Andre’s Blog

October 3rd, 2006

Dave and I just got to our _lovely_ hotel room in Silicon Valley/Santa Clara for the AjaxWorld Conference & Expo. We’re pretty exhausted, but managed to get some Pizza which ate while watching oh so uplifting news:S

Anyway, Dave’s talking about “Ajax Debugging and Quality Assurance” at 11:30, once you’ve moved passed the Ajax 101 which you should’ve by now you’ll need to know about the tools and techniques that he’ll be discussing. Some of the tools of particular interest include: FireBug, JSUnit, Selenium and CruiseControl.

I’m leading a BOF about Usability at some point…but I’m not entirely sure when. I’ll post again as soon as I know.

Birds of a Feather Sessions:And then, for good measure, AJAXWorld 2006 also offers a welter of BOFs led by some of the industry’s biggest names:
Usability BOF – Andre Charland
JSON BOF – Douglas Crockford
Dojo BOF – Dylan Scheimann
Open AJAX BOF – Jon Ferraiolo
jMaki BOF – Greg Murray
Ruby on Rails BOF- Thomas Fucchs
Rico BOF – Bill Scott

AJAX World Conference & Expo Speakers and Agenda Announced @ AJAXWORLD MAGAZINE

Dave and I will try to get a podcast in while we’re down here, so stay tuned. I’m down in Santa Clara after this for the Open Ajax Alliance meetings until Saturday morning. If you’re around drop me an email or give me a ring.

technorati tags:ajaxworld, ajaxworld2006, ajaxworld06, davejohnson, andrecharland, usability, debugging, ajax, qa, performance, jsunit, selenium, firebug, bof, presentation, santaclara, siliconvalley, nitobi

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September 2nd, 2006

After several months of hard work we’re almost done our rebranding process. This week we officially launched the new www.nitobi.com website! Keep in mind a website is never finished, and this is just the first iteration. We’ve update the design to be cleaner and simpler. One of our design goals was to to maintain a healthy amount of whitespace. We also wanted to make it easier for visitors to easily learn about our products and the functionality that they’re looking for. That’s we have big links to the feature highlights, demos and video tours front and center. After demos and product info, downloads and pricing were the next most visited sections of our old website so we brought those up to be in the main bar separating the header (and logo) from the rest of the content. We’ve ported over our old knowledge base to the new template as well. The forums are currently still at http://forums.ebusiness-apps.com running on PHPBB but we’re porting those over to Drupal, which we’re excited about because we want move over more of the dynamic functionality of our site into Drupal as it makes sense and as time permits. But we’re treading carefully into this new web framework, so we’re just going to do the forums and feed aggregation to start with. Our site content doesn’t change that rapidly so we don’t ‘need’ a full blown CMS for the content pages. You can access any of the dynamic content via RSS feeds as well (news, blogs, knowledge base and forums) which is handy for our customers so they don’t have to come back to the site or wait for email to keep up to date on what’s going on with the components they’re using. We’ve been working hard on putting together more rich media such as video tours and feature highlights in the form of small Flash movies that we put together using Camtasia, we’re going to be expanding and creating more and more of this content through the fall. Likely the new videos will be more technical and implementation specific, more like “how to” videos for developers.
That’s it for my website update. Please send me any feedback or ideas you may have! Thanks:)

technorati tags:website, nitobi, design, redesign, launch, www.nitobi.com, marketing, drupal, rss

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July 30th, 2006

Michael Mahemoff is starting a series of podcasts to go along with the content’s of his new book Ajax Design Patterns. 

I was a guest on episode one where we talked about 9 patterns of Ajax widgets:

• Slider
• Progress Indicator
• Drilldown
• Data Grid
• Rich Text Editor
• Suggestion
• Live Search
• Live Command-Line
• Live Form

Dave joined Michael for episode 2 where they discussed ten patterns of Ajax Architecture:

• Drag-And-Drop
• Sprite
• Popup
• Malleable Content
• Microlink
• Portlet
• Status Area
• Update Control
• Virtual Workspace

Michael has a very deep knowledge of these patterns and keeps the listening interesting.  IMHO.  Can’t wait to podcast with Michael again. You can get  all of Michae’s podcasts here:

Technorati Tags: ajax, patterns, podcast, usability, widgets, components, ajaxdesignpatterns

Posted in AJAX, Usability – HCI, Podcast | 2 Comments »

July 30th, 2006

Dave put together this cool little demo for the talk I gave at GeoWeb last Thursday.

We wanted to show closer integration of the desktop and the browser environments.  So we used a list of addresses (actually lat/long coordinates) in Excel, copied and pasted the list into the nitobi grid which was mashed-up with up with Google Maps.  It was pretty slick, I’m not sure if I emphasized in my talk how important this type of workflow is going to be in the future.  Users should have to make a cognitive switch between the desktop and web environment (IMO).  If you I can see the data let me get copy it, paste it, drag it, drop it or move through it with the keyboard.  Come on!  I want arrow keys, tabbing, I want to send email by hitting ctrl+enter like I can on the desktop, these are not hard to implement they just take some thought and care from the application designer.

Click here for the screencast.

Dave will have a more technical follow up post to this soon.  Likely he’ll include geo-coding for addresses and such too, since most people probably don’t think in lat/long coordinates or have lists of those kicking around;-)  This coming from the usability evangelist that I am…

Technorati Tags: ajax, gis, map, geoweb, mashup, nitobit, nitobigird, googlemap, ux, ui, usability

Posted in Technology, Software Development, AJAX, Web 2.0, Usability – HCI | 1 Comment »

July 25th, 2006

I’m speaking at GeoWeb on Thursday, July 26 at 10:35am.

