Three years ago, on July 1st 2006, I released version 1.0 of Bingo Card Creator. It was ugly, underfeatured, and bug-ridden. Now, it is ugly, underfeatured, and bug-ridden… with AJAX!
Feast your eyes at this very, very early sneak peak. You’ll want to click one of the various “sign up now” text links rather than the download a free trial ones. I haven’t gotten around to sitting down with my design guy and redoing the buttons and the sales pitch for the free download yet.
Featurewise, it isn’t quite competitive with the downloadable Bingo Card Creator, to be honest. A few of the power-user features, particularly design-focused things like picking fonts, are shockingly difficult to implement in a good way in a web application. Others, like consistent columns and call lists, I just quite haven’t had time to integrate yet.
I was really impressed that I got the live preview of the bingo cards to work as well as it does. Check it out — I am very proud of that work, although it is rough around some edge cases. It took probably half of the development time of the site but I think getting users super-responsive feedback to their actions is worth every minute of it.
AJAX Technical Detail
How does it work? While users are typing words into their text box, Prototype periodically checks it for changes and, if there are any, serializes the contents of the form and calls an AJAX function on the server. The server takes the contents of the form and saves it to a “scratch” record in the database, which is not otherwise visible to the user. The return value from this function overwrites part of the calling web page, including replacing the previous preview image with a new image if the scratch value has changed (same url, new query parameter — this tricks browsers into always requesting the image anew rather than checking their cache).
The path to the image on the server is actually just more Rails code, which checks to see if the scratch record has changed since the last time it produced an image. If not, Rails tells Nginx “give them the last image we wrote, straight from the disk”. If yes, then Rails uses Prawn plus a boatload of custom formatting logic to create a PDF, then calls out to ImageMagick to turn that into a GIF and resize it, then writes that to the storage area on the disk and tells Nginx to serve it. Total time per request: on order of 300 to 800 ms. My back of the envelope math suggests that my server, with two Mongrels, can probably support about 20 teachers simultaneously editing cards as fast as their fingers can go… after that I need to get worried (or upgrade to a bigger slice, which I might do anyway).
Still To Come
I still have to:
- rewrite my copy to address the existence of the web version
- get Bingo Card Creator 3.0 tested, in particular the features where it links to the website
- give the user workflow a graphical upgrade, because pretty buttons sell B2C software
- rewrite my page templates to push both the trial and the online service — I sense a lightbox coming up…
- improve usage stats collection (can be pushed after release)
- test integration with the purchasing funnel to make sure it works right
- give some spit-and-polish to some usability issues
I’d love if you have any comments on it. Take it for a spin and let me know. This sneak-peak is not using the production database, which means when the sneak-peak ends you’ll lose anything you did with it. In the unlikely event you want to use this for something important, make sure you save your cards locally.
Hi,
A quick suggestion:
The current online system is usable and easy to understand so that’s good.
But I think you could make it better by just laying out a table (over the full screen) and let them edit the individual cells in-place.
Keep a title box on top and save\print buttons on the side.
You don’t need a two-step process then.
Each time they perform an edit and leave the cell, you can commit that change with an ajax call.
I will confess though, that I’m not your typical use case for creating bingo cards so take what I say with a grain of salt.
Thanks for the suggestion. Here are my issues:
It is possible to put any number of words in a word list, from zero to “lots”. I have customers who use hundreds, for reasons which become quickly apparent if you play bingo with a group of several hundred people. (Yay, Fortune 500 retreats.) I don’t want to cut users off after N elements in the table. Similarly, I don’t want them to feel that they have to fill every element in the table right now before proceeding, because they don’t.
Currently I cannot see you webpage at all?!
Neither the normal site or the staging. Is your server down or something?
Patrick, I also cannot access neither of your sites. As for AJAX, I’d recommend to go with jQuery library. There are tones of samples and it’s very easy to learn and to build sophisticated Web apps in a shortest time. Still, looking forward to try your web-bingo when it gets accessible.
Connection refused for me, too. BTW, sneak peek has two e’s. Congrats on the release! 800 ms seems like it would be an eternity.
Thanks guys. Sorry for the system crash during the first day of the sneak peek — I had some unanticipated difficulty with my slice. (Slicehost support continues to amaze me — we got through a truly arcane Linux issue together in under an hour.)
How are you limiting the online version? Or are you planning on offering it on a subscription basis only? In other words, how are you planning to make money with it? You may have covered this previously. If so, sorry for missing it.
Dan, it has the same limit as the downloadable version: it can only print out 15 cards from a word list in trial mode.
Also, it watermarks printouts made in trial mode, something the downloadable version has never done. See here:
http://www.bingocardcreator.com/pdf/words-beginning-with-pl.pdf
The business model is the same as always: sell licenses. I am not selling subscriptions yet, although I might revisit that decision if there is customer demand for it.