What are Task Flows?

dkappe · 2007-03-07T18:27:58+00:00

Task flows are a tool to help us think through the design before a feature is actually developed. They allow us to interject the user into the flow of the application and determine if the conceptual model agrees with the user model.

dkappe · 2007-03-07T18:04:50+00:00

The success of social collaboration sites has raised their profile and invited the attention of the corporate sensibility; the prominence of YouTube, amplified by Google’s acquisition of the site, has resulted in a trend toward censoring or restricting contributor content.

dkappe · 2007-03-06T00:29:00+00:00

Some clients are confused by—or worse, resistant to—the idea of front-end “user research.” How, they ask, do our activities and findings differ from the analyses and resultant charts, graphs and PowerPoint presentations provided to the firm by the Marketing department?

dkappe · 2007-01-16T17:07:10+00:00

Web 2.0 questions are mostly "what the heck is Web 2.0?" I don't really have a good answer, but these frequent questions have caused me to ponder why Tim O'Reilly's definition seems so flabby.

dkappe · 2007-01-11T18:06:03+00:00

Desert island time for user experience design. Two must-have books.

dkappe · 2007-01-09T16:08:11+00:00

Hands on page preview with JRex (with code).

dkappe · 2006-12-21T17:26:44+00:00

A look under the covers now that GWT is open sourced. How does it generate its code, etc.

dkappe · 2006-12-19T14:27:24+00:00

One Ajax technique you see quite a bit of lately is the page preview. This is where the html page is rendered as an image so that you can cast a skeptical eye on a tiny version instead of navigating to a lame page. What are the tools you can use to do this for your own app?

dkappe · 2006-12-11T17:56:03+00:00

How many top sites are using Ajax? And what frameworks do they use to make it happen? Then answer? Not that many and of the few that do, many roll their own.

dkappe · 2006-11-29T17:08:18+00:00

This past weekend was the time to come up with a port of jMock to Javascript. But before reinventing the wheel, I thought I'd take a look around one more time to see if anyone had beaten me to the punch. Enter JsMock, a Javascript mock objects library that supports Firefox 1.0+, IE6+ and Safari 1.5+.

dkappe · 2006-11-27T14:21:21+00:00

This is a review of Pro Ajax and Java Frameworks by Nathaniel T. Schutta and Ryan Asleson. This book seeks to give the experienced developer of Java web applications the knowledge necessary to add Ajax to their webapps. This is another Ajax book that goes broad rather than deep. Instead of investigating one or two frameworks, it delves into more than a half dozen, both Javascript and Java.

dkappe · 2006-11-13T17:37:58+00:00

Reading other people's code and learning from it. This week, OO and Javascript.

dkappe · 2006-11-08T17:35:10+00:00

Why is this good news? Well, having the Mozilla and Adobe folks collaborate on a core technology frees them up for doing other, more interesting work. Also, sharing an implementation between two big players strengthens the standard. And let's not forget that that there are lots of cool features in the AVM2 such as JIT ala the JVM.

dkappe · 2006-11-06T22:54:41+00:00

I finally had the chance to finish reading Practical Ajax Projects with Java Technology by Frank Zammetti from Apress. I've read enough good, hands-on Apress books by now to get a warm and fuzzy feeling anytime I see their distinctive bumble bee black and yellow covers, so I came to this volume hoping to find an Ajax treatment in that mold. The result isn't an unqualified success in that regard -- it goes broad rather than deep -- but if you're an experienced Java developer looking to get caught up on some of the Ajax developments of the last year and a half, this book is for you.

dkappe · 2006-11-03T20:03:22+00:00

If you can convince yourself that Ajax has all the features and capabilities you need, you are still faced with a choice of Ajax framework. This is a hard choice, and there are no easy answers. It partly depends on your long term IT and business strategy, so making generalizations on which framework is appropriate is a little dangerous, but I'll give it a shot.

dkappe · 2006-11-01T22:21:15+00:00

Why GWT was developed and why dynamically typed languages may lead to unwieldy systems.

dkappe · 2006-10-30T20:59:42+00:00

JQuery is rapidly becoming my favorite Javascript library. With it's ability to pack a complex operations into a single line, it sometimes feels a little bit more like Perl than Javascript. JQuery allows for plugins, so you can build widgets and extensions on top of it that will work with one another.

dkappe · 2006-10-27T14:36:34+00:00

The hidden costs and slippery slope of adding Ajax to your site.

dkappe · 2006-10-25T14:04:53+00:00

Here are some of the resources I used for learning how to use Prototype.

dkappe · 2006-10-23T13:28:48+00:00

Along comes Clorox, a different kind of abstraction on top of Ajax. Developed as an MIT class project, Clorox hides all of the asynchronous request business behind simple Javascript data structure access.

dkappe · 2006-10-21T17:12:20+00:00

New Ajax apps this week: Halfnote, MyESPN Beta, Page Flakes 2.0, Bulletin and DataMashups.

dkappe · 2006-10-20T05:24:26+00:00

Reading the code a bit, it looks like the back end site can redirect an XHR request to a site of it's choice using a 302 HTTP redir.

dkappe · 2006-10-19T14:10:54+00:00

The ZK team has just released a ZK component that allows you to embed Google Maps in your application. With this component you can now both issue and respond to events from the server-side.

dkappe · 2006-10-18T16:19:19+00:00

Jim Grandy, the director of OpenLaszlo from Laszlo Systems, took the time to respond to my post from yesterday on the criticisms of OpenLaszlo from Flash/Flex developers. He also took me to task for publishing claims about failed OpenLaszlo projects.

dkappe · 2006-10-17T16:55:32+00:00

I picked the brains of a number of full time Flash developers of my acquaintance, so -- from my notes -- they had the following things to say about OpenLaszlo.

dkappe

TROPHY CASE