Back in 2006 when aTech was just a fledgling web design company, I started work on a CRM-type application to help us manage clients, jobs & quotes.
At the time, we received quite a lot of interest from other designers & developers and, the SaaS market was tiny compared to today. Frameworks were much less advanced and creating applications was a slow and labourious process. It certainly shows here!
Desklamp was originally written in PHP and later converted to Ruby on Rails. I recently came across the original PHP code and an associated screencast. I thought it would be fun to share both!
This screencast shows some of the little UI enhancements which existed — inline editting, confirmation dialogs, validation errors etc… I’m actually very proud of the design & the experience . I wish I could say the same about the code! I haven’t looked at it in too much detail but if I wrote actual MySQL queries in my views today, I would be hung, drawn and quartered.
Here’s a few screenshots from the application and it’s associated marketing website:
