E M E R G I C . o r g: Mozilla as Platform
Linux News writes:
With user clients like e-mailers, HTML composers, calenders, debuggers, chat applications and address books, Mozilla must be far more than just a Web browser. And it is. The Mozilla Browser is built on top of the Mozilla Platform.The Mozilla Platform itself is a set of programmable objects and XML processors bound together into a single program. Applications that exploit this platform consist of images, XML and text files that are interpreted at runtime when the platform starts.
You can buy the O'Reilly book from Amazon, or just get the entire book in a zipped version from Micah Dubinko's site. In either case, I think this would be an essential read...
Tomalak's Realm
SJ Mercury: The year's lowlights and highlights in technology. Dan Gillmor. Human beings make some terrible decisions, and the malevolent among us do enormous damage, but somehow the species seems to muddle through and even make progress. That's how it looks from here as I look back at the last 12 months in technology, tech policy and overall economic matters.
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So what did he learn? Well five things to begin with:
I think this is a simple but great portifolio site, that has attitude and good design. Good work Jack...
O'Reilly Network Articles: O'Reilly's Best of 2003
This year we published nearly 100 feature-length articles by O'Reilly book authors. Based on visitor statistics, we've come up with our top 10 most popular articles of 2003. But wait, there's more. We've also gathered our favorite tips pieces of the year. And where would we be without the books themselves? So we've also compiled a list of the year's top-sellers. What's wrong with a little shameless, year-end promotion? Enjoy.
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http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/news/2003/12/19/bestof2003.html
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MetaFilter: Graffiti Archeaology
Graffiti Archaeology Pretty cool flash app that lets you view photos of the same walls in San Francisco over time, as the many layers of graffiti accumulate. To anyone that has ever ridden the Caltrain, a lot of these walls should look familiar.
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http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/30342
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E M E R G I C . o r g: Prahalad on Indian MNCs
The Economic Times has an interview with CK Prahalad. Excerpts:
Take Wipro, TCS and Infosys as potential models of what multinationality means. You will find their cost, given the size of their global operations, measured in terms of people working abroad, is incredibly low compared to traditional MNCs like GE, IBM, Siemens or Philips. The reason is fairly simple. They have no legacies to change, they re starting from zero. And they were under tremendous cost pressure from day one, so they had to develop new ways of communication, co-ordination and management. That s quite unique and different from building standalone, country-by-country organisations with their own infrastructure and then changing it to global business management.The new MNCs like Wipro or TCS are all multi-focal companies where the key manufacturing operations are in one part of the world but the customer-facing operations are in another part of the world. Their revenues may come from a part of the world where they don t necessarily dominate. It s a very different configuration from what the traditional MNCs had to start with. Not only will Indian MNCs emerge as a major force, but they will have the opportunity to rewrite the book on how to manage global operations. They will show us how to create low cost, highly effective, real-time systems. The good news is we are starting with real-time 24/7 as a starting point.
We are inventing so many things we don t take credit for. Take call centre operations. Few people know what it takes to train young Indian men and women who have strong accents, to speak English as if they were born in Ohio. We ve developed accent neutralisation capabilities. And we train not one or two people but a hundred thousand people to take on a persona
for eight hours a day which has nothing to do with reality. In other words, we efficiently play-act and that s the innovation.
“Microsoft's history of holistic software development can be seen in many of its projects over the years, some popular some not. There was the Microsoft Bob social experiment (an utter failure, which is sad, as the Bob interface was a great UI for kids); the friendly (yet ultimately annoying) Office Assistant, which attempted to provide users with help when it appeared they needed it; the inductive UI work (LINK) most recently seen in Windows XP's task panes and Office XP's task panes and Smart Tags; and the roles-based administration in Windows Server 2003, among others.”
Interestingly, that is not the image most users have of the microsoft user experience, and a lot of these attempts have either been invisible (which is the way it should be, eg inductive UIs) or left a bad taste (office assistant) wonder if Longhorn is going to change all that or is it more vaporware...
