Carolyn Snyder who has recently published a book on paper prototyping has written this article on IBM developerWorks. Personally I don't like the concept of usability testing using Paper Prototypes unless the participants are well aware of GUI/Web design elements and can relate to the buttons as buttons and tabs as tabs...
How much longer does it take to develop a prototype using Visio or even Fireworks? If you're good with any of these tools, you could churn out the design in less than 20 minutes...
I'm not denying the importance of prototyping or even user testing. These are important stages of the process, but in my opinion a semi-finished computer prototype will work much better than the best paper prototype.
Also if you really want to test the IA, I would recommend sorting flash cards or even UML class diagrams as a good way to communicate the IA...
The paper prototype too has its place: I think it's a good way to communicate the design between designers and programmers. But showing it to the end-user, well...
MXNA has started a cool new feature whereby it ranks posts on the basis of number of clicks it receives. If you use MXNA a lot that is a good way to quickly find out if the post is relevant to other flashers (as there could be number of 'OT' posts on flash blogs). Now a sort by ranking feature might be useful as some important posts might have been pushed to the end when you visit the site. What say?
Found this site for a Belgium based design studio with some nice pixel animation. The design is good, but the site navigation is highly un-usable. The spider like navigation has a mind of its own and keeps moving... Very frustrating.
But that apart there is some really good work displayed in their portfolio. Especially the information design work for Agfa. I wanted to see an enlarged version of those. It looked very nice...
[via k10k]
I might be a little late on this one, but the latest version of OpenOffice (1.1 beta2) seems to have support for both Flash and PDF export. That is cool...
Also on a related note, Microsoft which is already feeling some pressure on the MS Office front has announced a price cut on volume licensing of their yet to be relased version of Office 2003...
So why is a company like Microsoft interested in licensing Unix from SCO? This article made the same connection I had made a when the deal happened; they simply wanted to hurt Linux. Unfortunately, they were not prepared for the fact that SCO is actually just an administrative agent for Novell who still own the copyrights
Now that is a very interesting development. This is stuff that "High-tech thrillers" are made of -- ;)
Microsoft's much publicized strategy to use special funds to offer discounts to governments and non-profit organizations might actually back-fire.
The first example of this was when Munich decided to go with Linux instead of Windows XP.
Though the trend might not catch up so soon, as the lure of heavy discounts might sway the decision in favor of MS for some time, I see a longer lasting trend to move towards Linux. At least when it comes to Government IT departments...
There are a number of reasons to use Flash for rich internet application development, but one of the most compelling reasons, is the ability to deliver not just cross platform, but even cross-device applications.
This Sean Neville interview on the serverside talks about RIA development using Flash. Here is an excerpt:
The closest anything gets to this is Java. But I'm not sure how easy or difficult it is to port the same code across devices...
[via Christian Cantrell]
I have been interested in XUL for a while now, and ever sine a friend of mine showed me what he was able to achieve over a weekend with XUL, I was completely blown away...
But still the inertia to learn something new was just too much, especially when the Technology is still non IE (read non-commercial) but this article by Harry Fuecks on SitePoint has really got me interested.
The technology looks almost tailor-made for me. XML, CSS and JavaScript...
Hey wait, isn't that exactly what SVG is like too ;)
I just got myself an account with Info Aggregator. I had seen Rajesh use this application when I met him last.
Unlike Newsgator, there is no install involved here. You register for an account and use it like a normal email account. Rajesh's post mentions that it's an IMAP account, but I could not set it up using IMAP on Outllook. It works fine as a POP account.
There are a few problems like effectively setting filters for Outlook. Though there is the ability to use a server side filter using seive, I did not try it. The challenge with using Outlook filters is that all the emails come from the same email ID, so it becomes difficult to add filters. My current Outlook filters use a content based filtering which is the least reliable of all filtering mechanisms. Also it does not allow you to subscribe to feeds that do not use the rdf/xml extension (example)
Anyway, I do see a lot of potential in it if some of these interaction related issues are ironed out...
Good work Rajesh and Co.
Finally usability is getting a little more importance than it used to. But this Business two dot oh article points out that while companies like IBM and Microsoft (believe it or not!) are focusing on usability these days, it is important for Usability Professionals to present usability as a business critical operation, not an optional extra. The article quotes Don Norman:
Another proponent of usability and interaction design is Alan Cooper and Cooper's book,
The Inmates Are Running the Asylum should be a must read for engineers and product developers within your company. One sneaky way to make your point is by buying a few copies (you could buy them for the office library) and leaving them on a few people's desks... (sneaky ;) )
According to this post Google might soon stop indexing blogs. I had the same thought some time back. Looks like it's time for a new section on Google for blogs...
Don't know about you, but it makes sense to me to track blogs separately...
