Sarah Allen's Weblog

Yahoo's BrowserPlus sneek peek

I checked out Yahoo's sneak peek of BrowserPlus this morning -- looks like there is some interesting stuff there. It think they have a good approach by getting feedback from people using apps before they open up the APIs to developers. I have always believed that to get the UI right, you need the user experience to drive the APIs not the other way round.

Key Features
* Drag-and-drop from the desktop to the browser (my favorite!)
* Upload to FlickR
* Desktop Notifier (integrating with Growl on the Mac and Snarl on Windows)
* Image editing: rotate, crop, and effects: 'sepia', 'swirl', 'solarize', 'oil_paint', and 'grayscale'.
* Text-to-Speech
* PStore (local storage: I wonder what the limit is here)

Geek Features
* Ruby Interpreter
* JSONRequest
* IRC Client

The API documentation is available, but right now you can only use it if you work for Yahoo. However, with the documentation out there, including a slick doc browser, they seem pretty serious about opening this up to external developers.

BrowserPlus also has a plugin architecture, so the features can be updated without restarting the browser or even refreshing the page! This will put them in a very good position when it comes to adoption, but the way they present the plugins is a bit odd from an end user perspective. I can dig allowing Yahoo to install an image editor, but do I really care that the app I'm using is written in Ruby? I've got a little security geek background and I don't even understand implications of allowing a "RubyInterpreter" to be installed -- is it sandboxed? does it allow file system access? This is weird territory from a usability perspective. How's a normal person to tell what's safe or not? Hard to tell what the model is here... am I trusting the site or trusting the software vendor? Right now they are the same for BrowserPlus, but they'll need to clarify this before they open it up

Installation Experience
Continuing with my series evaluating the initial experience for Adobe Air and Gears, here's a click-through slide show of getting started with BrowserPlus:

| View | Upload your own

Privacy Policy

To learn more, please read our BrowserPlus privacy information at http://info.yahoo.com/privacy/us/yahoo/browserplus.

Certain sites may request the you download a corelet? Are you kidding me? How about you just use an English work like "extension" or even to quasi-english "plugin" -- I think it just confuses people to create new language for an old concept.

Conclusion
BrowserPlus is a promising new contender in this space with a new angle. Even though AIR and Gears have been out (at least for developers) for a while, there is no clear winner and I don't expect that to be decided for a while yet. BrowserPlus worth watching. If you are going to check out one demo, I'd recommend the flickr uploadr.

RIAs to rule the world

Forester has recently issued a new report which describes how "RIAs emerge to deliver the information workplace of the future." (via Read/Write Web). This contents of this report seems underscored by Pandora's mention in Doonesbury last week:

Rich internet apps with superior user interfaces like Pandora, Google Maps, and H&R Block's consumer-oriented tax program Tango and have entered into common use by regular folks, who then expect a higher level of polish and usability in the applications they use at work.

quick, effective diagrams with Gliffy

Gliffy is a great new tool for creating diagrams. It recently opened up it's doors to a public beta. I've been using it for a while. It's awesome to be able to create a quick network diagram, and then publish it to get a easily accessible jpeg image. I've never loved Visio, and now I don't need it anymore! Working on a team with that uses both Mac and Windows there just hasn't been a good way to create a diagram that can be easily edited by anyone on the team before Gliffy.

They've got some other neat features that make it feel like a mature product that can easily fit into your workflow:
- collaborative tools
- version control
- SVG export

Also, in addition to the basic shapes that I've been using during the private beta, they just introduced:
- Flowchart
- UI wireframes
- Floor plan
- Network shapes (yay!)

Gliffy is built using OpenLaszlo by Chris Kohlhardt and Clint Dickson. The interface is snappy and easy to learn. It includes the kind of important user interface details you've come to expect from a desktop app: the side palettes can be quickly tucked away, allowing more room for your drawing; when the browser resizes, the document and tools resize fluidly; and you'll find familiar menus and toolbars. You'll forget you are using a web browser!

