28.9.13

Building An App In 45 Minutes With Meteor | Smashing Magazine

Building An App In 45 Minutes With Meteor | Smashing Magazine

The other day, I finally accomplished one of my long-standing goals: to go from one of those “Wouldn’t it be cool…” ideas to a working, live app in less than 1 hour. 45 minutes, actually.
It all started with a design meet-up in San Francisco. I can honestly say this was the best meet-up I’ve ever been to: Even though it was announced only two days in advance, more than 200 people RSVPed, and a good number of them showed up. It was a great chance to put faces to familiar names, as well as to make new friends.

But I got to talking with so many people that I didn’t have a chance to get contact info for everybody. So, the next day, I asked the organizers about it and they suggested that everyone who attended leave a link to their Twitter account in a shared Google Doc.

That would work, but I was afraid it would prove to be too much effort. If I’ve learned one thing in my years as a designer, it’s that people are lazy. Instead, what if I built an app that lets the user add their Twitter account to a list in a single click?

The app would work something like this:
  1. The user signs into Twitter,
  2. A link to their Twitter profile appears on the page,
  3. That’s pretty much it!
With my list of requirements complete, I set to work to see how fast I could build this, and I thought it’d be interesting to walk you through the process.

At first, take a peek at how the final app looked like:
Our very bare-bones (but working!) app.
Our final bare-bones (but working!) app.

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