According to this NY Times Article Qualcomm expects 6 million Indian users to move to CDMA based mobile phones. This in my opinion is just the tip of the ice-berg. With a population touching almost one billion and with a majority of the country still largely un-connected by traditional land lines, there is a huge market out there.
There two important factors to be considered though:
If mobile phones become affordable (can we get it under $25?) I don't see why people will not start using them- unless of course, they are difficult to use.
So I think the first step would be to invest some money in designing simpler to use mobile phones. This might bring down manufacturing costs too, as you can do away with features like games, calendar and even the phone book. People who can hardly read will probably never use a phone book...
Did I say hardly read? Yes, a majority of Indians are still illiterate, and more over even if they were able read their own language, you have to take into account that India is a country of many languages... So one may even have to think up of an interface with little or no text and keeps the feature list down to 2 -- a) Make calls b) Receive calls...
There, with those two things done there is a huge huge market. It might just about be the biggest thing in the telecom revolution since the invention of the telephone...
If you had just visited my site a few minutes before this post, you'd have been greeted with a login box that asked you to enter a username and password.
I did not put that on my site, and if you'd read the screen more carefully, you'd have noticed that the screen was for onRelease.org. The erstwhile Flash blog.
Looks like Aral has put the entire site behind a password, so this login screen will come up on all sites that use Aral's 'no war' counter...
Too bad, I liked the counter. Not that I'm political, but I'm anti violence and that counter was my silent protest...
Anyway, whatever is going on with Aral, I hope it is for the best...
This is a post on Moock's Blog about the quirks of using Flash UI Component based forms. The article on the O'Reilly site discusses this in more detail...
Maybe a Flash Form component should be developed based on these guidelines...
Time flies. It seems like just yesterday that I had posted my first review on Flazoom, today three years have gone by...
According to CHris' post there have been around 1800 posts on Flazoom, of which a mere 60 odd have been posted by me. So that goes to show the great variety and enthusiasm amongst the rest of the editors.
Although very few editors still post there (many might have got their own blogs like me) CHris still updates the site regularly and it makes very good reading...
I'm getting Spam/Junk/Virus emails from microsoft.com email ids. Obviously I'm deleting them right away, but is anybody else getting the same?
Found this on Claus' Blog. Looks like the beta for DENG browser is out. Here's what Claus has to say:
The DENG Browser is a desktop application based on the upcoming DENG Flash MX Component, looking, feeling and behaving just like your favourite Web Browser (Mozilla, Internet Explorer, ..)
You may ask yourself why we would write a Web Browser, as there are already quite some good implementations out there. There are several reasons:
First, this software is not meant to replace your favourite HTML Browser, nor is it supposed to replace Flash or anything else. Flash currently is way too slow for being able to compete with C++ implementations. We developed the browser to give the beta testers of the DENG Component the ability to test their documents in an easy way, without having to touch the Flash IDE. We think that the DENG Browser is of interest for a much broader audience so we decided to make it public.
Another reason, and thats the main reason we developed the DENG Component, is missing support for emerging Web Standards like XForms in current browser implementations. The final version of DENG (we are hopefully going to release it in summer/fall this year) will feature support for XHTML Tiny, XForms, XFrames and Mobile SVG, all styled by CSS2 (plus some CSS3 features) amongst many others, with a strong focus on XForms. Currently, it supports subsets of all those technologies, growing every day.
Last but not least, DENG is a zero-install rendering engine based on Macromedia Flash technology, allowing very fast development cycles (for an experienced Actionscript developer, it is very easy to write new Namespace Modules) and support for rich content.
Friends of Ed, the Flash books publisher which had to go under because its parent company had shut down, has re-surfaced.
Apress has has bought them over...
This is good news for a lot of people who have had projects shelved because of the shut-down. Hope they all get revived and we get more books on Flash...
[via Flashcoders]
I got on to Emmanuel's site via a comment he posted here and found this post...
The paper there makes for very interesting reading...
Do you Systemize or Empathize?
Take the two Flash based tests to find out what your Essential Difference is...
I seemed to score pretty high on both...
EQ= 52
SQ= 42
That classifies me as B Type brain. Hmnn..
The results of a Borland Survey are out. And the verdict is:
Most programmers do get average sleep...
| Hours Sleep | Count | Percent |
| under 6 | 13760 | 16.32 |
| 6-8 | 60636 | 71.91 |
| over 8 | 6808 | 8.07 |
| I never sleep | 779 | 0.92 |
| no choice | 2328 | 2.76 |
:)
[via Emergic.org]
Alberteinstein.info is a site that holds digitized images of some 900 Einstein papers as well as a searchable list of 43,000 documents in the Albert Einstein Archives. Calling it a storehouse of information, might be an understatement...
[via NY Times]
This Meet-the Makers interview with Jeremy Allaire makes a very nice read. Some very intersting thoughts on his vision of the future...
