Do-It-Yourself Design: Just Point and Click
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On-line customization was a slow starter in the 1990's. But as technology has improved, so has the variety.
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Simple to code does not always mean simple for the user. And simple for the user is often not easy to code.
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How to uncover your own Hidden Gems.
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Keep paragraphs together, print on both sides, change the date automatically, fit more text on a page, and insert an object on its own page.
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Macromedia promises to speed development of Internet applications with a new tool for its Flex platform. With Flex, enterprises can add interfaces to strategic applications, including visual
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Why make a useful tool more complicated than it needs to be?
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Lukas Smith has posted his review of a book from Packt Publishing - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!"   Duane from Pakt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing a few books for them in my blog. I picked "Mashup Projects" from the list of just released books, since I am interesting in the topic and I am actually going to give a presentation at the internal "PHP Day" we are doing at Optaros in November.   He points out the good (good writing style, well-chosen examples) and the bad (a log list of errors and oversights in the code). He also talks about the contents of the book - the different examples and the final more major project. Overall though, he sees it as a good book, one that would be a good introduction to mashups for PHP developers (if you look past the formatting issues).
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P&aacute;draic Brady is back today with the latest installment (part 5!) of his look at complex views in the Zend Framework. This time, her focuses on something called the Two-Step Pattern - a pattern similar to the Layouts pattern.   Part 5 of our series takes a small time-out from approaching a Composite View solution to reusable Views to take a peek at a simpler approach useful for simpler types of web applications. As we've discussed previously Composite Views allow the nesting of reusable View elements, effectively building a View based on a hierarchy of Views. But often there are simpler solutions to simpler problems. One such solution is the Two-Step View pattern, sometimes called Layouts if implemented in a specific way (as we do below!).   He gives the example of a simple website that needs a header and footer on every page. Rather than having to duplicate the header/footer calls across all of the pages, the Layout (Step-Two) pattern defines a single template that contains the header and footer but also uses a "main" area where the content is dynamically inserted.   He includes a full code example to help illustrate the point - a class, Zps_View, that is fed the path to the layouts and the layout files to use before rendering.
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David Pogue explores the time-saving qualities of macro software.
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A few simple changes--and some useful keyboard shortcuts--let you work faster and smarter in your browser.
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This is interesting .  43Things has tags as well!  A lot of people are using the Flickr dynamic and bold font treemap view which I'm not sure is good or bad. I've never been fully happy with this view but a lot of people seem to like it (so what do I know!)
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The last time I browsed the selection of desktops in a computer store, I came down with a case of instant deja vu. Each time I'd spot a thoughtful feature on one company's PC -- say, both USB and FireWire ports on the front or a full set of memory-card slots -- I would look at the machine to its right or left and spot the exact same item.
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By LOU KESTEN  Computer gamers who came of age in the 1980s have fond memories of the "point-and-click" adventure. In essence, the play involved clicking on the screen to find whatever objects you needed, then figuring out how to use them.
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Ryan Malesevich points out a very simple, one-script solution to the common need for an image gallery for your website - SimpleView Gallery - that a friend of his has written up.   In my post that I wrote that I would be back for good this time, I mentioned that I was going to be working on a gallery script. My good friend Chris let me know that he also wrote a simple script viewer that works quite while. His script is SimpleView Gallery and it requires to modification for it, just upload the script to a directory that contains images and that's it.   He also mentions a small change he made to make it work with WordPress and it's automatic thumbnailing system (to hide those thumbnails).
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Okay, non-interview stuff first. I've recently picked up several 'shortcuts' from O'Reilly and Addison-Weseley.  I love this format.  For about 10 bucks, you can get a PDF only copy of a 50-100 page "book".  The shortcuts (so far at least) have been very focused, which allows them to cover a reasonable topic in sufficient depth without creating a monstrous 600+ page tome.  The shortcuts I've looked at so far have been timely, useful, and a great value.  October marks the beginning of Apress' push into Ruby and Ruby on Rails.    Apress also has Practical OCaml coming out soon to help soothe your inner functional programmer.  Now, on to interview news!
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Good software designers get out of their bodies and become users of software. Because ultimately you don't design software to express yourself, you design it to be useful. The point of news, as with software, is to be useful to the person using it. Sorry, it's not about employing editors. Scott Rosenberg, a writer and editor of news can be forgiven for seeing it from his own point of view, but we users of news don't share that point of view. To me, as a software designer, it's no surprise that there are lots of ways to view news. That there used to be one main way to do it is also not a surprise, there were technical limits, that aren't there anymore.  The skill of laying out a paper presentation of the day's news on a big sheet of paper is now an obsolete craft. The only reason we needed people to do that in the past was that was the only way to get written news to massive numbers of users of written news. Now that computer monitors are cheap, and we have little computers that can get us news that fits in our pocket, we can try out lots of ways of arranging it, and maybe we'll even discover something new.
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Evan Williams, the Blogger guy and Twitter co-founder, gave a talk at LeWeb3 about keeping software small, and how sometimes you can create a product by removing features from an existing product. He showed how Twitter is less than Blogger, no permalinks, titles, comments, templates, etc. It's almost nothing compared to Blogger, but we're using it and liking it. It's not a new story. When I was coming of age in computer science, the newest computers were minicomputers. They were called that because they were smaller and did less than the mainframe computers that came before. They were followed by microcomputers which did even less and were a lot more popular than minicomputers (which of course were more popular than mainframes). Scaling things down can make them more useful. But it's a paradox because once a feature is in a product you can't take it out or the users will complain so loudly that you put it back in right away. I know, I tried, a number of times to back out of features that I thought of better ways to do. You can always add features to products, it will make the existing users happy. But it often comes at a cost of making the product more complicated for first-time users, and they don't have a voice, they can't complain, they just go somewhere else, usually quietly.  So Evan has a point. Software design, if you're creating wholly new products, is like haiku. Find the smallest subset of a mature product that will attract people and ship it.  But there are certainly features they could add to Twitter that would have no impact on the steepness of the learning curve (i.e. how easy it is for a new user to get started). For example users are good at skipping over prefs they don't understand. But you have to think carefully about what the default should be, so there's no penalty for not caring.  Also features that only appear in the API have no cost in complexity of the user interface. They might make it possible for a developer to build a new product on top of the existing one. Since the user of the base product can't see the feature, it can't make it harder to learn.  Some users say they don't want new features, but I bet most of them would be very happy to use a new feature that made Twitter more fun or useful. And there are  alot of users who don't say anything about it, and don't think much about it. Most people aren't interested in theories about why products catch on, they like it or they don't, and don't know why they do or don't.  It's always good to ask questions about why things work, but if I could offer the Twitter folk any advice, I'd say don't hesitate too much to put in new features that will make users happy. Ultimately users like new features in products they use a lot. There's a reason why products tend to bloat over time, it's because users demand it. The trick is to not compromise too much on ease of learning.