One of the many changes that web developers are having to adjust to is that it's much harder to conceptualise and prototype a rich internet application than a simple page-by-page one. We've all been a meeting where a BA, PM or designer has tried to do this with something like PowerPoint, and have since realised that PowerPoint just don't cut it.
So, to cut long story short, here's here's a much cooler way of doing it in Visio.
I honestly don't know how long this has been around so it might be old hat. Anyway, UX Mag is worth a look if you are interested in the 'user experience.'
Ok, it's a bit too clever by half sometimes but still, there is stuff there worth reading. I particularly enjoyed the piece Design 101 for programmers.
I have been blessed with working with wonderful techies in my time at the Uni. Generally they have always listened to me, even when I was being more than demanding, and tried to implement what I asked for. They never treated me like an idiot and always accepted that sometimes the interface was beyond them. More than that, they were willing to learn about interfaces. Now I'm not working with them, I miss them. Sniff.
(I also like the treatment of links to stories on UX Mag - much less room for mistakes when the whole box containing the title is a link. Nice).
If you like Flickr as much as I do and know more about application development than I do than perhaps you would like to read a write-up of a talk given at the O'Reilly ETech conference this month: Scaling Fast and Cheap - How we built Flickr. It was given by Cal Henderson.
Today, some light reading via Boing Boing: history's worst software bugs. Including:
November 2000 -- National Cancer Institute, Panama City. In a series of accidents, therapy planning software created by Multidata Systems International, a U.S. firm, miscalculates the proper dosage of radiation for patients undergoing radiation therapy.Multidata's software allows a radiation therapist to draw on a computer screen the placement of metal shields called "blocks" designed to protect healthy tissue from the radiation. But the software will only allow technicians to use four shielding blocks, and the Panamanian doctors wish to use five.
The doctors discover that they can trick the software by drawing all five blocks as a single large block with a hole in the middle. What the doctors don't realize is that the Multidata software gives different answers in this configuration depending on how the hole is drawn: draw it in one direction and the correct dose is calculated, draw in another direction and the software recommends twice the necessary exposure.
At least eight patients die, while another 20 receive overdoses likely to cause significant health problems. The physicians, who were legally required to double-check the computer's calculations by hand, are indicted for murder.
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So, we've been hearing a lot about AJAX recently (but if you haven't, Wikipedia is always a great place to get up to speed) - another addition to the arsenal of strategies for creating Rich Internet Applications (there are plenty of others - Flash Remoting, Java Applets, XUL and XAML to name a few). A lot has been toted recently about AJAX, and RIAs in general as a phenomenon that will transform the way we work and even ultimately kill the desktop. Although this vision is perhaps a bit optimistic (at least for the time being), there are a number of other cool things this approach can offer in the meantime. In particular, in addition to the much-debated improvements in user interaction there may be some real architectural benefits to developing with AJAX.
1. It separates presentation logic and business logic in a way that few other technologies can. In a nutshell the way AJAX works is to have a server spitting out raw XML, which is then formatted and adjusted by a HTML page in real-time. This means that those who like to focus on data can deliver the former, and those who perfer to build goregous apps without caring where the information comes from can work on the latter - no more mishmashing of HTML and PHP (or JSP, or PERL, or whatever your poison is). Also anyone who's been thinking about service oriented architecture recently should also be pricking up their ears at the idea of the idea of having lots of XML-driven data sources floating around.
Because of this separation of concerns, the ability to build end-user functionality is put in the hands of designers (provided they get comfortable with JavaScript, and can convince their programmers to give them some useful XML to work off). They don't need to worry too much about what's serving up the data or or where it is - as long as they can get at it with their JavaScript code.
2. If a few different services on the same domain use AJAX, and therefore have XML feeds in the background serving up all the core data, the gateway is open to build some really cool services that combine all those feeds together. Imagine a search engine where you pull up not only an academic's phone number, but also their web page, their current publications and last 5 blog posts. All without any server-side code. Not that I'm pre-empting anything here...
3. By using client side Javascript to offload all your presentation logic to the client, and reducing the data sent between requests to a small amount of XML, you're freeing up precious CPU cycles on the server for more important things, like more customers.
