Reading the first couple of chapters of Donald Norman's Things That Make Us Smart got me thinking about user-interface design. He's talking about how for 'reflective' tasks, where you contemplate information, you need different kinds of tools than for 'experiential' activity, where you just take in information. What's intriguing is what goes wrong when tools give you 'experiential' interaction, e.g. a video clip, when you need support for reflection - reasoning and creativity - such as comparison support. Comparison support is useful for deducing new information from observing differences and similarities between different data.
Many web applications inelegantly expose themselves in their URLs. While ASP.NET applications tend to have an .aspx in the URL, Struts' default configuration gives you a .do in your URL. It is possible to reconfigure a Struts web application that uses URLs like /customer.do?method=edit&id=42 to use something like /customer/edit/42 instead. This article covers several separate techniques that you can use for different parts of the URL.
I've just finished reading The Pragmatic Programmer, which is an interesting book about software development that I wish I had read years ago*. One of the books intriguing ideas is to use a secure hash, e.g. MD5, of a configuration file to prevent people tampering with system parameters after deployment (page 74). Working out when this would be useful comes later: first, where do you store the calculated hash?
A tricky issue in application design is the need to name everything in the user-interface, leading to new words and new usages for old words. Problems arise when a new meaning displaces the old, but only for the software developer and not, crucially, for the user. As a developer, can you put yourself in the mind of the user? Perhaps - developers usually like to think so. So what does 'format' mean?
In cooperation with DiderotTrack, Lunatech developed a website for online document processing. Factory3x5 was designed as a suit of services that render incomprehesible XML to a designed and easily read PDF format. After doing market research, we came to 2 conclusions: the market is getting warm for these type services, but it is too early for most companies to make the transition to such a web based service.
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