Software Engineer

Reviewing adobe edge newsletter, I found spectra news viewer which is a top system and usable in multiple ways, here is more information taken from msnbc website

Spectra merges the news spectrum and the color spectrum into an expansive news viewing experience. With comprehensive live news coverage, striking design, complete customization, dynamic browsing, human body interaction and many other unique features, Spectra brings A Fuller Spectrum of News to life in our most immersive extension yet.

• 
  Select msnbc.com topics from
  the news channel palette.
• 
  Your Channels manages
  active news topics.
• 
  Left, right or scrollbar flips
  through summaries and images.
• 
  View full content instantly with
  Full Story or later in NewsCollector.
• 
  Newscollector lets you save stories
  for later viewing.
• 
  Word Filter using search words
  or topic names.
• 
  Orbital Settings adjusts speeds
  and presentation order.
• 
  Auto Mode takes you on
  a 3D journey into the Orbital.
• 
  Use your webcam
  for human interaction.

Well It may not be literally new, but as any web technology introduced, it takes for something really cool and new time to be widely used (such as web standards, ). So I’ve been reading about this and you might want to take some time (a lot actually… I haven’t research them all but this post will help us all with some kind of guide for further reading).

Adoble Flex
http://learn.adobe.com/wiki/display/Flex/1a.+Learning+Points

SQLite
http://www.sqlite.org/

Adobe Air.
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/comparison/

Silverlight
http://www.silverlight.net

Time ago I heard about some ESPN & CSS thing going on. I remember something about ESPN saving terabytes a day in bandwitdh usage by using CSS for layout instead of tables.

So know I did some research and long story short:

• ESPN website gets about 1 to 1.3 billion page views per month.
• By using CSS…

• Page reduction (estimate) 50 KB
• Page views/day 40,000,000
• Projected bandwidth savings:

• 2 terabytes/day
• 61 terabytes/month
• 730 terabytes/year (784,000,000,000 KB)

So… switching from Tables to CSS styling is not such a little thing, and it takes tons of work when you change some existing website and try to migrate it to CSS layout. But the concept of just presentation and content-structure separation can make such an impact can tell you that you don’t need some costly data mining algorithms for getting some nice returns on investment.

Sources:
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2003/06/espn-interview

1. Photsynth: It needs an active x pluggin for Internet Explorer, but it’s like using something from the future now. The way the navigation goes through the 3d environment is great and the way I order photos in a 2d model is superb.
2. Google Maps – Live Maps: the entire map can be seen as a gigapixel image, street view is truly useful and the directions tools that both sites offer are a great way to show how web 2.0 apps are afecting nowadays rutine.
3. Google Reader: the best way to keep you updated, it has a high performance and forget about having to check manually every feed either in your browser or surfing page by page. In 5 minutes I can overview more than 80 feeds. Apart from the mail web systems, I thinks this is the most useful web software available for professionals.
4. Yahoo: the ultimate usability portal, well studied components which give the user a lot of information in one page.
5. Flickr: great community where people can actually know the whole world with high quality photos taken from great photographers. It has great sense of usability (yahoo trademark), and you can spend a whole afternoon using it in conjunction with the apps described at point 2.
6. Microsoft’s Hotmail: It’s fast to manage, I can do a lot of things faster than If I were using gmail or yahoo mail, it’s very intuitive with the “right click” options.
7. iGoogle: the extensions and the widgets offered are great, you can actually set your internet “dashboard” here.
8. Youtube: the ultimate web 2.0 site. Huge community, huge traffic, and very entertaining site.

In the past, I wrote about the importance of forms and how to build them properly. In this article, from catswhocode.com , are presented some little but key features that can change user experience when using forms.

Some of them are:

• Calendar
• Web 2.0 form
• Resizable textarea
• Ajax login form
• Mootools Form Validation
• Custom checkboxes, radio buttons and select lists
• Multiple select
• Form Validator
• Textboxlist with autocompletion

Let’s start with a classic definition from wikipedia:

A webform on a web page allows a user to enter data that is, typically, sent to a server for processing and to mimic the usage of paper forms. Forms can be used to submit data to save on a server (e.g., ordering a product) or can be used to retrieve data (e.g., searching on a search engine).

So, web forms are really needed nowadays (think about this “leave a comment” feature for the most web 2.0 systems).

Here you will find how to build a web form standards-complaint and accesible (using labels and “for” attribute, for instance).

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/fancy-form-design-css

This is another reference; a study about the usability, design and programming about the web forms:

• Hover, active, focus – effects in use?
• Help, support, tooltips: static or dynamic?
• Help, support, tooltips: where are they placed?
• Input validation: static or Ajax?
• Design of error messages
• Is it necessary to confirm the e-mail?
• Is it necessary to confirm the password?
• Is captcha in use?
• Cancel-button in use?
• Alignment of the submit-button
• Thank-you message
• Further findings

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/08/web-form-design-patterns-sign-up-forms-part-2/