This code is not production ready. Estimated launch is in late October. Pilotfish developers are practicing README driven development, so this documentation is being written before the code is actually done. :) To see the real state of the code, checkout the HISTORY. If the project interests you and you would like to be notified when the first release is ready, more info can be found on the pilotfish.io website
Software should be intuitive, easy, and fun to use. Pilotfish is a user experience toolkit for web and application developers to build better user experiences.
Instead of re-writing these common user experience widgets for each platform over and over, pilotfish unifies this effort as a community driven project that pulls together the latest best practices in User Experience. Your users get a better experience, and you save time. See plugins for a list of the functionality you gain by using a User Experience Platform.
TL;DR: Pilotfish is bootstrap for User Experience, with a server-side platform too.
Sure, most experienced developers have created experiences like the ones you see here, at least once. Do you want to keep doing that over and over again, or use well-tested, high quality interactions?
jQuery is client side only. Pilotfish provides a server-side component as well for a complete platform that enables services, analytics, and dynamic interactions for your users.
No. While there is a highly available, scalable platform-as-a-service at api.pilotfish.io. You can also download/install the api code and host yourself. See alternate hosting options.
Pilotfish currently requires jQuery. We plan on supporting other frameworks soon. Let us know if you are interested in other frameworks, that will guide our priorities. The best way to do this is to file an issue. Pilotfish will not interfere with any other libraries.
Pilotfish uses a plugin driven architecture, so you only get the plugins you need. The pilotfish.min.js file is only 1.8K when minified/gzipped.
A pilot fish is one of those little fish that hover around sharks and eat the parasites, creating a mutually beneficial relationship with the shark. Similarly, Pilotfish aims to work alongside your application to make it better.
To see a working sample site, head over to pilotfish.io
To use pilotfish, first include the base pilotfish file:
<script src="//cdn.pilotfish.io/client/latest/pilotfish.min.js"></script>
Then you include the javascript for which plugins you may want to use:
<script src="//cdn.pilotfish.io/client/plugins/recorder/pilotfish-recorder.js"></script>
Depending on the plugin, some extra configuration may be required.
For the asynchronous version, see: http://jsfiddle.net/Y4dbB/
Several core plugins are included with the platform, and there is also a community of developers that create plugins as they are needed.
- Blower - Automagically finds usability problems (makes your site suck less)
- Recorder - records events to the analytics backend of your choosing
- Speaker - speak with your user (notifications, error handling, tool tips and more)
Have an idea for a plugin? We'd love to hear it. Please file an issue describing your idea.
Pilotfish currently depends on jQuery, at least version 1.4. If your site doesn't use jQuery please let us know which javascript library we need to support by filing an issue
Pilotfish accepts the burden of browser compatibility testing, and we aim to make reasonable trade offs for compatibility versus complexity/bloat.
We currently to support all browsers that support JSON:
- Chrome >= 4
- Firefox >= 3.5
- Internet Explorer >= 8
- Safari (including iOS) >= 5
For older browsers that don't support required functionality, we aim to gracefully degrade - silently disabled without causing problems for the user.
If it is important for you to support older browsers, we recommend modernizr, which brings browsers up to snuff.
While it is recommend you use the latest stable minified release of the javascript, you may also pick a different release state or lock to a specific version number. We use semantic versioning with major.minor.patch. Examples:
-
/client/0.1.0/pilotfish.min.js # this exact version only
-
/client/0.1/pilotfish.min.js # anything in the 0.1.x series
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/client/0/pilotfish.js # anything in the 0.x.x series, non minified
-
https://raw.github.com/pilotfish/pilotfish/master/pilotfish.js # Pull latest commit from github (not for production)
You may host the javascript files yourself if you like. Simply download them from any of these sources and put them on your servers.
Note that the server-side api, and web console are open source, you are free to download/install them and run them on your own server instead of using the Pilotfish hosted solution.
http://pilotfish.github.com/client/latest/pilotfish.min.js
TODO
TODO
We aim for you to use this inside your application, so we picked the least restrictive license we could find. MIT License - see LICENSE
See USING.
We want you to have a good experience, too. :)
Please check out the existing issues, and if you don't see that your problem is already being worked on, please file an issue
Would you like to help out? Checkout the TODO page.
See doc/helping to get started. See doc/development for guidelines on how to write code that gets included in the production release.
- The Pilotfish website
- The wiki (TODO)
- The Pilotfish Discussion Group (TODO)