courtesey Ard Hesselink
This Friday I thought I would post on some of the tools that our web/media group has been using lately.
Assembla
Writing code is hard. Writing code in a group that might not even be on the same floor, building, or state is much harder. Assembla is a set of the key collaboration tools that programming teams need, all rolled into one off-site package. SVN, Trac, a wiki, and even Scrum reporting tools. We initially used it as a stop-gap measure while we got our own SVN server up. Now we're finding it hard to tear ourselves away.
IRC
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) has been around for a long, long while, but we hadn't really thought of it as a work tool until real recently. After two of our finest web/media developers returned from the 2008 DrupalCon, they informed us about a whole 'nother world of Drupal support and discussion living on the IRC channels. I tried it out for a couple of hours one Sunday I was amazed at how much live help was out there for some complex stuff I was trying to figure out. I'm on a mac so I use Colloquy to get on Drupal's IRC channels. Obviously this isn't Drupal specific. There are many channels for the topic you are currently banging your head over right now.
ScreenKeys
What's cooler than a button? A button with a little display built in. Screenkeys are little programmable LCD screens in buttons and switches. These could be quite fun for customized and changing content. The options for control in a game could change every time a visitor plays. We aren't using these yet but I just threw them in for fun.
Any of all those crazy acronyms throw you for a loop? Post a question about how we are using these tools and I'll try and fill you in.
Comments
Hi Bryan,
Can you talk a little bit more about some of your possible uses for ScreenKeys in a museum environment?
Hey Paul,
Well imagine that you had some sort of game. Like a quiz show. I mention that because that's something that we actually have. Normally we would have changing answers on the screen that you could select by hitting standard old buttons labeled A,B, or C. With these buttons you could actually have the button light up with the words of the answer: panda, rhino, new york, etc.
Essentially any time you would normally think, "oh we need to put a more complex screen based interface here to allow dynamic control options," you could use one of these buttons as a possibly simpler changing interface solution. Like I said, I haven't fooled around with them so "simpler" might not truly be a reality. Honestly, the designer in me just kinda thinks they look cool.
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