If you want to build a mobile app, maybe it would be better to use jQuery Mobile or Appcelerator Titanium to crank out the first version; you can always build native iOS and Android versions if the project gets traction.

Make use of existing services

Unless you have someone on your team who wants to spend their weekend setting up servers and dealing with hosting, deploy your app to PaaS providers like Heroku (Ruby) or AppHarbor (.NET). If you need more flexibility, you can spin up an Amazon EC2 instance pretty easily. Remember that you can always move your architecture to your own hosted servers after the weekend.

Here are some other services to consider, all with free plans for development:

• MongoHQ/MongoLab - cloud-based MongoDB instances
• SendGrid - API for sending emails
• Twilio - Voice and SMS web service

For some design shortcuts, use a website theme from ThemeForest and get icons from IconFinder (make sure to check the licenses).

How I would start, if I could go back

I now believe that anyone can reach ramen profitability, as long as there is real focus on the goal. Once you are focused on generating revenue, it is a good idea to consider how the type of idea you choose can affect how easy it is to bootstrap and reach ramen profitability. If I was just starting out now with the knowledge I now have, I would completely focus on reaching ramen profitability, and I would work on the side on a “tool” with paid plans rather than a “social” idea. This is the approach I took with Buffer and it worked surprisingly well.

I feel it is also a much more doable first step than aiming for the million dollar idea from the outset. Avoiding those world-changing thoughts can make you very productive. As Jason Cohen described very succinctly:

Prevailing wisdom is that “small is risky.” It’s just the opposite. When you just need to be Ramen-profitable, you can do so even in a recession.

With an installed base of 40 million iPhones, you have to be crazy if you aren't interested in writing an iOS application. But where do you start? Most applications are going to be network connected. So what about a project that spans across both, such as a chat application. In this article I show you how to build a chat application with both server and client components. You can learn much from it about creating iOS applications that I guarantee you will want to write one by the end of this article.

Building the application starts with architecting the solution. Figure 1 shows the architecture of how the iOS device (the iPhone in this case) connects to the server through two PHP pages.

It’s Friday, so today’s roundup is “awesomeness.”

• Beloved designer Brian Hoff writes,  In a Sea of Designers: My ‘Best’ Advice
• Bookmark for life, supportwebstandards.com
• Web type at last! by editor/typographer John Berry
• Speaking of typography, have you wandered over to For Print Only (FPO)?
• And, since we’re on the topic of type & letters, Fillerati is very amusing & makes having to design with ipsum lorem fun again!

Holiday adventness: A photo & story a day via Photoadvent.org &  Everyone Loves PHP by @scottmac (enable “Scottish” mode to read, alternatively drink whiskey)

Wildcard: Olimpia Zagnoli shares her story (video)

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

It’s Friday, so today’s roundup is “awesomeness.”

• Beloved designer Brian Hoff writes,  In a Sea of Designers: My ‘Best’ Advice
• Bookmark for life, supportwebstandards.com
• Web type at last! by editor/typographer John Berry
• Speaking of typography, have you wandered over to For Print Only (FPO)?
• And, since we’re on the topic of type & letters, Fillerati is very amusing & makes having to design with ipsum lorem fun again!

Holiday adventness: A photo & story a day via Photoadvent.org &  Everyone Loves PHP by @scottmac (enable “Scottish” mode to read, alternatively drink whiskey)

Wildcard: Olimpia Zagnoli shares her story (video)

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

In this 7-minute Ruby on Rails tutorial video we look at how to use the Paperclip plugin to handle file uploads.

This video is from Think Vitamin Membership, a high-quality video training site, curated by us at Carsonified and Think Vitamin, with hundreds of short videos on topics like …

• Accessibility
• CSS3
• Design
• Django
• HTML & CSS
• HTML5
• JavaScript
• jQuery
• NoSQL
• PHP
• Ruby
• Ruby on Rails
• SASS
• UX
• Version Control

10 new videos are added every week, so it’s a great way to stay up-to-date on all the latest technology and methods. Browse the entire library of videos.

In this 7-minute Ruby on Rails tutorial video we look at how to use the Paperclip plugin to handle file uploads.

This video is from Think Vitamin Membership, a high-quality video training site, curated by us at Carsonified and Think Vitamin, with hundreds of short videos on topics like …

• Accessibility
• CSS3
• Design
• Django
• HTML & CSS
• HTML5
• JavaScript
• jQuery
• NoSQL
• PHP
• Ruby
• Ruby on Rails
• SASS
• UX
• Version Control

10 new videos are added every week, so it’s a great way to stay up-to-date on all the latest technology and methods. Browse the entire library of videos.

Eating turkey all weekend and wondering what you might have missed?

• James Hamilton on why “all you have learned about disks so far is probably wrong" in Availability in Globally Distributed Storage. It turns out for the same reason our financial systems melt down: black swans. The world is predictably unpredictable. Murat Demirbas also has a good post on the same Google research paper.
• Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques
• Vroom...Formula One racecar streams 27 gigabytes of telemetry data during a race weekend! 200 sensors “measuring anything and everything that moves or gets warm. 
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @dmalenko: It is cool to sit by the ocean, oversee the sunset and think about scalability models for a web app
  • @detroitpro: I have to admit; sometimes I think "This would be easier with a SQL DB" #NoSQL #NotOften #ComplextRelationships #FindingRootObjects

Eating turkey all weekend and wondering what you might have missed?

• James Hamilton on why “all you have learned about disks so far is probably wrong" in Availability in Globally Distributed Storage. It turns out for the same reason our financial systems melt down: black swans. The world is predictably unpredictable. Murat Demirbas also has a good post on the same Google research paper.
• Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques
• Vroom...Formula One racecar streams 27 gigabytes of telemetry data during a race weekend! 200 sensors “measuring anything and everything that moves or gets warm. 
• Quotable Quotes:
  • @dmalenko: It is cool to sit by the ocean, oversee the sunset and think about scalability models for a web app
  • @detroitpro: I have to admit; sometimes I think "This would be easier with a SQL DB" #NoSQL #NotOften #ComplextRelationships #FindingRootObjects