First post
Welcome to Roaring from our Monstercave: the place where de Monsters  roar about the different things we face during the process of creating our products. This means you can expect posts about the research that we do, the design problems that we face and how we solve them, technical difficulties we overcome, how and why we make certain design decisions and what it means to be a startup on its way to the top without any funding. Key in to all this is that de Monsters believe in sharing knowledge and ideas.

Interaction Design
As all of de Monsters have a background  in Interaction Design, there will be a big focus on it and on its relating fields. We strongly believe in the benefits of user-centered design and use this in all of our own products. The ultimate goal for all this is to ensure that we get a good User Experience, because in the end that is all that matters. The different models, templates and data that we gather and create during this process is something that we intend to share here on Roaring out loud.

PEF & de Monster Debugger
Most of the posts on this blog will have something to do with the design and development of PEF, our main product. PEF (temporary name meaning Paul, Erik, Ferdi, we promise to change it soon) is an easy to use design documentation service. It has been in development by de Monsters since February 2008 and has come a long way since.  We are currently working on the second major design for PEF and are thrilled about what you will be able to do with it once complete. The how and why will be frequently discussed as we show the different design decisions that have been made and what the reasons behind them are. We hope that you will share your thoughts on them.

Monster products

A very concrete aspect of sharing knowledge and ideas comes to show with de Monster Debugger. It is one of the tools that we created to aid us in the development of our own products (ComoHabla is the most important other tool) and it has been released on an open source license. With de Monster Debugger you can log different types of data from a Flash/FLEX/AIR application. We are planning to release a new version next week with some really neat new features like adjusting your application at runtime. You can expect some posts on the design and development of de Monster debugger soon.

Authors
Roaring out loud is created and maintained by three Monsters: Paul Reijnierse (twitter: unclepaulie), Erik van de Wiel (twitter: aapjerockdt) and Ferdi Koomen (twitter: ferdikoomen). We have been friends for years and worked as a team on several products before we started and graduated on PEF in 2008. We are all deeply involved in the core design of PEF, defining the core functionality and behavior together.  Our orange Monster (Erik) fills in all the details and creates the visual design for our products. The green Monster (Ferdi) is our lead developer and main prototyper, he has a crush on ActionScript (3) and AIR. The blue Monster (Paul) handles most of the communication for de Monsters and is our public roarer in real life, he also takes on some of the development for our products.

We are de Monsters

We’re going to post at least one article each week. The first articles will be mainly about explaining why we made certain choices: why we use Adobe AIR, why we use personas, etc. After that we’ll get more into details. Hopefully our future articles will be helpful, give you something to think about or at least give you a chuckle while you read our stories about how we fall while we try running. Thanks for taking a minute to read our first article. It is kind of an introduction article but we promise much more!

GRAWH!
Paul, Erik, Ferdi
De Monsters

What's next