There are some new items of interest on the ExhibitFiles development blog since my last post in early July. You’ll find the results of our Design Workshop held in Berkeley in June, a front-end study by Randi Korn & Associates, and a great post by Kathy McLean about the project which includes her article, We Still Need Criticism.

We’ve starting to get comments from the exhibit developer community, which is really helping the design process. The project itself is unusual in that we (as exhibit developers) are the primary audience too. Most of the projects that we develop are for the general public or targeted for a particular grade level, etc. The scale of the project is also unique, it is funded through a three-year NSF grant. It will be the first major application that we (Ideum) has developed with Ruby on Rails.

The site itself won’t be up until later this winter, but in the meantime we’re learning a lot through development process, and the blog is great way to share. While we’d love to take credit for this idea, we’ve been following another development blog; Bare Naked App, which has been sharing their process and progress building an application called “Amigo” since February.

The focus of ExhibitFiles is very different than Amigo which is “Bringing advertisers and newsletters together.” Another difference is that along with the development blog, we have a group of advisors who represent our core audience. However, like the folks building Amigo, we’re trying to be as responsive to the needs of our future members as possible. It’s hoped that our advisor’s participation along with a fairly transparent process (via the blog) will help guide the development of the ExhibitFiles. Stay tuned.

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