Making eBay Better with Open Laszlo

There's a nice zdnet article about cooqy, an eBay site developed using OpenLaszlo by Robert Yeager . "After taking a look at AJAX, Flash and traditional web development platforms, he settled on OpenLazslo. According to him it was because it was a mature product as well as free and open source. OpenLaszlo's elegant XML-based programming model was a big plus and made for rapid development. Cooqy went from nothing to core functionality in 4 weeks of part time work."

I found the app compelling, and imediately got sucked into shopping-mode by the "photo collage" view. It must be a very successful application where I can get distracted by my usual analysis of the UI and Web 2.0-iness of it all to instead be enticed to actually *use* the application :)

I'm thinking of buying a few pounds of legos:

The Mind Canvas

A few weeks ago, Jonathan Boutelle stopped by the office to show me The Mind Canvas which Uzanto launched last fall. They have developed a set of survey applications using game-like interaction to collect information.

Unsurprisingly people like this stuff. I love this quote from someone who took one of their surveys:
“Filling out this survey was the most fun I’ve had in a long time. It was a brilliant application of computer technology. Ask me again sometime….PLEEEEEEEEEASE.”
(from What about the data: Do game-like methods get good user data? )

I'm glad to see "divide the dollar" which in an online version of one of my favorite tools for getting people to rank feature priorities. Instead of merely picking your top 5 or ranking features, you can decide what amount of money you want to spend on which feature. We used to use this methodology for every release of Macromedia Director (perhaps they still do). We had a fixed amount of engineering time to devote to new feature development, and we could do a rough guess of how expensive features were (ranked by $, $$, and $$$). We used paper to gather input from the development team, product management and marketing, and small focus groups. I would have loved to gather input from the loyal following on direct-l or a large group of prospective new developers using using this kind of online survey.

In addition to providing a nice graphic experience for standard survey questions, Uzanto has created innovative online interactions for collecting information about higher level concepts. Of particular interest are their methods of collecting data about how people categorize information which can be helpful for determining appropriate information architecture for a web site or testing existing categories. My favorite is how they've implemented an "open sort" technique using drag and drop and free-form naming to get people to provide their own categories and names for them (pictured below).

The best part of The Mind Canvas happens behind the scenese. They have wonderful interactive visualizations of the data that is collected.

For now, it is available as a service and you can get in touch with them to set up a study.

draw your own comics

I missed this when it was posted to the OpenLaszlo weblog in Nov, but I really like this site which lets you draw and publish your own comics. There's a pretty nice app which let's you draw comics.

There are some really nice parts of the UI to let you specifiy the size of the frame and switch between frames you are editing. The drawing tools are pretty basic, but effective. For some odd reason, it took me a few minutes to realize I could drag the drawing tools palette outside of the yellow area. It's interesting to notice yourself making assumptions about a new UI. I'm still not sure why I made that assumption... but maybe I just expected that yellow area to be there for a reason. I really like the representation of stroke width (pictured to the right). There are a lot of nice details they got right, including being responsive to feedback when I sent them a note with my critque.

Here's a comic strip that I drew with my feedback on the site:

It's a bit of a scrawl. Mouse-drawing was never my strong point. I lost the stylus for my wacom tablet a while back. This site inspired me to buy a new one this morning. There's a nice little section which generates an HTML snippet to easily add strips to your blog. Maybe I'll be inspired to add more pictures to these blog entries if it can be this easy :)

a new kind of radio station

I've been listening to Pandora for about a week and I love it. A piece of software has not had such an effect on what I do with my computer since Movable Type.

I must be the only sofware engineer in the world who does not have their own personal mp3 collection. I love music, but I'm not terribly organized (anyone who knows me can confirm the typical state of my desktop, both real and virtual). Aside from having an historic aversion to sorting and organizing, I have a specific challenge with music. I don't have a good memory for it. I can remember arcane technical detail from my software development experience of the early 1990's; however, I can't recall many of the bands I heard play at Lupo's or the Living Room, let alone albums or song titles. It is hard to connect what I am in the mood for with an array of album covers or song titles.

