The idea behind the app is simple: provide a safe environment for young children (age 2-6) to play, watch, learn and discover. It features content from television, games such as memory, a drawing tool and sing-a-long songs. The app mostly follows the website, but is adapted for touch screens.

I have young children and they keep coming back to this app again and again. We can also see this in the visitor stats. In fact the Z@ppelin team, including myself, was quite surprised when we received a call from the hosting team that we were causing a massive load on their servers. Since then I added a huge amount of caching and CDN speedups and now we’re fine.

Some numbers:

• 100.000+ downloads in 10 months time
• 60.000 children use the app every month
• 6 million pageviews per month on average

I did the back end in Ruby on Rails using JSON. The app itself was coded by Noodlewerk.

Bootstrap

Not a Ruby plugin, but Bootstrap is the quickest way to create a web site from scratch. It’s a CSS file that sets up everything just right: grid, typography, forms, navigation, modals, tooltips. It’s far better than the alternatives. github

Kaminari

First-class paging for Rails apps. A worthy successor to Will Paginate. github

Rack-rewrite

I discovered this one fairly recently. It’s Rack middleware that lets you rewrite and redirect URLs. Perfect for legacy URLs you need to support, because Rack-rewrite lets you deal with those before routes.rb, so they won’t clutter up your code. The only downside is that the rules are more or less hidden in the middleware config, so novice coders won’t easily figure out why some URLs behave like they do. github

Paperclip

Still the quintessential attachment plugin for Rails. github

Foreigner

You should care about your database. It’s the place where your, or your client’s, business lives. It’s the place where money and companies are made. Guard it with your life. Which means maintaining referential integrity between tables. Foreigner does it all, does it in the background and does it cross-platform. I love everything about it. github

To name but a few of the techniques used:

1. full semantic HTML5
2. form elements bonanza: email, number, using built-in validation
3. @font-face (with css3 strokes!)
4. video elements with flash-fallback
5. stickers using css3 rotation
6. unobtrusive javascript throughout

and it looks gorgeous to boot. I’m proud to have coded this one!

I just tested it myself and — gasp — it works! I don’t need to cut off my balls now. Apparently there is hope for mankind.

The amazing thing, at least to me, is that you can continue to vote up to 1.5 hours before the actual broadcast. There’s a lot of work in making this possible. The guys in the MCR have to be really alert!

Cast your vote too! There’s no need for registration.