Loosely Coupled

I'm pretty excited about the latest consumer tech products I've seen from Apple and Microsoft. Although they seem to target slightly different segments, both have new offerings which push user interface and interaction to a new level. iPhone Early this year, I watched the Macworld video where Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. I was blown away. It was easy to see the new possibilities offered by this device. I mean, the phone I have now offers many advanced features that are clumsy and frustrating to use (web access, email, text messaging, etc) . The iPhone makes these tasks intuitive (and it looks fun). As the average user gets a hold of this, I'm guessing we'll see a spike in web traffic as mobile computing goes mainstream (sort of like what the iPod did for digital music). It will forever change the way people interact with the Internet and our products. Microsoft Surface Computing Yesterday I watched a video demoing Microsoft Surface Computing. I don...

My work had focused on web application development for so long, I had to pause when I was asked to develop a desktop application. I had little idea where to begin. I started searching for application frameworks that met the following criteria: I could write the application in Java The resulting application would be cross platform with a native look and feel. The framework was mature, easy to use, and widely adopted. I quickly narrowed the field down to 2 choices Eclipse RCP and NetBeans . Both met the criteria I was looking for. Either would have been a reasonable choice, and I chose Eclipse. First of all, I was comfortable developing in the Eclipse IDE. Second, Eclipse had a larger installed base and an avid community following, with over 1200 commercial plugins available. I was happy with my choice. Since I had been coding with JSF for some time, the leap to an event based system was not that large. The Forms plugin allowed me to easily create an attractive interfac...

It's Friday and I don't feel like writing anything I have to think about too much. I thought I'd start a list of some of the online resources I regularly use for news and inspiration. I hope to add to this list as I go. Props to these great innovators! Kayak Kayak is a travel search engine. Kayak makes excellent use of AJAX, adding results as they are discovered, and allowing users to tweak results (times, airlines, stops, etc) without a page refresh. I love how natural this application is to use. I also appreciate how willing they are to share the technology they're using and other cool stuff . CSS Zen Garden This site really cemented, for me, just how powerful and flexible CSS can be. I can spend hours browsing designs and learning new techniques. I do not have an extensive background in design and this site has really helped me refine my user interfaces. Amazon I'm always impressed with the great innovations Amazon has developed for users b...

On my last web application project, we realized the JSP/JSF presentation layer we implemented was not cutting it anymore. Transitions between pages were too slow, users wanted more dynamic feedback and drag and drop functionality. The project was put on indefinite hold shortly after that but I wanted to talk about some of the technologies I researched to address these problems. AJAX Ajax seems like the mainstream choice. While AJAX could help address the transition time and feedback issues, I don’t believe it could help add drag and drop. What worries me about AJAX stems from my experience with CSS. Even though CSS is a web standard, some browsers still implement CSS differently. I’ve had to place hacks into my CSS to account for these inconsistencies. It is a pain. Like CSS, web browsers could implement AJAX (XMLHttpRequest) functionality slightly differently. For me, I’d rather stay away from AJAX if at all possible. Adobe Flex I first noticed the power of Flash in ...

In my last post , I asked how much more effective my prototype would have been if we had started with the “compelling story” and went from there? The problem from the start was failing to recognize who my user group consisted of. We assumed that since we were working on an application prototype, our users were a fictional (and generic) set of people who would eventually be our customers. The end result was a feature rich application that didn’t solve any single business problem. In reality, the people performing the demonstration were the real users. Developing features to help them tell their story (and win the company more business) should have been our only goal. Around the time I realized this, I also discovered two developments in user interface design - Usability and Accessibility. Usability I got turned on to Jared Spool through a presentation titled “Scent, Search, and the Pursuit of User Happiness”. I’ve been a big fan of his and the work being done at User Interf...