Category : hacking

in hacking, projects, software

Use “Admin Templates” for great looking web application MVPs

Over on Hacker News it’s not uncommon to hear from developers with limited design skills, trying to figure out how to bring decent-looking Minimum Viable Products to market. This morning, HN user flipacoin posted in that same vein, having been quoted a minimum of $10,000 in design fees for his web app.

Part of the standard HN recommendation for minimizing design costs is the use of off-the-shelf WordPress templates for your sales/marketing web site and blog. This is a great recommendation if your MVP is just the marketing site, which in many cases the right first step.

But what if you’re further along? How does this help you build your actual app?

Enter the “Admin Template.”

It turns out that ThemeForest* has an entire category of themes called Admin Templates that work great as web application user interfaces.

I originally discovered this treasure trove of off-the-shelf application interfaces while working on the backend for WebinarFlow. Scouring the theme sites turned up quite a few designs that would make for a great homepage, but none that seemed to fit very well for an app. Admin templates, on the other hand, are built specifically for web applications and CMS backends, and make quick work of prettying up most CRUD-style and B2B-type applications.

Most of the admin themes you’ll find on ThemeForest are standards-based very customizable. Most offer a choice of color schemes, fixed and liquid layouts, and a bunch options for typography, forms, tables, buttons, icons and widgets. And most are between 10 and 30 dollars!

I commented on flipacoin‘s post, pointing to the admin templates section on ThemeForest, and based on the strong reaction there, I decided to write up this post and share more broadly.

“The ‘Admin’ templates on Theme Forest are really kind of blowing my mind right now.” — tptacek

Here are a few of my favorite admin templates:

Adminique

Adminique Dashboard - Theme for web application user interface

Admin Control Panel Pro

Admin Contro Panel Pro Theme - web application skin

Adminica

Adminica Theme - web application skin

Yaadmin

Yaadmin Dashboard - Yet Another Admin Theme - web application skin

*Yes, I’m using affiliate links throughout. Hopefully you don’t mind. Fortunately ThemeForest’s admin themes are cheap enough I might make enough to buy one!

If you liked this post please join the discussion on HackerNews and follow me on Twitter.

in hacking, software, tools

A couple of cool Mercurial plugins

Last month I posted on git vs mercurial, concluding based on first impressions and hearsay that I’d probably like Mercurial. So far so good. I’ve been using Hg pretty regularly for a project and while I haven’t really needed to do anything fancy I can say that so far it has been very intuitive to use.

Along the way I’ve found a few interesting resources that I’d like to share:

The Hg-Git Mercurial plugin. This plugin, hosted by the folks at github, allows seamless access to git repositories from Mercurial. It works as advertised, though when I first installed it I received HTTP 406 errors when trying to clone a git repo. Turns out I had copied the HTTP URL instead of the git URL. Get that right and everything seems to work great.

The Hgkeychain Mercurial plugin. This plugin allows Hg to store passwords for remote repositories in the Mac OS X keychain. (I sought this out pretty quickly as I got tired of logging into bitbucket.)

Hg Init: a Mercurial tutorial. I haven’t actually read this yet, but this six-part tutorial by Joel Spolsky of joelonsoftware fame looks really good.

Let me know if you’ve got any other must-have Mercurial tools or resources.

in hacking, software, tools

All you really need to know about Git vs. Mercurial

I recently came across a note on the Atlassian acquisition of Bitbucket, a code hosting site much like github. In a blurb about the service, one thing in particular caught my eye — they offer a free account with unlimited private repositories. I’ve dabbled with Git, and like it, and think Github is very cool, but I’ve always been put off by the need to pay for a private repository. Instead, I’ve set up a repository in my dreamhost account and that works great, but I’d prefer the convenience and polish of a commercial hosted service. My quick review of the Bitbucket site was promising, but … Bitbucket works with the Mercurial DVCS.

While I like Git, I’m far from wed to it, so I started to look into Mercurial (aka Hg). It turns out everything you need to know about Git vs. Mercurial can be summed up in a catchy analogy: Git is McGyver, while Mercurial is James Bond. This is the argument advanced by Patrick Thomson in very articulate blog post “Git vs. Mercurial: Please Relax.”

If you are wondering about Git vs Hg you should definitely read Patrick’s post, but here are my takeaways:

  • Git is more flexible and will have some advantages if you are working on a large team or want to build other applications on top of it
  • Mercurial is more user friendly and will be easier to deal with if you’re working on small projects
  • Mercurial has taken steps to ease the transition for SVN users, while Git can at best be said to ignore this issue

Patrick’s description of working with Git resonated with my own experience. While my ‘happy path’ experience with git was always good, on several occasions I ended up with the repository in a state that made it clear that I would need a pretty deep understanding of how this thing worked to seriously depend on it. I found, but balked at digging into, Git Internals, an apparent rite-of-passage to truly grokking the tool.

While I’ve not yet even downloaded Mercurial, Patrick’s description of that tool resonates strongly as well, if only in contrast to git. I think I’ll like it. I’ll let you know.

If the McGyver vs James Bond analogy doesn’t work for you, you can try this lighter post, which compares the two tools to Wesley Snipes and Denzel Washington.

in gadgets, hacking

First attempt at enabling tethering on my Pre

My home Internet service was down last night, and I don’t yet have a broadband card for my recent Macbook Pro acquisition. (Any thoughts on the mifi?) To pass the time away till I was “back on the grid,” I spent the evening trying to get tethering working on my Pre.

I’ll cut to the chase… Not only was I unsuccessful, but in the end I somehow killed the Internet on the phone as well. Actually the Internet connection was still there, but the phone wasn’t able to resolve any DNS names.

In any case, here are some notes from my little experiment:

  • Trying to hack a phone when the phone is your only Web connection *is* pretty hard. Firefox and tabs and multiple windows and cut-and-paste to Terminal is really necessary for this kind of stuff. Not recommended. Dig your well before you’re thirsty!
  • There are some great resources out there for hacking the Pre, and to Palm’s (and maybe Sprint’s) credit, they have not been wasting good resources–and good will–fighting the community. (I’m giving Palm the benefit of the doubt on the whole PreDevCamp debacle.) The first stop for any aspiring Pre hacker should be the webOS internals wiki. There are lots of good resources posted there.
  • “Rooting” your Pre is the first step for many hacks and is pretty easy to do. After rooting you get unfettered access to the Pre’s Linux operating system. Maybe I’m old-school, but it still amazing me that I can get a real Linux bash prompt from a device this small and sleek, and with such a good looking UI.
  • I found some nice instructions on tethering here, but they didn’t work for me. After restarting the connection manager you are supposed to check to see that IP forwarding is enabled. When I checked it wasn’t. Not sure if this is 1.1 thing. Or not. It turns out in this case that the first Google result isn’t event the best way to go about tethering anymore…
  • In search of answers, I found that a very cool homebrew tethering app has been developed, and I tried that out. My Tether can be found over on the preCentral forums (another great resource for Pre hackers) and is very slick. Installation is straightforward on a rooted device, but I can’t yet recommend it since it was at this point that I lost my connectivity. I’m not yet ready to blame my problems on My Tether, but proceed with caution.

My Tether for Pre

It’s about this time, having lost my 2″x3″ portal to the Web, that I gave up. Earlier this morning, I went back into my rooted Pre, restarted dnsmasq, and rebooted the device. I could swear I did all that last night, but that’s all it took to get my on-device Internet working again.

I’m sure I’ll be trying this again sometime soon.