Building the YouNow Profile app: Intro – Mr. Joel Kemp

I architected and built the entire front-end for the new profile app at YouNow. The project served as my first Backbone.js application.

I had tried learning the library a handful of times before, to no avail. I kept wondering ”why is Backbone even necessary?” Through a series of posts, I’d like to shed some light on my successful approach for learning Backbone – in hopes that it will help someone else get over the hump.

Here are some screens of the app for posterity:

The tech used:
* Backbone.js: for the architecture of the app
* Underscore.js: for Backbone and templating
* Jquery 1.9: for all DOM interactions + animation
* SLIM: for all markup
* SASS: for all styles
* Twitter Bootstrap: for visual styling and positioning
* Spin.js: for dynamic, css-based spinners
* LabJS: for async loading of all scripts
* Moment.js: For timestamp display + manipulation
* Jwplayer: for broadcast playback
* Jquery Placeholder plugin: for IE’s lack of html5 placeholder support
* CodeKit: for all SASS compilation and JS merge + minification
* Sublime Text 2: Code editor

In the next post, I’ll describe the initial (non Backbone) prototype version of the app. See it here