Ruby on Rails candy for petproject

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi all,

I'm participating in a petproject contest. For this contest I'm using Ruby on Rails. So I could learn Ruby on Rails and to impress the jury with cool Rails features.

It's a system so that roommates can organize their expenses.

Do you have some cool ideas to incorporate into this project? I thought about personal RSS feeds, email notification. But these are not REALLY cool. I incorporated some del.icio.us in the login screen.

Thanks in advance!

2

LeonB wrote:

Hi all,

I'm participating in a petproject contest. For this contest I'm using Ruby on Rails. So I could learn Ruby on Rails and to impress the jury with cool Rails features.

It's a system so that roommates can organize their expenses.

Do you have some cool ideas to incorporate into this project? I thought about personal RSS feeds, email notification. But these are not REALLY cool. I incorporated some del.icio.us in the login screen.

Thanks in advance!    If you are looking for application features (rather than Web 2.0 features), you can take a look at a Palm software called 'Holiday Debts' that has some cool features on sharing expenses. Among other things, it allows you to enter who paid for which item (incl different currencies) and how that is to be shared among the people who were there.. and you can always glance at a different screen to see a cumulative plan for settling the debts.

Cheers, Mohit. 7/29/2007 | 11:35 AM.

3

billmonk.com might be of use.

4

LeonB wrote:

Hi all,

I'm participating in a petproject contest. For this contest I'm using Ruby on Rails. So I could learn Ruby on Rails and to impress the jury with cool Rails features.

It's a system so that roommates can organize their expenses.

Do you have some cool ideas to incorporate into this project? I thought about personal RSS feeds, email notification. But these are not REALLY cool. I incorporated some del.icio.us in the login screen.

Thanks in advance!

Heh. I'm always trying to find a way to remove the cool ideas from my applications. If I can offer any advice, make sure you have a clear goal in mind. Then add enhancements on that idea... tons of cool features doesn't guarantee a good product.

Okay... I thought of some other advice. Talk to your users. They're the ones that you're building it for. Find out what sort of problems they're experiencing and then once you have enough information, start brainstorming innovative solutions to them. Giving them a bunch of features without first understanding their goals may not be very productive.

Good luck!

Robby