All posts by ajohnson

Rich Internet Applications, Software Development

Not drinking the Flex / Silverlight / Apollo Kool-Aid

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From billhiggins.us:

If you’re considering or actively building Ajax/RIA applications, you should consider the Uncanny Valley of user interface design and recognize that when you build a “desktop in the web browser”-style application, you’re violating users’ unwritten expectations of how a web application should look and behave. This choice may have significant negative impact on learnability, pleasantness of use, and adoption. The fact that you can create web applications that resemble desktop applications does not imply that you should; it only means that you have one more option and subsequent set of trade-offs to consider when making design decisions.

See also: The Other Road Ahead by Paul Graham. Scroll down to the section entitled ‘Just Good Enough’.

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Links: 5-15-2007

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Links: 5-2-2007

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Links: 4-17-2007

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J2EE, Jabber, Open Source, Personal, Software Development, Syndication

instantFeeds 1.0.3

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New version of instantFeeds: version 1.0.3. It includes a two new features: you can now turn off your notifications by sending the command ‘off’ (kind of like an out of office feature) and turn them back on by sending the command ‘on’ and the notification you get sent now includes an approximately 255 character summary of the latest item. Additionally, I fixed the package naming (Wildfire recently had to change it’s name to Openfire and all the package names had to be updated as well) issues.

As always, you can check out the release notes, the source repository or just skip to the good parts and download the plugin.

Daily Links, Software Development, Syndication

Communication Multiplexers

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From an interview with one of the developers on the twitter.com team:

I think the real power of Twitter is its ability to channel over different mediums at the user’s whim. IM, SMS, email, and the web are just transports as far as Twitter is concerned. Generally, you have to go out and get information via whatever medium that information is on. With Twitter, information can come to you via whatever medium you prefer. Or, if you want some space, you can easily turn off the information tap with a simple “off” command. That’s powerful.

I linked to a blog post by Tim O’Reilly a couple days ago that summarized this feature by calling it a ‘communications multiplexer’… There are other companies that do interesting things in this space in different ways: rasasa.net, zaptxt.com, feedcrier.com, etc… It’s also one of the ways I’d like to evolve the instantFeeds plugin I wrote: be able to send an email, IM or an SMS or maybe even message into a web page: get only the information you want, delivered using the medium of your choice.