After four tiring-exciting-stressful-fun days, we’d like to introduce you to our new little buddy, HelloApp.

The idea is simple: When you arrive at a conference, you just say where you’re sitting, via Twitter. Once you do that, you can …

1. Search for people with a certain skill-set (ie PHP, jQuery, CSS3, marketing, etc) and see where they’re sitting
2. View the seating diagram colored based on Twitter follower count
3. Search for a specific person in the audience and find out where they’re sitting
4. View the seating diagram colored based on whether people are Designers, Developers or Businessmen
5. Earn badges and points by meeting people and completing tasks. If you earn a high enough rank, you’ll be able to post public messages to the entire audience and win prizes.

Here’s how it works …

Check-in

The first thing you do is check-in to the conference. You can do this by tweeting:

@helloapp !dev #php #html5 #jquery

That says that you’re a Developer who is tagging themselves with PHP, HTML 5 and jQuery.

You can also check-in via the web app …

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Earn Badges and Points

You can earn points by meeting people and completing special tasks. Once you build up enough points you earn the right to post messages to the entire audience and win special prizes. Here’s how it works …

When you meet someone and they give you their Twitter username, just tweet:

@helloapp met @their-username

If they return the favor and tweet:

@helloapp met @your-username

You’ll then both get points for meeting each other. Both people have to do it, in order for the points to be awarded. Here’s how badges look on your profile …

Grab Your Seat

Once you check-in, you say which seat your sitting in by using the passcode attached to your physical seat at the conference. This is done via Twitter like this:

@helloapp sat your-seat-passcode

Once you’ve done that, you appear in the seating chart like this …

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Explore the Crowd

You can then browse the seating chart, click on the tag cloud or search. You’ll be able to see who is sitting around you, what their interests are, and whether you have anything in common.

In the screenshot below, we’ve searched for anyone who’s tagged themselves with ‘PHP’.

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In the screenshot below, we’re viewing the audience based on number of Twitter followers …

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In the screenshot below, we’re viewing the audience based on whether they’re a Designer, Developer or Businessman …

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What You Can do Right Now

Obviously HelloApp is designed to be used during a conference, so you can’t use that functionality right now. However, what you can do is Join In and tag yourself and say whether you’re a Designer, Developer or Businessman. You can also search the list of everyone who joins before the conference.

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A Big Thanks To …

• Mark and Mark at Microsoft for being so supportive of The Future of Web Apps
• Red Gate for their .NET developer tools
• Matt Lee from Red Gate for coding like a madman
• Mike for the beautiful design work
• Keir and Will for all the support

It was a great experience coding it in ASP.NET MVC and we’re looking forward to possibly doing more apps in the framework.

Please Join In and let us know what you think!

[Update]: We want to give a big shoutout to @allisterk and @paul_leibowitz who built aseatapart.com which gave us the inspiration for the app. Meant to say that in our first post :)

As you probably noticed, we’ve been working hard this week on a mini app called Hello. We’re trying to be as open and transparent about the process as we can, in the hope of educating, entertaining and amusing you :)

Here is the latest …

Development

Matt has been pushing updates to the GitHub repository and he’s moving along quite quickly but there’s a huge amount of work to be done (possibly too much) and we’re a bit worried it won’t get done in time. Here’s a quick update from him on the ASP.NET MVC code:

We are using LINQ to SQL for our ORM. Here is an example of how easy it is to use. To grab a list of sessions that have started or start within an hour’s time, and haven’t finished yet, all you have to do is:

var sessions = _repo // _repo is our DataContext
    .Sessions
    .Where(
        s => s.Start < DateTime.Now.AddHours(1) // starts within an hours time
          && s.Finish > DateTime.Now // hasn't finished
    );

Or how about inserting a set of tags pulled out of a tweet:

_repo
    .Tags
    .InsertAllOnSubmit(
        processedTweet // this is a tweet that has been 'processed'
            .Tags
            .Select(tag => new Tag
            {
                Created = DateTime.Now,
                TagName = tag,
                Username = tweet.Username
            })
    );

Easy, huh?!

We’re using a cool tool from Red Gate called SQL Compare which scripts out the structure of the database as SQL files. You can see an example in the GitHub repo.

Wireframing

I moved the wireframe for the home page from paper into Balsamiq, just to give us a more concrete idea of size and spacing.

Paper Wireframe v2

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Balsamiq Wireframe v3

View larger or Download the original Balsamiq file

Design

Here is how the design is progressing for Mike …

Home page header v1

Home page v2, with search results

View full size

We’re working our asses off in the next four days to build a simple app called “Hello”. The strap-line is “Turn to your neighbor and say …”, so you can probably guess what it does.

We’re hoping you can use this experience to pick up tips on …

1. Code: We’re releasing it live and open-sourced, as we build: github.com/carsonified/helloapp. Feel free to fork it.
2. Design: We’ll be sharing the logo and UI design, as it progresses.
3. UX: We’re scanning our wireframes, no matter how rough, and releasing them to download (see below).

Why are we doing it?

1. To entertain and amuse you :)
2. Help you learn from our mistakes
3. Shed some light on another company’s design and build process
4. Open up the conversation about ASP.NET MVC

Some of you may be suprised by #4 as we usually build in Rails. The reason we’ve chosen ASP.NET MVC is because we feel that a lot of developers blindly choose frameworks like Rails because 1) Everyone says it’s cool and 2) They hate Microsoft.

There’s a negativity towards the Microsoft stack that we think is narrow minded. Surely we should be technology agnostic, and simply choose the best tool for the job, right? If Jeff Atwood (founder of Stack Overflow) codes in ASP.NET MVC, then surely it’s worth a look. For those of you who haven’t come across the framework the description from the site is:

A free, fully supported, web framework that provides total control over your HTML and URLs, enables rich AJAX scripting, and facilitates test driven development.

With that in mind, we pitched an idea to Microsoft where we use some of the sponsorship funds for Future of Web Apps to build an app in ASP.NET MVC. We’ll share all the positive elements of the framework, along with the frustrations. Hopefully it’ll be interesting for all of you.

I want to say a huge thank you to Matt Lee, an awesome ASP.NET MVC developer from Red Gate, who is building Hello. Keir is helping with the database design, Mike is doing all the design work, and I’m doing the wireframing, filming and blogging.

First Draft Wireframes

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Second Draft Wireframe

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First Draft Logos

First Draft Home Page Designs

Feel Free to Follow Along

We’ll be tweeting from @carsonified with progress updates, interviews and photos. We’re hoping (fingers crossed) to launch at 5pm London time on Thursday Aug 13th. It’ll be a fun ride :)