Intridea - Leaders in Agile Software Development

Having had to develop apps that relied on the ability to send text messages to members, I thought that it would be a good idea to turn some of that functionality into a plugin that would be easy to use. SMS Fu gives you the ability to be able to send text messages from your Rails app in less than five minutes. There’s no third-party gateway needed, as the phone number is converted into an e-mail address, which makes it deliverable to any phone.

Installation

git clone git://github.com/brendanlim/sms-fu.git vendor/plugins/sms_fu

Usage

Supported Carriers: Alltel, Ameritech, AT&T, BellSouth Mobility, BlueSkyFrog, Boost Mobile, Cellular South, Fido, Metro PCS, PSC Wireless, Qwest, Southern Link, Sprint, Suncom, T-Mobile (US/UK/Germany), Virgin Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Vodafone (UK,Italy,Japan)

To use SMS Fu, all you have to do is include SMS Fu in one of your controllers.

class ExampleController < ApplicationController
  include SMSFu
end

After this, go to /config/sms_fu.yml to change the default reply-to address with your own.

Phone numbers must not include any non-numeric characters, with the exception of ’+’ for International numbers. The three required parameters are the phone number, carrier, and the message itself. To find out just what you need to pass for the carrier, check the yaml file. The one line below will deliver a nice ‘Hello World!’ straight to your phone.

deliver_sms("5555555555","AT&T","Hello World!")

Since most non smart-phones only support up to 128 characters, you’re allowed to specify a limit to truncate the message delivered.

deliver_sms("5555555555","AT&T","Really long message ...", :limit => 128)

If you feel like rolling your own mailer, and not using SMS Fu to handle this, you can retrieve the the converted e-mail address for the phone number and carrier supplied.

get_sms_address("5555555555","AT&T")

That’s all there is to it! If you want to add your own carriers, just edit sms_fu.yml.

We here at Intridea are avid users of Unfuddle as it’s by far the most feature-filled-while-remaining-simple solution out there for software project management. Unfuddle comes with Subversion hosting, but it’s harder and harder to ignore the strengths of Git as a SCM solution. Not one to sit idly by when there’s hackery to be done, I put together a rough tool for anyone who has a GitHub account that provides a webhook to automatically create Unfuddle changesets.

All you need to do is grab the bridge code from It’s GitHub Home like so:

git clone git://github.com/mbleigh/github-unfuddle.git

And follow the setup instructions in the README. The webhook is running off of Sinatra and is very lightweight. Once it’s running you can start seeing changesets just by pointing your post-receive URL to the webhook, and you’ll soon start seeing updates in Unfuddle like so:

This is still in its beginning stages so there’s bound to be a kink or two, but that’s the beauty of GitHub! Just fork, fix, and pull.

As you may have noticed, Intridea.com has just undergone a much-needed facelift. Our new site should be more cross-browser compliant, more informative, and more attactive. Our Services and Products get extra attention on our new site, reflecting our focus on providing high-quality web development services to clients, as well as producing an array of products. SocialSpring, our white-label, plug-in social network software, is one of the products we're most proud of. Read more at our (also) newly-launched site - www.SocialSpring.com.

Notice something funky? Any feedback, questions, or comments are welcome - please direct them to info@intridea.com

We've also moved to Feedburner, so please update your feed readers to use http://feeds.feedburner.com/intridea

Intridea will be represented at Railsconf 2008 by Josh Owens and Chris Selmer. They will be speaking about their experience rapidly building web applications during the first Rails Rumble, a 48-hour contest for developing a Rails site from concept to completion.

Railsconf 2008 will be held in Portland, OR on May 29th - June 1st. Stay tuned for scheduling details.

The other day when Zoho People was announced I came to the realization that even though I had heard about Zoho in 20 different blog posts over the last year or so, I had never taken a moment to go check out what they were all about. With a full online office suite, it’s definitely something I’m interested in and could use. So why didn’t I take 5 minutes to explore further?

Their Logo. It had been attached to all of the posts about them, and when I see it I just instantly lose interest in the company and their products. This is not the logo of a company that wants to be taken seriously for a productivity suite, it’s the logo of some company that sells teddy bears online that you can customize…or something. It is such a stark disconnect from the target demographic that I really just can’t understand the thought process that went into it.

Now I may be shallow in writing off this company solely because I didn’t like the look of their logo (though I would argue that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do), but the point is that it doesn’t matter at all what features, awesome back-end programming, and next-generation online collaboration Zoho offers. I never found out more about them because the image I was presented was not one that appealed to me.

The design of a company’s logo, its products, its website, everything, are not throwaway concerns. In a split-second, a person might look at your corporate website and decide “This company doesn’t look professional enough.” There is a critical period in the very first moments a potential customer sees your product that may well inform the rest of your relationship with that customer. Without an appealing aesthetic front, you will never make it to the meat of your pitch, because they have already written it off mentally.

This, I feel, was the largest gap between my college Computer Science education and the real world. I’ve always been a designer as well as a developer, but when there was absolutely no emphasis placed on the user experience or the aesthetics of the software that we were building for classes, I got frustrated. Not everyone has an eye for design, and that’s not a problem. But if a product is to be taken seriously, someone along the line has to take it and make it look good, because behind-the-scenes magic will always be just that: behind the scenes.

Intridea helped Geico launch Iheartcavemen.com – the web’s premier caveman dating site. This tongue-in-cheek take on the online dating scene allows gentlecavemen to post online profiles complete with customized caveman photos. The morphed photos can be virally distributed on dozens of social networks using the ClearSpring widget platform.

Iheartcavemen.com is based on Intridea’s SocialSpring platform. SocialSpring is an enterprise-level white-label social networking product. With SocialSpring, a company can quickly have a fully-featured custom social network in a fraction of the cost and development time of building a solution from scratch.

South by Southwest (SXSW) 2008 Launch

The site was developed in collaboration with our friends at iStrategyLabs. The site garnered A LOT of attention at the SXSW launch: Mashable, Valleywag - So easy, a caveman can do it, Valleywag - Even the cavemen are getting action