:Web Application Usability

Mike Chambers released somemore info on central and Oscar has a recent screenshot. Central is based on flash player 6 and not 7, which I think was because the new player was a moving target all this year. I’m waiting to see how the data exchange (now called blast!) between different apps is carried out. Also, an excerpt from Central forums.
“All apps will have to get a product ID from Macromedia to install an app in central. If the application will be featured in the Application Finder (i.e. public) Macromedia will be screening / approving those applications. Not all apps will need to be screened; but all require a unique Product ID.”

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“Business success in the new economy depends on adding something new and better for the consumer. The actual quality of every part of the transaction—from browsing to comparison shopping to comprehensiveness—must be noticeably better for the end user. Simply lowering costs for the vendor doesn’t guarantee success.” Alan Cooper says, experience matters in an article on Visual studio magazine.

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On Monday September 15 2003, a change to .com/.net behavior was announced by Verisign. Every mistyped domain name, one that had not been registered, would be redirected to a sitefinder by adding wildcard DNS records to all .com and .net domains. VeriSign inturn gets revenues from search engine partners whose technology powers Site Finder. The results for my name on Sitefinder matched only with those on MSN & Hotbot & Overture. So, a partner of Inktomi brought 20 million new clicks/day generated by typos from Verisign. The Internet Software Consortium, the nonprofit organization that develops BIND, is writing a patch for Internet service providers and others who want to block customers from a new Site Finder service from VeriSign Inc.
The changes are expected to cause more spam to get through spam filters and lots of other problems. This move also gives verisign lots of new data. As a user I would like to go to the search engine I’m familiar with if I mistype someting, not the search engine verisign likes. The bad thing about this change is, it takes away control from the client the user interacts with.

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:Interactive narratives has a collection of informational and storytelling experiences designed and produced for the web. There are lots of flash narration interfaces along with HTML and Panoramic narrations.

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There is a scrambled text doing rounds on the net. It says, “Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.” It works better with short words. It works because we learn words by looking at the letters, but read them by looking at the word as a whole.
Similarly interface elements should be both learnable and scanable. Novice users will be able to learn new features and expert users will be able to perform tasks quickly. Buttons for example have text/tool tip and an icon. The text/tool tip makes a button learnable and the icon makes it scanable.

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In an interview with Ubiquity, Bhaskar Chakravorti says that, the process by which technology has an impact is actually quite slow even if the intrinsic benefit of the innovation is enormous because all the different parties involved must coordinate their choices. “The point is that while Moore’s law tells us how quickly computing power doubles, but because of the slow pace of fast change the pace with which such improvement in technology translates into real impact in the market happens – as a rule of thumb – only half as fast. Thus: Demi Moore’s law.” On a related note, Rajesh Jain has an excerpt from an article which says that IT’s impact on productivity is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. And, Jackob Neilsen in alert box answers the question, “Do Productivity Increases Generate Economic Gains?”

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Microsoft Infopath has its demo in flash. Its shows how Infopath forms are designed, how data is inputed and stored and also explains it using a scenario. On another note, Don Park points to Ten Favorite XForms Engines and says, “Benefits of XForms are not compelling for most web applications and there are complications that prevent wide deployment as a web technology.”

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Lots of cool looking concept phones over at this site. Motorola, Samsung, NEC, Nokia, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, featured. Via Gizmodo. >

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Luke Wroblewski writes that color schemas in nature when used on interfaces have “the potential to distinguish (by helping create a more memorable website), guide (by allowing users to focus on interactions), engage (by making page layouts comfortable and more inviting), and inspire (by offering new ideas for color selection).” Users hate monotonous interfaces for frequently used interface, skins satisfy most of them. But creating skins for each application is very difficult. In MSN messenger, the background of a chat window can be changed to any picture. The images that change daily on top of this blog are also distorted versions of real images. Enabling the interface to change its appearance by sampling a real image will give the users unlimited options with minimal effort.

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: Studio MX2004, Dreamweaver MX2004, Fireworks MX2004, Macromedia Flash MX2004 and Macromedia Flash MX2004 Professional all up for grabs. Fourteen new articles on devnet too. Grab em and crack through them. The new component architecture is the most interesting of all. Information on building new components is here and here. Also loading data across domains is a lot stricter. Update: There have been a lot of searches to this post for “macromedia flash mx 2004 crack”, “macromedia flash mx professional 2004 crack”, “macromedia studio mx 2004 crack” and “macromedia dreamweaver mx 2004 crack”. Well, here is a link to a post which claims to have it.

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