Immerse or Die is a tough-love book review project begun by Canadian author and editor Jefferson Smith. Page Fight, this reader-reaction companion app, is a collaboration between Jefferson and Futurescale. He was the consulting editor for our publishing venture’s first release, and came up with the idea for the project.
Together, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the business of writing, how to improve its quality, and the difficulty of soliciting actionable feedback. This is our attempt to fill what we see as a critical gap in the self-publishing cycle: getting lots of honest reader reactions to a book’s marketing materials, before publishing. We gamified the entire process, with achievements that unlock more and more functionality, and a leaderboard, where players can see how well they’re doing compared to other top players, and authors can discover how their contenders are faring.
It was also a great deep-dive into the process of developing single page apps (SPAs) with mobile-first design. Over the first seven months of 2016, I designed the UX and built the app from the ground up using Angular 1.5, Bootstrap 3, Chart.js, jQuery, Firebase, Heroku, Node.js, and Gulp. Along the way, I open-sourced the User Profiles module, and wrote about the process of integrating with Slack for user feedback.
For more screenshots of the application in action, see the page on my personal blog: http://cliffordhall.com/coding
Or simply go to the application sign in (you can use your Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or GitHub account to sign in without a password), and explore: https://page-fight.com.
SEP
2016
About the Author:
Since the early ’80s, my consuming passion has been programming. Today I work as a Software Architect, bringing more than 30 years of industry experience to bear on every task. My career has run the gamut from writing games in machine language for Commodore 64 and Apple II to implementation of large scale, object-oriented, enterprise applications. In my spare time, I am an author and occasional music producer.