Archive for the 'General' Category
I have been involved in a couple of projects related to this topic and I have seen the same issue, the plan is to build a good tool and open it to the public, with no strategy on how to make it fly, but this article describe very well a way to put on wheels and start the engine to your EES.
Every time I remember how we used to debug web applications on the browser makes me appreciate even more the nice tools Firefox provides.
Not very useful, but very nice to see the quality colors and animations that can be done with Canvas..
Silk.
Yes, HTML5 video feature specification seems to be very powerful, but not yet finalized and not everybody agreeing.
The problem with HTML5 video is that Web Browsers still don’t agree on what video format should be supported, some wants a proprietary solution, some other obviously want the open source free solution, so they support the version format they like, until everybody agree on something (hopefully soon), they force us to have the videos on different formats, for example:
<video controls=”controls” autoplay=”autoplay”>
<source src=”pics/video/gizmo.mp4″ type=”video/mp4″ />
<source src=”pics/video/gizmo.webm” type=”video/webm” />
<source src=”pics/video/gizmo.ogv” type=”video/ogg” />
Video not playing? <a href=”pics/video/gizmo.mp4″>Download file</a> instead.
</video>
What the browser is going to do is test every video format and check if is supported until it finds the correct one, but that leave us with a big maintenance issue.
A good temporary solution is to make use of services like
They host, convert and server the video depending on your browser.
I am working on migrating a Flex application to HTML5. This application opens a Flash Socket to the server to be able to have a constant communication between the server and client. During the design I immediately though about WebSocket, nice… problem solved. One characteristic of this connection is that I only need it to send update events from the server to the client, I will never execute a transaction from the client using this channel, then I discovered this new HTML5 feature, Server Events. It very similar to WebSocket but its only one way communication.
Very interesting survey, not very scientific but it gives you something to think about, I guess it has to do a lot with the age of the people and technical knowledge, but for now you can make fun of people using it..;-)
After updating to the latest Firefox version every time I try to debug it would show me the not funny gray screen of Flash Crashing
1. Goto firefox config by typing about:config in the firefox address bar
2. Click on the I’ll be careful, I promise button.
3. Type dom.ipc.plugins.timeoutSecs
4. Find value and double click and change the value to -1
This changes the default timeout value from 45 secs to unlimited. This should solve the issue.
At this point, we all should know about the importance of a UI Design and Usability in a Web 2.0 application, technology alone will never get the user acceptance and subsequent marketability without it. We have to agree that UI Design/Usability is that’s the face of the product and that’s how the user will evaluate the software, they will never know and don’t care what happen when they grabs the mouse and click that button.
We all have seen a lot of well architected projects fail because the the UI is ugly, cumbersome, is not easy to use, or gets the typical feedback from the user “the previous app was better”, the typical reason? A bad User Interface Design. Most of the time this happens for two reasons, one is because the development team does not have a experienced modern UI/UX guy. A lot of projects do not take the UI seriously and that think that “UI Design is just picking a nice color and anybody can do that”, and do not hire somebody to do that job, letting the developers, business analysts, QA or experience users to guide the UI. The other reason is hiring the wrong UI designer. Some years ago when applications were just flat, design on HTML, PowerPoint or even just on a peace of paper was OK, but not any more, applications are a lot more interactive and applications designers need to get more technical.
To be a UI Designer you definitely need a big talent, but to be an UI Application Designer you need more than that, you need to be technical. Thanks to how technology has changed during the last few years, to be a User Interface Designer, Interaction Designer or a User Interface Architect, you need a lot more than that talent, good taste and the coolest Mac. Web applications are way more powerful that before, we have nice and powerful Javascipt libraries, Flash, Flex, Siverlight, AJAX, .NET, just to name a few, and if your designer said “Javascript? Flex? ahhh?” there is no way he can design a application exploding current technologies, making available useful features to the end user, and probably your application will look like an application from the 90’s.
I am not saying that a UI Designer needs to know every little detail about the new technologies, but he needs to know what is possible and what is not from the technology prospective and make it part of his design, because the developer will not make that decision for him.
So, if you leading a project, please get somebody with the right UI skills, if you are a UI Designer and are/want to get into the application design, please get a little technical and help the UI Designers to get the credit than thy deserve.
The growing adoption of Ajax and DHTML in web applications, have caused the creation of hundreds of open source Javascript libraries and pages have more of those than ever before plus the custom code counting thousands of lines of code in a single page load.
One of the techniques to make your application run faster is making sure you only load the necessary javascript for initialization and rendering, splitting your javascript libraries, leaving the unnecessary javascript payload to for later.
As a developers we know splitting and keeping the javascript files clean is not an easy tasks, and gets worst when multiple developers with different skill levels are modifying it, but by doing it you can get a significant faster rendering.
You can do this splitting manually by using Firebug and getting a list of functions that are executed “onload” but reading about this technique, I found Deloto. Doloto is a system developed by Microsoft Research for automatically splitting JavaScript into clusters. The first cluster contains the functions needed for initializing the web page. The remaining clusters are loaded on demand the first time the missing codeneeds to execute, or they are lazy-loaded after the initial flurry of JavaScript activity is over. When applied to Gmail, Live Maps, Redfin, MySpace, and Netflix, Doloto reduced the initial JavaScript download size by up to 50% and reduced the application load time by 20% to 40%.
I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems like a good thing to test or just to get an idea of how we can manage our javascript files to reach one of or main goals of having an application that performs as fast as possible.
If somebody have use it, it would be interesting to hear from you.
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