September 11, 2007

Hacking iUI

Christian Decker wrote this in the late evening:
Joe Hewitt’s iUI is just great. As long as you do standard stuff…

I’ve been working on a small application based on the iUI Framework for some time now, and I hope to release it soon. So far iUI was working fine for me and I managed to squeeze everything into the limited functionality it provided me. But now, just like the iUI Author, I’m getting a bit bored by the “standard iPhone look” so I’m trying to find new, innovative, ways of adding functionality. Sliding from left to right and from right to left is cool, as long as you don’t have to see it over and over again, it’s time for some cool new stuff, that might not already exist in iPhone-land. I’m currently experimenting with scriptaculous to add some effects and I’m also trying to get some inplace editing to run smoothly.

Callbacks from iUI
iUI dictates some default behaviour when clicking on something, be it a link or a form button, even adding additional callbacks won’t prevent iUI from reacting. Wouldn’t it be nice to add callbacks directly into iUI, in a declarative way, so we don’t have to hack around too much?

Edit in place
Many have already forgotten about this nice thing: you have something displayed somewhere, you click on it, and can edit it, without having to load an extra page, maybe loosing the context. With the above mentioned callbacks this shouldn’t be too hard to realize.

iUI for everybody
Maybe it’s just me but limiting my application to the iPhone is a bit… restrictive, isn’t it? I noticed that iUI applications actually are great for start pages, such as iGoogle, Netvibes and similar. By making a Netvibes module you even allow users to add it to the Mac OS X Dashboard or the Vista Widget engine. So making iUI compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox would be a source for new users (well ok Firefox already works with some minor bugs, not much to do here…)

Well these are just a few ideas I had while developing with iUI, what about you?

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September 4, 2007

Import Contacts… no!

Christian Decker wrote this in the late evening:

Queup

Many Web Applications nowadays have the option to import your contacts from you other accounts like Gmail, Hotmail, MSN, MySpace, you name it. It usually is a nice feature for both the users and the owners of the application, as the users can get quickly connected to their contacts, while the owner rapidly gets new users. But stop! Not all “import contacts” options are the same, there are the good guys and the bad boys:
  • The good guys don’t ask you immediately to import contacts and certainly don’t force you to. They give you the option later on or they let you skip it, maybe you’ll do it later. What they certainly don’t do is automatically invite every contact you import by sending them yet another stupid email, or send friend requests in the case of social networks. These are absolute nonos! Don’t ever do anything the user is not asking for.
  • Then there are the bad boys, their mentality is best summed up as “All your contacts are belong to us!“, no really they don’t give you the option to skip import or tell you that if you don’t do it right now you won’t be able later. On top of this thy will send an invitation to everyone on your list and keep hammering them with updates, possibly citing you as the sender. These people will get pissed and at least delete you from their contact list, if not worse.
I had this problem once in the last few months and I can’t tell you how embarrassed I was to find out that an invitation has been sent to all my work colleagues. So please, please, please web developers be nice and give me a moderate import contacts, even if an aggressive import can fastly grow the number of your users, it will piss off ten times more!

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Ajax, CSS, DOM and JS-related resources

Christian Decker wrote this at around evening time:
Ajaxian today has a feature about the most useful information sources on Ajax, CSS, DOM and JavaScript (or as many will know them: the basis on which the whole Web 2.0 is built :) ), so I’ve skimmed through my del.icio.us account looking for stuff to add and here are my favorites: So that’s it from my side, if you have more resources you’d like to share with the rest of the world post them on the original article.
70-442, certification exams are valuable in providing knowledge and skills of designing and optimizing data access with the usage of Microsoft SQL Server 2005. 642-652, Wide Area Application Services for Field Engineers exam (WAASFE) is very beneficial for IT engineers and technicians to promote their skills. 642-445 certification exams are also associated with Cisco IP Communications Support Specialist certifications to promote IP telephony networking system. 642-565 cisco exams are designed to assess the abilities of candidates how to tackle cisco security products with the use of latest technology. 642-176 certification exams enable the candidates to get job successfully as SMB engineer. 640-816 stands for Interconnecting Cisco Networking Devices Part 2 (ICND2), having direct association with Cisco Certified Network certification exams. 156-310 exams are designed for the assessment of professional and technical abilities of the candidates.

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