September 8, 2009
James Governor of RedMonk yesterday kicked off an interesting discussion about the state of Enterprise User Interfaces, more specifically Enterprise Portals and points out …
“… That’s right- less painful for users. Products like IBM WebSphere Portal and SAP Netweaver Portal were supposed to bring much improved user interaction models to enterprise IT, but unfortunately traditional systems-focused IT departments, rather than user interaction specialists and their web brethren, did the work …”
James eludes to the crux of the problem in the above quote and Thomas Otter highlights it further in a comment saying …
I sense that most of the problems/challenges with enterprise UI are not just a tool challenge. It is a design thinking problem. Until design thinking permeates enterprise application development, UI will be a sore point.
Thomas is right, it is a design thinking problem, more precisely, the problem is that there are no design thinkers in most teams that build or customize enterprise software…. read more
August 31, 2008
Maybe I’m missing something here, but why does FlexBuilder generate css styles as “styleName” but suggests auto completions as “style-name” ?
Generated Style
Auto-Complete
UPDATE: If you find this behaviour annoying, please
vote on this Flash Builder bug
June 27, 2008
Google Gears is a very interesting platform. It’s a browser plugin that is aimed at extending the abilities of web browsers to satiate the needs of modern day rich web applications. The Gears website defines it as follows ..
Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser:
- Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop
- Store data locally in a fully-searchable database
- Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance
Gears today provides some very interesting features like a WorkerPool module to run JavaScript code in the background, without blocking the main page’s script execution, a LocalServer module that allows a web application to cache and serve its HTTP resources locally without a network connection, a Database module that provides browser-local relational data storage, a Desktop module that allows you to create desktop shortcuts for your web applications and more.
There are some very interesting features in the works as well like Desktop Notifications from browser apps, Multiple file select, resuming uploads, geolocation support etc.
All the above features have the potential of drastically changing the experience users have when using applications in the browser and that excites me 
Many of these features can be very useful for applications that run in other plugins like Flash Player or Silverlight Player as well… read more
January 8, 2008
Every Java developer I know has read her books and visited the Java Community Site she started. My first encounter with Kathy Sierra’s writing was when I started reading Head First Java a few years back, the book completely mesmerized me, It was unlike any other technical book I had ever read. I was not reading this book because I needed to know something but instead I was reading it because it was a lot of fun .. this is very unlike me and its very unlike technical books.
Later, I was introduced to her blog Creating Passionate Users and I was totally hooked … well technically the blog wasn’t just her’s but I was passionate about it mostly because of Kathy’s posts … her captivating style of writing and extensive knowledge on the subject was an excellent combination and the cleverly chosen supporting images were the icing. I was so passionate about her blog that every time I noticed a new post on it, I got goose bumps (Seriously !!).
About 10 months back, in early April of 2007, due to a very sad and alarming incident Kathy decided to discontinue writing her blog … I felt her pain and was very sad, I hope she has recovered from that incident and is enjoying life. I miss her blog a lot and even today I spend a good amount of time in its archives, there’s tons of knowledge in there and anyone who is in the business of creating stuff, software or otherwise, should read her articles. read more
January 1, 2008
Hundreds of Flex based Rich Internet Applications came to life in 2007 … here are 10 applications that I liked most, these are the ones that made me wish I was involved in building them … I’m sure there were apps that made you wish the same, so do share your own list … here’s mine ..
read more
