We finally took our stealth project here at RH Presence into closed beta. It’s been a long wait, full of documentations, hours of testing, headaches, overtimes, mockups, code re-writes, concept re-iterations and tons and tons of backups. Even though this is just a closed beta, we wanted to make sure we didn’t intentionally leave any gaps in the experience. Starting with a 100 signups, we hope to grow in a controlled and manageable manner. Interested? Go ahead and join up – we’ll be glad to have you on board! Our Filttr Blog will be the place where we’ll share details about the service and its progress, so I won’t be doing that here.⌘

A little history

Filttr began a couple of months ago when we realised that Twitter was close to going mainstream. We’ve all been waiting for it to happen, and we decided to create something that will not make it overwhelming for new people joining. We’ve heard complaints from new people who thought Twitter is just noise and spam. I love Twitter, and fortunately or unfortunately, cannot live without it any more. So it’s a little difficult for me to see most of my real world friends pass on the magic of Twitter after just a few weeks. Filttr doesn’t aim to find you more friends, but it does aim to let you follow more and more people without worrying about being overloaded with noise. We have worked to create some really smart algorithms that figure out what you’re interested in, and then show you what we think is relevant to you. All conversation should have context, and if Twitter is the conversation, we try to give it the context.⌘

I was in charge of the design of the website, as well the lead developer of our AIR based desktop application. The application took up most of my time during the development phase, with features being constantly added and removed, in keeping with our very early plan to make the app intuitive, fast, easy to use, and good to look at. There were memory and processor leaks that I had to deal with, with limitations from the runtime itself. Seeing as how this was my first time developing a desktop application, it was a whole new ball game compared to actual websites and web-applications. What helped though, is that I decided to use HTML/CSS/JS to create this app, rather than Flash/Flex. Learning a whole new development environment along with an unfamiliar runtime platform was visibly trying to bite off more than I could open my mouth for. I’ve been working with Javascript for a good part of the last 5 years, so I understand the mechanics of the language. Of course, where there is Javascript, there has to be jQuery. With the excellent library on for the ride, a lot of things became easy and quick to code out. The problem with being stealth is that it feels like time is always against us, and hence we needed some really rapid development. jQuery is the ultimate rapid Javascript development library, and once again, I thank the entire team for providing us with such an amazing tool.⌘

Patience

I can’t put everything into this one piece, so I will break it up into a series of posts to chronicle my experiences dealing with my first work on an actual, release grade web service. Believe me there were many, and it’s been a good hard 2 months of waiting for this day to arrive.⌘