GIS Applications on the Web: Possibilities and Limitations
  Speaker: Andre Charland, co-founder, eBusiness Applications Nitobi
Google Maps put Ajax on the map for consumers and developers alike. There is a growing trend towards porting GIS and mapping software to the web. In this presentation, Charland will speak to the possibilities and limitation of various Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies, including Ajax, Flash and FLEX. He’ll approach it from both the professional Web developer’s perspective of moving into a Web environment – an environment that is as rich and visually engaging as traditional GIS applications; and the user’s perspective – moving toward a desktop experience and usability issues.

I’m really looking forward to this talk as I think mapping and GIS is really cool and we’re only at the tip of the iceberg, not just on the web but for other devices too. I’m going to be on the look out for some cool topo map applications.

UPDATE: Here’s my slide deck in PDF and PPT. Here’s the link to a whole bunch of map mashups. I’ll upload the movies shortly.
Technorati Tags: geoweb, ajax, gis, googlemaps, presentation, vancouver, bc

Posted in Technology, Software Development, AJAX, Web 2.0, Usability – HCI | 1 Comment »

July 17th, 2006

DaveO gets a lesson on using AJAX (not just for cleaning) for advanced web interface usability from the brilliant and humourous lads of E-Business Applications, Andre Charland and Alexei White.

Note: This is an ‘enhanced’ podcast filled with relevant photos and links (use your viewer window in the bottom left corner of iTunes).

While playing with Elastic Path “thinking putty,” they discuss ways to optimize the user experience, pros and cons of various technologies, the Nitobi Grid and Combo Box products and recap a few Gnomedex conference highlights – plus have some laughs about ski culture (gapers), community building, fantasy sports and the fleece-filled recreational equipment district of Vancouver.

More here

Posted in AJAX, Usability – HCI, Podcast | No Comments »

July 5th, 2006

Andre Charland, Dave Johnson and Alexei White discuss Nitobi Grid 3.1, AJAX
Copy and Paste and Open AJAX.

Technorati Tags: ajax, enterpriseajax, grid, datagrid, podcast

Posted in Software Development, AJAX, Usability – HCI, Podcast | 2 Comments »

June 28th, 2006

Ajax and Accessibility Podcast:

• AT&T natural voices Demo
• Jaws
• section 508
• WAI
• Microsoft Accessibility resources
• Ajax and Screen Readers
• Webvisions 2006
• Dave’s Ajax Talk
• barcamp sf

while we’re on the topic the there’s 40 links to Ajax accessibility resources on Ajaxian today.

Technorati Tags: accessibility, ajax, jaws, screenreaders, podcast, eba, enterpriseajax, andrecharland, davejohnson, alexeiwhite, section508, webvisions, webvisioins06, barcampsf

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June 8th, 2006

We have an rss feed that you can subscribe using iTunes right here: http://ebadre.audioblog.com/rss/ajaxradio.xml.

Participants:

• Andre Charland – CEO and Co-Founder of eBusiness Applications
• Dave Johnson – CTO and Co-Founder of eBusiness Applications
• Alexei White – Product Manager and AJAX Evangelist at eBusiness Applications
• Christian Van Edeen – Schenker Canada

Schenker and AJAX

• Built a large scale internal applications with an AJAX UI
• Users are around the world
• Very data intensive
• controlled IT environment
• Using

• Nitobi Grid

• Prototype

• PHP and lots of home grown stuff

REST

• Pros and cons
• Tim Bray’s post
• REST is good for scaling

Google Spreadsheet

• Seems like a good UI
• Do do we trust google with yet more of our data
• Does not seem really good for business use
• Good enough for soccer moms, probably

Technorati Tags: podcast, ajax, enterpriseajax, rest, google, spreadsheet, schenker

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June 3rd, 2006

I hooked up with Cote’ from Redmonk and Charles from TheFrontSide to chat about “Enterprise AJAX”. It was a fun conversation and Cote already has it up here. Part 2 is coming soon so don’t worry. They’re old buds and do the Drunk and Retired podcast together, so I was the new kid on the playground.

Some highlights:

• Global namespaces are a pain, and so is global domination;-)
• Next time we’re going to talk about tips to make JS and AJAX components work together and hopefullyform a group to make components work together, maybe Open AJAX is already on it but I’m not sure
• How do you optimize AJAX? I defered too my much smarter colleague on JavaScript Benchmarking Part by Dave Johnson
• How do you sell AJAX? Good question. Nitobi sells components, development, training and consulting
• My favorite point was an acronym that Cote demystified for me, AJAX is now officially a Magazine Driven Architecture (MDA). ROFL I had a good chuckle about that! Wonder if I could get away with a wikipedia entry for that!
• AJAX is all about usability…but I always say that
• AJAX spreadsheets and ODF together are going rock!

Some of the stuff I wanted to chat about was how TheFrontSide compares to GWT and if Charles is concerned by the current bruhaha with Morfik. Next time guys.

And arrggh we just got an XBox 360 for the office! So much for productivity! But team moral is way up:)

Download the MP3

Technorati Tags: ajax, redmonk, eba, cote, podcast, thefrontside, javascript, enterpriseajax

Posted in Technology, Software Development, AJAX, Web 2.0, Business, Usability – HCI | 1 Comment »