Winsupersite has the latest screenshots of the ultra secret “Aero” release of Longhorn. WinXP got the navigation right with the task pane, Longhorn is trying to get the task-oriented pages right. You can also see a dashboard which keeps track of your latest alerts similar to centrals’ console in one of the images.
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Brad DeLong has a public wiki with interesting math calculations. How many years will it take for the total mass of all the humans to be equal to the mass of the earth? Ans=1750 🙂
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Founder Emeritus at Macromedia, Jeremy Allaire shows 10 trends that point to Internet 2.0. Also, John Robb lists some ways to build Web 2.0 apps. He also describes what web 2.0 is here.
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Dave Winer writes about two schools of Aggregator UI’s. “One says that they should work like a mail reader, the other that it should work like a weblog.” It boils down to, scrolling to the next post or clicking to the next post. Which one do you like to read your subscriptions in? Radio and manilas’ aggregators along with most webbased aggregators like feed-me follow the weblog school. Also, Dan Gillmore wants blog ranking to be considered while displaying the posts. Marc Canter says, “We are trying to achieve rankings for blogs based on topics with K-collector.” I like my “blogging school” aggregator and I’d like my own rankings for it based on how many times I click on each post.
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After the blackout, there were ads appearing on google for “blackout” almost immediatly. TShirt business, MSBlast virus, Battery lights, real life stories site… If you can link your business to any news story, you can get cheap click throughs immediatly on Google. Also, when searching for “Remote Procedure Call Shutdown”, a symptom for MSBlast during the initial stages of the attack gave a few ads for viruses when there were no relevent results. Googles crawl is pretty fast, but not fast enough to get results related to current news. Google ads are a gold mine for advertisers who can attract lots users looking for information at rockbottom prices. For ideas on what users are searching for, look at “In the News” feature at Google news.
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“DENG is a small (60k) Modular XML Browser, capable of rendering XForms, SVG, XHTML, arbitrary XML with CSS (e.g. RSS), XFrames and any other custom XML namespace in the flash plugin.” They have a demo of Googel, in XHTML and XForms with CSS3. Via EnterFrame.
IE takes around 4-5 years to get a substantial user base for a new version, flash takes 1.5 years, google takes 0. The faster feedback-design loop and faster new developments can be taken to the user by keeping the code small or putting it on a server. Deng takes new standards compliant code to users by keeping the code small.
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“You have a handful of resources for emphasizing things, and trying to draw attention to them:
Real estate, Order, Form, Expectation & Flow, Consistency.”
Writes Scott Berkun.
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The best method to get feedback about an application is not conducting focus groups, but testing the new feature live on web for a small number of users, if possible. Its cheap, no errors caused by the measurement itself and its fast. Google tested some of the changes live and amazon is also doing the same. Browsers impliment the referers to a page. But flash needs elaborate setup to get feedback.
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The power finally came came back after a day in Detroit. No stores or food joints were open, couldn’t cook anything at home as all the cooking appliances were electric. As JD points out, “multiple systems are chaotic, but their vulnerabilities are less catastrophic.”
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Guardian has an article on rich internet applications / smart clients / web applications. It mentions .net clients for handhelds and desktops along with information about central. It also has a line on how Macromedia aims at standardizing the UI across different apps. “Macromedia believes it will need templates and design patterns to help it reuse code, and to give end users consistency, so that Central applications will work the same way no matter where they have been developed.” I wonder how this will be implimented.
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