One of the points he makes is the eminent death of the browser. With Office 11 and InfoPath looking like Microsoft's steps in that direction, I really wonder whether the next generation of software will be nothing more than an extended client-server model. Where the client is a web-veneered Office based Application and the server residing somewhere else over the Internet...
One important step taken by Macromedia in this direction is the announcement of Macromedia Central. But it's too early to make predictions yet...
Joel Spolsky raises a valid question here while suggesting a new book by Carolyn Snyder. We have been using a rather nice way of paper prototyping at work using UML methodologies and this has proved quite succesful. I'll try and elaborate the techniques used sometime later, meanwhile I'll check out what the book has to say...
A small Flash application that quickly generates a color scheme based on one input color...
Interesting...
On the internet, as anywhere else, public opinion does matter a lot. So if your site/web article has a lot of following, chances are there would a lot of references to it on a number of websites. This in turn would give it a high Google ranking...
That is not bad, but can you really use this to give new meanings to already existing terms? Geoffrey Numberg seems to think so. This article in th New York Times goes on to discuss the pros ands cons of having an "uniquely democratic web"...
The article concludes by saying:
But one of the most important sites that Google uses for its Page Rank is DMOZ and because this is human controlled (supposedly by experts/followers of a particular field), there might be more truth to Google's search results than Numberg actually leads us to believe.
Scott Manning had recently posted his discontentment with Flash Blogs making personal posts, now this NY Times article explores how blogging can wreck personal relationships too...
Hmnn... I better be careful with what I put up here.
All the new stuff going on at Google Labs looks very interesting. The new experiments include:
It's great to see this commitment to innovation from a company.
Found this on Mike's Blog today. Mike suggests the following:
One best practice suggestion on my part would be to use the default code directory, namely "Program Files/Macromedia/Flash MX/configuration/include/" Place all .as files here and maybe even create additional folders inside here, for each project. This way you could move your .fla anywhere and still have access to the scripts...
Jupiter Research has quite recently given all analysts personal weblogs where they can blog about the latest happenings in the industry. I think that is a real cool idea.
While on the site, I came across Matthew Berk's weblog. Matthew has been quite bullish about Flash and RIAs in general for a long time. Here is Matthew's look at the RIA space, and not surprisingly Flash figures on top of that list.
...followed closely by Laszlo.
Media Labs Asia, the high profile collaboration between the Indian Government and MIT Media Laboratory decided to shut its doors on April 30th. My office being right next to the Media Labs' Mumbai office, I might miss my neighbors. Not too sure if rural India feels the same...
There was a time when content management was an expensive solution and publishing regular updates was an option available only to websites willing to invest in an expensive CMS. Enter blogs, and today, the power to publish is in the hands of everybody (including nobodies like me.) It’s a wonderful feeling to be able to manage content (or ‘microcontent’ as people like to call it) on your site with such ease and at the same time have access to an online repository of all your thoughts and findings. If you have been keeping a blog, sooner or later you’ll find yourself checking your own archives for that nice tidbit you posted a few months back, but can’t summon up anymore.
There have been a number of developments in the blogging scene. Pyra Labs was bought by Google and Sixapart have found some serious money coming their way via Neoteny. Does this mean that blogging is going to be next big wave? Or is this going to be the start of a ‘blog bubble’? Nothing can be said for sure but there definitely is a great potential that exists here. One of the most promising opportunities I see is the arrival of a new breed of blogs – The Enterprise Blog.
Imagine giving knowledge workers/domain experts within an organization the ability to publish their know-how without actually having any web-publishing know-how! And consequently imagine another employee within the organization with the need for the particular piece of information actually being able to retrieve the information without even having to get in touch with the domain expert. What is more important though, is the fact that the knowledge remains within the enterprise, even if knowledge worker does not.
Apart from being an enterprise knowledge repository, I’ve seen a number of software evangelists use blogs (Macromedia and Microsoft being amongst them.) Guy Kawasaki would probably would have really loved it if MacWorld was a blog (is it?)
And finally there is an ocean of personal blogs on the net that may contain information that is very relevant to an enterprise, and thus giving them the ability to leverage knowledge and talent from outside the enterprise, at little or no cost!
Whatever the motivation, it does make sense for enterprises to leverage blogging as a productivity tool or a supplement to their existing IS infrastructure. As to how exactly these tools will be adopted by enterprises remain to be seen.
Meanwhile, I really see an opportunity here to come up with some interesting Flash based visualization that will help analyze linkages and even geographical distribution of knowledge (a la ‘world as a blog’.)
Here are some related readings:
Emergic
Padwan
IT-director - via Emergic
John Lawlor on Business Blogging
Jon Udell - The conversational Enterprise
Jon Udell - Publishing a project Weblog
Jumping the corporate blog wagon
Sacramento Bee
Man gets sacked for blogging
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