Came across this via Phil Wolff's Blog and in fact, the British Awards which are sponsored by the Guardian Unlimited has some pretty famous bloggers for judges, including Jason Kottke, Dan Gillmor and Moby. Where as the Asian Awards are based on user votes...
MetaFilter: Tommy, you're permanently expelled!
"Want to get arrested? Walk home with me." It's LawForKids, the site devoted to giving the kids the education they need about drinking and other kewl stuff through the aid of really, really, really crappy cartoons. Plus, enjoy the intellectual and grammar-rich discussion on hard knocks in Juvie, plus Flash games about being a good citizen. Not sure about discouraging kids from crime, but I sure as hell want to stay away from a life of web design now.
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http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/30227
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Scripting News
Rolling Stone interviews Steve Jobs.
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http://archive.scripting.com/2003/12/12#When:6:37:39PM
PubDate: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 23:37:39 GMT
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Boxes and Arrows: The Visual Vocabulary Three Years Later: An Interview with Jesse James Garrett
In October 2000, Jesse James Garrett introduced a site architecture documentation standard called the Visual Vocabulary. Since then, it has become widely adopted among information architects and user experience professionals.
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E M E R G I C . o r g: User Interface Hierarchies
Russell Beattie writes:
I'm looking at user interfaces more recently. Online, on my desktop and on my gadgets and I'm taken aback by their complexity. But I've had an epiphany about their underlying structure that I wanted to try to express here.Is there a reason for the icons and the buttons and the menus and the tabs and the list boxes and all the other GUI crap that we have to deal with both on a computer and increasingly on our mobile devices as well? I honestly don't know. I personally think less is more when it comes to user interface design.
Maybe it's just me, but I think in hierarchies and outlines. Even if I don't always use my outliner for everything, I still organize my documents like that, and the text within those documents are usually indented as well.
What's my point? That we need to do like Apple did with the iPod and review how our UIs work. We need less widgets, not more. We need more than simplicity, we need consistency. And since *all* data is a hierarchy, using that as a base for all UI elements would be a good thing. Teach a newbie: "This is how a hierarchy works. Now, anytime you need to find or edit information - whether it's the MP3 you want to play or the settings on your phone, now you'll know how."
It doesn't make sense any more. Now that we're all comfortable with the idea of computers and the mouse, we don't need "buttons" and "gauges" and "files" and "tabs" and all that crap that are analogies to real things. They're not real things - it's just data.
If you're wondering what's up with the blog, well, I'm really sorry for the lack of updates the last couple of days. I'd been traveling around the country making a few presentations to a few key customers and had a number of users lined up for user testing of our software, so in the process I was unable to devote time to posting updates. Hopefully things are under control now but hey, you never know...
“It's not what you don't know that kills you,...it's what you know that isn't so.”
-Webster Tompkins in Deadline: A novel about project management
Looking at the quote, don't come to conclusion that this is a book on philosophy. In fact, to be frank, it's not even a great piece of fiction. But when it comes to explaining project management concepts, in a clear concise fashion, I don't think you could find a better book. The story is set in a fictional country called Morovia and the characters in this book range from an ex-Morovian General, a beautiful (half Irish) Morovian spy, to a Bill Gate-ish tyrant. OK, so the scene is all set for Software Project Management disaster and it is up to Project Manager extraordinaire, Tompkins and his team to save the day. And during the process, he gives you insights and tips into executing software projects successfully. Great primer to project management, I would say.
If you're an IT Project Manager and have not read this one yet, you may not want to wait too long, just buy the book from Amazon.
By the way, if you're really interested in putting some of Webster Tompkins' principles into action in your next software project, there is no better tool to help you with it than Digite Enterprise. As a complete project and process management solution it would certainly make your life as a project manager a lot easier.
This is a very interesting discussion at Slashdot, that sparked off from a couple of articles re-examining the ‘Three click rule’ and the ‘7 +/- 2’ rule…
Is it time we do a holistic review again? After all times they are a changing…
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