iHwy Development Blog

Introduction: The business problem

One of our core strengths is our ability to build tools that collect, analyze and search large volumes of information in a user friendly manner. We use great technologies to solve complex problems (see sidebar). Our experience in these types of applications is broad. We built the entire Intelitouch system, which we can easily claim was one of the first real estate management systems available on the Internet. That first generation CRM application led to many of the features that are common in all of today’s similar applications. We wrote the second and third generations of the entire Sponsorwise platform, which allows clients to collect specific pieces of information and generate detailed analysis. This application is in use today by companies like Jet Blue, US Bank, Panera and Pet Smart. The user interface is simple, yet intelligent and sophisticated. Underneath the simple user interface is a robust set of tools designed to collect and analyze information. These applications solve complex data collection problems.

One of our recent projects, Mainstay, is the newest generation of enterprise software in this class of applications. The term “generation” is appropriate because this product is a step above all the others. iHwy's collective experience, know-how and pain have been applied it to every aspect of this technology.

Mainstay is a platform-independent web technology tool that collects data.

Our customer, Harkcon, came to us with a need to create a solution that would run disconnected from the web and work on Mac, Windows and Linux as a desktop application. The program also needed to be able to run disconnected, regardless of whether or not there was an Internet connection. It was not a requirement to use web technologies, but it was a more effective, modern and nimble.

Stay tuned for more detailed information about this project.

We released a bug fix for our jQuery listnav plugin today to resolve an issue that occurred if the main list's list items had nested lists inside of them. The plugin was including the nested list in the counts that appear above the letters in the dynamically created navbar and was hiding the nested list items when it should not have been. Thanks to folks on the jQuery developers list for pointing this out!

We've seen some great usage of the plugin in some sites out there. Have a feeler out to the site authors to see if they'd like a mention. If you're using the plugin, we'd like to see how. Feel free to drop us a quick line and any feedback you have. Thanks!

When creating user interface we rely on a common set of controls to solve common problems. Hopefully, the controls are common enough to use again and again and they provide a consistant interface for interaction with our web applications.  

A pattern describes an optimal solution to a common problem within a specific context.

From the IAWiki:

Patterns are optimal solutions to common problems. As common problems are tossed around a community and are resolved, common solutions often spontaneously emerge. Eventually, the best of these rise above the din and self-identify and become refined until they reach the status of a Design Pattern.

Each pattern has four primary components:

1. a title
2. a problem
3. a context
4. a solution

Yahoo! has created a common pattern library where they give visual examples of each pattern.