Dear all,

We attended the new, DIC organized DemoCamp Dubai yesterday, it was different, but good nevertheless. Sad thing though is that the demo’s took longer than foreseen (each were given 10 minutes), but I did the same 2 years ago when I presented places.ae on Democamp 1.

Anyhow, I’d suggest for the organizers to actually have a public counting-down clock on stage, so presenters are forced to use their timeslots, and not longer. Also, initially, the rule was that you demo your app, not a powerpoint slide about what it will be, or could do.

As said, it was different, and change is inevitable, it was a good event. Good to see all startup familiar faces again.

Take care,
Michael

Ni Hao!
Happy New Year to our Chinese friends, Chinese users and their Chinese friends. That the year of the tiger may bring you luck, a good health and answers to any questions you have.

Check out the several chinese restaurants in Dubai.

Warm regards,

Michael

Hi all,

Sorry for the delays in blogging, but I was practicing for my 10k marathon run. I’ve been practicing the past, say, 2 months and didn’t have much time to push new changes to places.ae. Anyhow, we’ve been drafting new features on papers, have potential very interesting partnerships coming up, so now we’re back in full effect.

Thank you,
Michael

Today, two years ago, places.ae went from a “coming soon” page to the real deal. The application was, and is, far from finished, and I remember that the fromtpage was a whopping 450+ kB page.

It was a nice and exciting thing, as this was the first rails application we ever put on the Internet. And have continued to learn a lot since then.

Hits increased, servers got upgraded and the UI had three major changes (so far), and we still have a long way to go and many fun things coming up.

Thank you for using places.ae, signing up, supporting us, giving us valuable comments and criticism, we couldn’t have done this without you, our valuable users.

Take care,
Michael

Dear all,

At places.ae we would like to wish all our users and friends a happy new year coming up. We hope that 2010 brings you health and success, and as our commitment towards you all, is that we’ll give you more fun features, and more places.

Have a great year ahead,
The Places.ae

Dear all,
We had an unexpected downtime last night, whereby our Apache daemon didn’t wanted to get up again. Guess it must be the aftermath of the festivities.

Anyway it went down at 6AM GMT, and backup at 9AM GMT today, we’ll be monitoring if everything is ok and try to identify what happened.

Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Michael

Dear all,
We would like to wish you a merry Christmas for you and your family.

Thank you,
Michael

Hi all,

Ho ho ho, Christmas is coming early this year. After several customer requests, and some internal code changes, you can now view the menus and brochures of places that are on places.ae.

When seeing the search results, you will notice a new icon next to some of the places, such as next to Breakfast to breakfast in the screen shot below:

This icon means that there’s a menu available for that place.

Of course we don’t have all menus and brochures yet. If you have one, please feel free to send it to menu@places.ae. Currently we want this manual step in between to avoid mis-use and abuse of these functions. While we do appreciate clear scans of the menu, please keep in mind that we have a 10 MB file size limit, and we’d like to get them in JPG’s please. Soon you’ll be able to upload them.

If you have any suggestions, questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us.

Thank you,
Michael

Our team at places.ae would like to wish a happy Eid al-Adha to all moslims.

Dear all,
We pushed a new update with some minor changes, mainly to cater smaller screens. I have dual 20 inch monitors, and am using a rather large resolution. Machines that use a smaller resolution, say 1024×786, were scrolling most of the time, looking at huge fonts on their screen.

This has been changed, now to make the site prettier on several screen sizes, not only the enormous resolutions.

Also, the top logo and menu bar have changed. We ditches the MacOS-reflecting fonts, and the gradient background. This is more inline with the new marketing material we’ll be getting in.

In the background, we load a larger keyword list via lazy loading, so if you wait a tenth of a second after your page is loaded you’ll have more keywords in your autocomplete.

Thanks,
Michael