UI Developers: Be Absorbed.

Spongecell is looking to hire a UI Developer. We are focused on building applications that make people’s lives easier. The atmosphere is relaxed, yet productive (if I’m not ADD’ing my way through the office) and we are based in the Mission district of San Francisco.

Overview – an expert in web front end technologies including Javascript / CSS and possibly flash.

• Requirements
  • 3+ years of experience
  • Javascript
  • Ajax technologies
  • CSS
  • Middle tier experience – JSP, .NET, Ruby on Rails or other
• Desired experience
  • Flash
  • Graphic design – icons, etc.
  • Object oriented design and development

Send PDFs or text files to jobs@spongecell.com.

Kiko: the other calendar

Yesterday while in the middle of wireframing madness, my friend imed me a link to an ebay auction.

“Isn’t this what you do?” my friend asked.

Yes, but not just a calendar. That being said, there are several interesting points made by Richard White, the interface designer at Kiko (yay, go UI!) and other various blogs. I don’t think it was Google calendar. Point is, calendars are only one form of time organization. There are still untapped markets of how a calendar and other tools can help people to take charge of their life.

With a human computer interaction background, I often wonder how can be design for a better experience? The Apple ipod succeeds not because it’s a well-designed product. Rather it succeeds because of the entire experience of the iTunes application and the iTunes music store. An online calendar has potential to be something more than just dentist appointments, birthday parties and that Russian River weekend event.

And bottom line, calendars don’t have to hurt. And it’s sad to see a fellow web project enter the deadpool.

On why I am blogging now: Yesterday in the middle of a discussion with the VP of engineering, the CEO suddenly turned to me and exclaimed, “You haven’t blogged!” I started to mumble an excuse, but he cut me off and turned back to Anthony, “Sorry, I was in the middle of asking you a question.” Ah, Spongecell.

Sponge getting bigger…..

We have two new Spongers; Jennifer Ng and Tom Bagby. Jennifer joins us from Pittsburgh, rejuvenating our love for the steel city and all that is black and gold, with a masters in HCI from Carnegie Mellon. She is going to make Spongecell as friendly as the token old lady in Macaulay Culkin movies and easy as…[redacted by Anthony]. Tom is a coding rock star, coming to Spongecell by way of Seattle and a couple of gaming companies. He has already made the excruciating switch to a Macbook Pro, cementing the Apple zealot lead in the office.

We are looking to hire two more people to join our development team in the next month. More details coming soon – if you are interested, send me (marc at spongecell.com) an email. Spongecell is a fun group of diverse, young people with lots of different personality types, and accepting of most things – except tag clouds and bluetooth headsets (when not in use). Our offices are in the Mission district of San Francisco.

Birthday

I apologize for the lapse in posting, summer-time is a time of many activities, including coding.

Today is my birthday and for my birthday Spongecell has released Feeds. Above the calendar list click Add and create a new calendar. You can add as many iCalendar feeds as you want. Zvents and Upcoming provide feeds of your favorite events.

Another feature we snuck in is embedded calendars. Click on Publish/RSS and look for the embed designer.

These features are in beta of course. We’ll hype them some more when we know they work.