It’s been a while since I regularly read Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox: Current Issues in Web Usability. Imagine my surprise when I find no RSS … the largest change to web use since the browser itself, and all we can get access to is email alerts.
Archive for the ‘Interface Design’ Category
The Emperor Has No Clothes: No RSS for Jakob Nielsen
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008New York, New York
Monday, November 12th, 2007I’ve been living in Melbourne for 7 years now, and I have decidely itchy feet.
I moved to Melbourne for work just after the dot-com crash of 2000 and it was always meant to be a temporary stop on my way to New York, which I visited and fell in love with.
I think it’s time to get that dream moving again.
I am happy to work remotely to get a foot in the door, if that suits. Happy to sign up for a short-term contract if it gets me to your fair city.
So, if you’re in New York and need a developer with lots of experience, expert skills in Java, PHP and Ruby, and a penchant for user experience, drop me a line.
Dear Blogosphere: Shut up about the iPhone
Monday, July 2nd, 2007Dear Blogosphere,
Shut up about the iPhone.
I don’t want to hear it.
I am already totally over the iPhone, and won’t even see one until 2008, at the earliest. See, Dear Blogosphere, not all of us live in the US of A.
Not all of are effected by the apparent revolution caused by some people strapping a cell phone onto an iPod and hooking it up to a network that barely works.
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It does seem apparent that Apple is going to do to the mobile phone market what they did to the MP3 player market. If they can survive the telecommunications companies - all reports are saying that AT&T are really dropping the ball. In the music market, Apple could get traction without playing directly with the Record Companies, because people already had music collections. Once the iPod took-off, Apple had some leverage to play with. In the telecommunications world, things are very different … you can’t have an iPhone without the network, which means playing with the telcos. Australia’s equivalent of AT&T, Telstra, has a long history of customer abuse and mismanagement, but it’s the dominant player (read: only player in some areas of Australia) and Apple may be forced to deal with them.
Multimedia died for a reason
Thursday, June 28th, 2007The 37 Signals Blog has stirred up controversy again with a post about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript:
On the user experience side of things, we’re not even close to tapping out the potential of HTML. The majority of web sites and applications still suck.
Of course, the flame-war began immediately:
“Flex/Flash/Apollo is totally the future”
“No it isn’t”
I think that is definitely true that we have only scratched the surface of HTML. It’s only in the last couple of years that HTML, JavaScript and CSS have really become advanced, stable and widespread enough to be used for complex application development. Even features that have gained ubiquity, like auto-complete text fields that talk back to the server, are very recent additions to the developer’s toolkit.
Having worked with WebStart for several years now, the hardest problem to solve is the additional installation. Java makes this particularly hard, but when you use a runtime on-top of the browser, you will always have this additional barrier to adoption. Rather than prospective customers being able to use your application straight away, you are placing an extra hurdle in front of them.
The problem is not insurmountable, but it is there.
On top of all of this, most RIAs I have seen don’t really do much more than a “vanilla” Web 2.0 application anyway. I come from a Multimedia background (I did a lot of CD Authoring with Director in the 90s) and I’ve done far too much Swing, so I’ve seen many, many fantastically bad applications. There is a reason why software tends toward the a standard set of application principles - business applications don’t need much singing and dancing.
Auto-complete, edit-in-place, drag/drop, lists, options are all standard fare with HTML, CSS and JavaScript About the only piece that is really missing from the stack is the ability to zoom effectively.
Whichever side of the debate you come down on, you have to admit that it’s going to be an interesting few years.