Product prototyping with http://www.meteorkitchen.com/

These three application prototypes were created with MeteorKitchen.

PIMS - a Product Information Management Software. Adds many-to-many support for MeteorKitchen collections. The application has 16 collections from product groups to product pictures. Product groups supports multi-level parent-children configuration. E.g. Products->Fruits and Berries->Berries->Red Berries etc. A product can belong to multiple product groups without any limitation implement with multi-select UI-component. MeteorKitchen version of this prototype was it’s 3rd incarnation.

Things learnt from building this prototype

Using MeteorKitchen as application generator
Multi-level parent children implementation in MongoDB with the needed UI elements to support it.
Products-collection has 60 attributes. Displaying this many information elements has it’s challenges. Many of the attributes are many-to-one types and need their own management UIs.
Uploading product images with automatic re-sizing. Saving the images to an online-storage / mongodb.
Staged CSV import/export with user customizable schema. Dynamic schema support for imported CSV information.

PITPA - Personal Invoices Tracking and Payment Application. Is an application which manages and tracks due dates for invoices created from email bodies or PDF-attachments. It extracts invoice information from email and their attachments and displays it for the user.

Things learnt from building this prototype:

GMail offline Oauth permission to automatically fetch email on behalf of the user
Text extraction from free form emails.
PDF text extraction.
Number and date type handling and conversions
Usage of the bootstrap HTML, CSS, and JS framework
Building application log for a Meteor application for the user

Invoices - A simple invoices app with multi-company support. Generates PDF invoices for the user to download. Supports virtual and non-virtual bank payment bar-code graphics generation. Supports multiple languages.

Things learn from building this prototype:

Usage of the semantic-ui development framework
Currency and number information localisation
BarCode graphics generation using JavaScript
Multi-format, multi-language PDF generation using JavaScript

TLDR;

Using meteor-kitchen to build meteor apps is a nice way to prototype your ideas without having to write a lot of html/js code. And meteor-kitchen apps come out of the oven well baked. You can see and try the invoices app here http://laskut.meteor.com/. It comes with no warranties.

As a part of web application prototyping I made this small Google form http://goo.gl/forms/jrc1Dvjmt7 to gather information about what the application should be doing.

Later we’ll see ways to build Android and Apple app from a Meteor app.

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