Pandora lets me chose one song or artist and then it creates a perpetual play list of songs I might like, and most of the time it is right on target. The application grew out of the Music Genome Project which sought to "capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level," and then proceeded to catalog their findings in what must be a gigantic database. Pandora makes this database available to me without searching. With only the barest of a suggestion from me, it has an idea of what I might like. Of course, as these folks know better than I, offering up a song or an artist is no small suggestion of my taste in music. A single song has a number of qualities that indicate what I'm into.

It is no random chance that I found Pandora, since they use OpenLaszlo as a development platform. It's always nice when someone uses your tech to create something wonderful. It's at the heart of why I write software. Seeing Pandora was particularly cool, since they really understand what we call the "cinemtatic user experience" or, as we say 'round the office, what it takes takes to make an application Laszlo-riffic. I don't intend to take any credit away from the Pandora folks. While our platform enables beautiful design and makes it possible to build a fluid and intuitive interface, great design doesn't happen automatically. Great design takes inspiration, insight, thoughtfulness, and most importantly, people who care about it.

La Quinta mapping application

The mapping application gives consumers a visual way to quickly and easily find a hotel. To try it yourself click "search by map" on the La Quinta homepage. Be sure to check out the state of Texas, which has so many La Quinta Inns that a zoom in feature was needed. The coolest thing about this app is behind the scenes. When La Quinta adds a hotel, all they need to do is update a database with the name & GPS location of the Inn and, with a little Laszlo magic, the app does the rest.

"Laszlo's use of open standards makes it easy for us to integrate LPS into our existing architecture without added complexity or infrastructure costs," said Raven Zachary, Director of Internet Technology at La Quinta Inns. (read more)

Dean for America RIA

Howard Dean has made headlines for his use of the internet in his campaign for president. The "Dean for America" website regularly updates the homepage with latest news and hosts the official Howard Dean blog. There is a web application for planning or attending local events that tracks and publishes stats. So far Dean supporters have organized 7,892 events across the country with 86,628 attendees.

The latest addition to this site features a Laszlo event calendar. You can zoom in on a week or a day or get more details about a particular event. Behind the scenes, the Dean organizers have a similar web interface for posting events.

Behr paint color browser

This lovely web application for choosing paint colors is linked from the Behr home page and can also be found in Home Depot stores running in a kiosk.

Built in LZX and deployed with the Laszlo Presentation Server, this rich internet app would be categorized as a "product configurator." It is the most beautiful and compelling example I've seen.

I suddenly feel like painting my living room.

fun with maps

Maps are a natural way to use images to visualize a lot of data in a small space, or even a little bit of data in an interesting way.

I was inspired by IndyJunior to spend last Sunday afternoon experimenting with maps. Using the IndyJunior Flash application I mapped places I've lived. It's a very easy process that consists of editing an XML file with your locations and clicking buttons in a nify configuration app that let's you select the look-and-feel of the map.

The IndyLog also points to some other fun maps, like a map guestbook . Is it just a fun novelty to index notes by geographic location? or does it add meaning?

what is a "Rich Internet Application?"

Kevin Lynch posted last week about Flash applications that are "starting to appear." However not everything done in Flash is a rich internet application, and it is a challenge to sift through these showase sites to find great examples. There is a fine line between dynamic content and a web application.

I've spent some time over the past week trying to understand my own definition of a "Rich Internet Application." I discovered that in my mind I have mapped "Rich Internet Applications" to "good user interface design." Perhaps I've been drinking too much Kool-Aid...

Macromedia writes that "Rich Internet Applications combine the functionality of desktop software applications with the broad reach and low-cost deployment of web applications�resulting in significantly more intuitive, responsive, and effective user experiences."

Sadly desktop software GUIs are not always the pinnacle of user experience, and some of the best web applications that I've seen use techniques that are rarely seen in desktop applications.

I've started to collect some links to web applications that use techniques that are significantly different from HTML and desktop UI. I think an entirely new category is starting to emerge...
* Visual Thesaurus: graph for display and navigation
* Market Map: uses color and space to display information relationships
* Iokio's camerafinder: iconic representation of a result set
* Genetic Shoes: smooth navigation and progressive display of information