Monday 16 May 2011

A new look for Stadium

One of the things that impacts people's experience of a piece of software is the product's appearance. In fact, a lot of studies have shown that people tend to think that beautiful things work better.

We think that Stadium's output deserves a bit of love in this regard and we've been working on a couple of skins for future releases. Take a look at these and let us know what you think.

Simple blue

Inside the Stadium

Minimal black

Shiny black

Sunday 15 May 2011

My Joburg visit in May


I had the opportunity to meet Digiata’s Joburg system analysts/implementers on May 11th and 12th.  They are the primary users of Stadium’s designer.

The purpose of the visit was to:
  • Follow up on the survey conducted earlier on in the year
  • Understand pain/frustration points
  • Obtain feedback to incorporate into Stadium's roadmap
  • Get to see my colleagues in their "native" habitat
  • Last but not least meet my colleagues in person, many of whom I have communicated with emails for a long time 
It was an awesome experience that I will never forget. It was so special to see Stadium designer open on a few desktops, and it hit me that Stadium is
for implementers what Visual Studio is for developers. It is obvious, but you really need to see to believe.

Stadium is used to create quite a variety of web applications at our clients, so received quite a wide range of requests from the various teams. Just goes to
show what a versatile and generic product it is. However there were also some common requests.

A big thanks to all the contributors and the time you invested in preparing for it. I received lots of valuable feedback,
which I will be working on during this week to come up with an updated roadmap. Watch this space for further details.

Aside from that, Joburg weather was great, much warmer than Cape Town. Also was great to see agapanthus and
iceberg roses in full bloom, you won’t see this in Cape Town at this time of the year. And enjoyed my first ride on the Gautrain
from Sandton to the airport, was great!