Farata Systems      

I “designed” a small sample of the “experience” based on Ben Stucki’s “autoscroller”, Ely Greenfield’s “LightTable” and Sho’s “Drawer” (here is direct link : http://flexblog.faratasystems.com/scroller/Scroller.html) (it hides itself in the left side of the window, just move your mouse there)

  I think it pretty much shows the way modern interface evolved (for me) and also illustrates obvious issues with performance and bandwidth. The question about usability is going to dominate Web 2.0 apps, however, the faster the “Rich UI on the Web” evolves (the same way as GUI standards were introduced in ’94), the faster we can get out of the current state and provide new generation of components that are in foundation of user experience for any platform.

I would appreciate any comments on the way the control behaves and how it can be improved – I believe it will be released as a reference control implementation by Farata in a month or whenever the book comes out. In meanwhile, I will build a concept application measuring “user experience” into the real application and see if it can be used to “scale” UI.

THE REASON FOR THIS POSTING 

I recently watched again ”Ajax Power Panel” with great Adam Bosworth (http://webcast.sys-con.com/read/214082.htm). Being the real father of Ajax (1997) and few other technologies that have not been discovered quite yet, it is very interesting to see the way he approaches current state of the game. Do yourself a favor and watch his debate with David Temkin on richness vs usability.

Basically the argument centers between “productivity” vs “simplicity”. Both Adam and David are great in arguing “less is more” and “give them just enough rope” with applications supporting their concepts, they both avoided finding the common ground.

I think I see the problem in both guys arguments. It came in realization while watching my 7 years old son playing Sonic games – more specifically explaining it to people that never played and watching the response.

The application has to be 3 things:

1. has to provide “Basic” mode – simple enough for novice player

2. Provide focus point – the user has to be able to concentrate on the main task without being bothered with jazzy UI unrelated to main task. THE EXPERIENCE HAS TO BE RELATED TO ANY ONE SKILL THE USER MOST LIKELY TO HAVE

3. As the user progresses (based on response time and usage), more tools/options become available on-screen - and being removed into “history” if they are not used.

 Thank you,

Anatole Tartakovsky

P.S Special thanks to my wife for excellent pictures she shared for this component

Technorati Tags: Flex, ActionScript, drawer, advanced, layout, fisheye, flickr, photo, viewer

Flex

Today I finally gave up on writing itemRenderers/Editors by hand in favor of data driven approach. Few of my postings went to different forums, I will start collecting them here. The goal is to show all sides of power offered by DataGrid and factories -based approach.

  More will emerge, for now here is the first trivial case – automating formatting of SSN, phone, currency, shortdate and anything else.

Define DataGridColumnEx with one extra property:

public function  set formatString( fs :String ) : void{
    var  fm:Formatter = new Formatter();
   switch (fs.toLowerCase()) {
    case “ssn”:
     fm = new MaskFormatter(“###-##-####”);
     break;
    case “currency”:
     fm =  new CurrencyFormatter();
     break;
    case “phone”:
     fm =   new PhoneFormatter();
     break;
     case “shortdate”:
     fm =  new DateFormatter();    

      break;

//……………………..
   }
   this.labelFunction =
    function (data:Object, dgc:DataGridColumnEx):String { return fm.format(data[dgc.dataField]);}
  } 

Now you can do just this in your code:

   <lib:DataGridColumnEx    dataField=”PHONE”    formatString=”phone” />

Š         <lib:DataGridColumnEx    dataField=”SS_NUMBER”    formatString=”ssn”  />
    <lib:DataGridColumnEx    dataField=”SALARY”  formatString=”currency”
   etc.     

Not much – but at least we started to move in the data-driven direction….

Technorati Tags: Flex, format, itemRenderer, DataGrid, DataGridColumn, ActionScript, labelFunction, data, driven

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