So quite apart from any benefits to user interface design, there are some quite significant architectural benefits from an AJAX approach. But before we get too excited about this nirvana of stateless web applications all harnessing interoperable data sources, it has to be asked - can we actually use this yet? Confidence is growing as high profile sites like Google Maps and GMail push AJAX into the mainstream, but even these sites still offer non-AJAX equivalents. The standards around several components of AJAX (notably, the XMLHttpRequest object) are yet to be defined - IE and Mozilla of course implement it in entirely different ways, while the WC3 is proposing (and is yet to accept) something different again. Not all browsers support it, and users who turn off JavaScript, or who are using a PDA or mobile to view the page will almost certainly be prevented from acessing the service as well. And don't forget, there are plenty of competing technologies that may win out instead.
Personally, I think the debate is still wide open as to the extent developers should embrace AJAX. There's a strong argument in my mind, that if it works now, on the majortity of browsers now, then it should be used now, even if you can't make everyone happy. But maybe I'm missing something? Is there anyone around the Uni who has already had a crack at it (even better, if they've done it within CMS)? We'd love to hear from you.
Apparently only 5.7% of 280 government websites in New Zealand are standards compliant (in terms of valid HTML). Still, that's better than those in the US. Anyone know of an equivalent test of Australian govt. sites?
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The non-developer in me (and let's face it, that's all of me) is very excited about this in a kind of geeky way. Ning is
a free online service for building and using social applications.
UPDATE: I now have a developer account. Wahay.
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Hiya,I've just been doing some XHTML/CSS work for an intranet site and trying to pull it into a good cross browser layout... Inevitably, after making everything look pretty in FireFox I tested in IE... *eek*.Anyway, this set me on the rumour trail of when Microsoft are going to get it together with standards compliance rendering.
I'm happy to say I came across this on IEBlog. If these fixes are truly implimented, we are going to see a hell of a lot more sexy sites out there.
Web developers world wide are holding onto their mice in anticipation of the release of the next generation of Microsofts Internet Explorer, IE7. With anticipated increases in CSS2 and accessibility standards compliance along with security enhancements, it is hoped that the world wide web will no longer be split between the W3C compliant browsers and the megalomaniacal Microsoft monopoly of browser rendering.
Microsoft yielding to IE standards pressure?
What this means in real terms is that developers will no longer have to develop sites using the W3C standards, then hack them up to give the same text sizing, pixel placement, and functionality in IE as has been done for the past 4 years.
With the new styles currently in the pipeline for the USyd domain this is great news indeed, but as with all things Microsoft, I'll believe it when I see it.
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For all you geeks (you know who you are):
Computer scientists in the US are developing a system which would allow people to "teleport" a solid 3D recreation of themselves over the internet.
A useful resource: essential bookmarks for web designers and developers.
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Jesse James Garrett explains Ajax, "a new approach to web applications".
Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications that we at Adaptive Path have been calling Ajax. The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web.
Not being a techy I am not fully au fait with the implications of this development. Any techies want to voluteer a review/explanation?
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Koders is a search engine that finds code for you:
Koders is a search engine for source code. It enables developers to easily search and browse source code in thousands of projects hosted at hundreds of open source repositories.
Not being a techie I don't know if this is actually any good but thought I would pass it on anyway.
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This site makes interesting use of RSS news feeds, not to mention the graphic design. How it works:
Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.
Interwoven's developer network has reached 10000 members. As cmswatch points out:
Of course, TeamSite developers can use all the help they can get, when performing even simple administrative tasks in the CMS requires invoking obscure perl scripts from a command line. But a large, committed community can make the obscure more transparent. And Interwoven has built such a community -- even out of necessity. We laud them for it...
Even a non-techie such as me can remember the heady days of c1998 when Linux was starting to hit its straps and Richard Stallman was the god of open-source. If you're around the main campus of Sydney Uni you can listen to Stallman give a talk on "Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks." It's in Chemistry Lecture Theatre 1 on Tuesday 5 October from 4pm to 6pm. It's brought to you by the good folks at the School of IT. If you want more information leave a comment and I will get back to you or contact Uwe Roehm in the School of IT.
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