December 2011
1 post
Merry Christmas!
September 2011
1 post
1 tag
Version numbers don't matter
In the spirit of documenting changes that are obvious, but only in retrospect I want to go over a new versioning scheme that I am adopting for Bvckup. Its executive summary is -
No more dotted version numbers.
In other words, “Bvckup 2.1.3.14” becomes “Bvckup 2, revision 37” …or thereabouts.
In short
This is not an isolated change, but rather a part of a larger...
August 2011
1 post
1 tag
Please confirm your email address
Just a quick post to share something that seems obvious in retrospect, but took a while to notice and fix.
A mailing list for those wanting to follow Bvckup and Bvckup 2 progress has been up and active over a year now. Subscribing to the list triggers a typical confirmation email with a link that needs to be clicked on. The odd thing was that a good half of those subscribed never bothered to do...
July 2011
2 posts
1 tag
BetaLi.st
Made it to BetaList yesterday and wow, just wow. Steady thick stream of traffic and trending up on their weekly list of populars too.
Thanks for the sign-ups, mentions and tweets, guys! Very much appreciated. And a big round of applause to Mr. Köhlbrugge for conceiving such a useful site.
http://betali.st/startups/bvckup-2
Technical overview of Bvckup 2
I described several technical aspects of Bvckup 2 while it was on reddit.
As the development moves forward I will be posting detailed performance numbers for each listed feature, but meanwhile take a look at the overview to get a general feel for the amount of optimization finding its way into V2.
So here it is - A technical overview of Bvckup 2
June 2011
2 posts
Reddit
Two-day sponsored post on reddit is now live - http://www.reddit.com/comments/iarao
About one quarter through and there is 2300 unique impressions so far, about 40 click-throughs, plus a bunch of opinions which is what I am after. All in all this seems to be beating Adwords hands down.
Bvckup 2, the Teaser
Things are moving forward and today I am very happy to announce the launch of the Bvckup 2 (teaser) website - http://www.bvckup2.com.
With this launch we are now starting to showcase minimalistic aesthetics of Bvckup 2 and introduce our visitors to the concept of refined single-purpose software.
This project is a bit of a gamble… or an experiment, if you will. I really want to try and...
April 2011
1 post
1 tag
Teaser
Working on many things including a post on core optimizations and an update of the product identity. With latter trying to tone down some of the grandness of the current logo, to make it a bit more approachable and to better express the nature of product — a simple software that does just one thing, but does it really well.
March 2011
0 posts
1 tag
Version 2 in broad strokes
Bvckup entered its public beta in July ‘09, and the past year and a half provided a good insight into what was working, what was missing and what needed fixing. And so it is now ready for its next major revision — Version 2.
The new and improved Bvckup will focus on three things - core improvements, the user interface and speed optimizations. From mundane but useful, to pretty, to...
February 2011
7 posts
1 tag
It's alive!
This is to officially open this blog for business and to publicly commit to not spending any more time on tweaking its design. A month and a half of it should be plenty enough :)
Do take a look at a beautiful footer for the ways to keep up with the blog.
1 tag
How Bvckup got its name
Bvckup started its life as a small copying utility that I wrote for my own use and back then it was going under the name of JustCopy. Despite its spartan interface and hard-coded configuration that early version proved to be useful. It was a solid prototype of a real product, and a real product needed a name.
Read on to learn how the app got its name and the logo.
Name is the first impression
...
3 tags
Finishing touches
Tying up some loose ends.
A gentle warning for those running NoScript plugin. Here is a demo.
A notice to introduce this blog on the homepage.
1 tag
Regarding the timeframe
A very reasonable question arrived today over at Twitter:
ckasprzak @apankrat so is it a web design or app UI? Any ETA on v2?
And an answer to this question is this:
A guy brings a bolt of fine cloth to his Jewish tailor and asks him to make a pair of pants.
A week later he returns, but the pants aren’t ready. Two weeks later he returns, but the pants aren’t ready. Three...
2 tags
Input control styling
Just started on slicing the blog footer comp, should be done by Monday.
The last thing before that was a matter of input control styling. After trying this and that the following was a set of lucky finalists:
As one can plainly see, the issue here is not the lack of choices, but rather their abundance. One good option typically leads to few more. When it rains, it pours kind of...
2 tags
Styling the blog footer
Half way through redoing the blog footer from its temporary form -
to something a bit more elaborated -
The footer will then further be recycled for the main website, so this ties into the styling work of the main site.
January 2011
4 posts
2 tags
On sidebar styling
A pair of sketches to show a bit of the “behind the scenes” design routine. In this case it’s the styling of the sidebar information that accompanies every post.
The first option used icons as link labels:
It looked good on its own, but when considered in the context of the whole page it happened to add an unnecessary visual noise. Sidebar is a supplementary information...
2 tags
On sticky footer
This post describes a simple way to push a web page footer to the bottom of the browser window when there’s no enough content to fill full height of the window.
Sticky footer can be implemented in pure HTML/CSS, see for example here or here. This approach however has one, rather annoying drawback - it requires zero vertical margins on all page elements.
Cleaner and simpler
The method...
2 tags
One blog, coming up...
Almost done with blog’s design and coding, only a couple of things left to tackle.
First is the styling of the embedded images, nothing too complicated, just trying to keep it consistent with the minimalistic approach of the overall design. Two options are:
A larger version is over at Forrst, and a better look at the second one is on Dribbble. Still undecided, but at least it’s a...
2 tags
Please stand by...
Working on a proper blog design and it is coming together very nicely. Some bits and pieces are on Dribbble, have a look if curious.