curious about a new option present in the File menu: Save as Web Application. 

(…) more after the jump ›