mrc's Cup of Joe Blog

Join us in exploring the world of modern development, evolving technologies, and the art of future-proof software

Month: January 2012

Is your IT department slow and unresponsive?

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ProductivityPerhaps a better question is this: Do your end users or company executives see your IT department as slow and unresponsive? Do users complain that it takes forever to get new applications from IT? Do new development projects take months to complete?

Now, I do realize that most IT departments are swamped with work. There aren’t enough hours in the day to handle the daily duties and develop new applications in a timely manner. So, what’s the answer?

How can you turn your time-strapped IT department into the most responsive department in the company?

Rather than tell you, here’s a great story of a developer who did just that. In fact, he started completing projects so quickly, one executive in his company claimed that he was “developing solutions waiting for problems.” To find out how he did it, you can read the whole story here.

Tutorial: Create a pure CSS navigation menu for your web apps

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EducationYou’ve heard the saying, “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover.” It’s good advice, but largely ignored. Whether consciously or subconsciously, we pass judgements based on appearance on a daily basis.

This fact is especially important in business. Studies have shown that people judge a web page/app in less than one second. What does that mean? If you’re building apps for customers or prospects, appearance can affect revenue. If you’re building for internal users, it can affect usability.

Don’t get me wrong–I’m not telling you to focus solely on appearance. I’m telling you not to ignore appearance, because like it or not, an app is judged by it’s appearance first, and usefulness second.

How can you improve your application’s appearance? There are a few ways, but one of the best and easiest way is the navigation menu. A well-designed navigation menu will improve the overall look and feel as well as the usability of the web app. If you’d like to learn a simple way to create a good-looking navigation menu using CSS, we’ve written up a tutorial, which you can find here.

For more tips on usability, this article gives a few more ideas.

Build a web (and mobile) app in 30 minutes without programming

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ProductivityIf your company plans on building mobile apps this coming year, or if you just wish there was a faster way to develop enterprise web applications, you should really try the newly revamped m-Power Trial.

The m-Power Trial was recently updated, and now also lets you build a mobile web app. In roughly 30 minutes, you will create an enterprise web app, along with tablet and smartphone versions of that web app. The best part: Everything is done without programming!

You can try it here: m-Power Trial