Warping it up! » user

Yahoo! Launches Design & Code Libraries

Fini Alring — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 15:04:29 +0000

Yahoo launched two very neat sites a Design Pattern library and and UI Code library, I’m looking forward to digging into the patterns.

Welcome to the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. We are very happy to be sharing our library with the design and development community. This is our first drop of what we hope to be a monthly release cycle for the publication of patterns. In many cases we have bundled the patterns with pointers to related code from the Yahoo! User Interface Code Library.

Interview: Project Matisse and NetBeans IDE 5.0

Fini Alring — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 19:57:08 +0000

Developing graphical user interfaces (GUIs) used to be a tricky part of Java technology programming. Although Java Foundation Classes/Swing (JFC/Swing) technology has been around for quite a while, designing professional-looking, cross-platform GUIs can be tedious and prone to error. All this has changed with NetBeans IDE 5.0 and Project Matisse.

Project Matisse solves the core problem of GUI creation by making the layout design of visual forms much easier. The project extends the NetBeans IDE 4.1 Form Editor to support a free design paradigm that exposes simple layout rules that are easy to understand and to use quickly.

NetBeans IDE software engineer Roman Strobl interviews Project Matisse creators Scott Violet and Tomas Pavek.

The Next Wave of GUIs: Project Matisse and NetBeans IDE 5.0

Glide (Not So) Effortless

Fini Alring — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 14:24:46 +0000

Today I read about this new product / killer-app thingy.. Supposedly let’s you do just about anything with media from handling mail, chat, calendar, music, photos and what have you…

the tool is called “Glide Effortless”, and rumours about it being a UI wonder and all, I had to try it out for myself.

As normal procedure I always try to scan the site for validity and trust matters, by asking myself a set of rather simple questions; who are these people? where do they come from?, do I trust them? and last but not least what’s the catch? (price)

I was a little confused by the obvious lack of any pricing information, but decided to try and sign up.. All went pretty good.. Hmm suddenly it required my full address, and I mean required as in you have to fill it to continue. Eager as I was I happily typed it in.. And hit next button on the sign-up wizard…

Then it happened, I was asked to choose a product subscription type ranging from free 100mb account to some expensive ones, seemingly only to differentiate by the data storage limitations. Not being a complete retard I choose free account as my first choice, strangely enough this was the last available option – they seem to think free version should be your last choice!!? Not so logical approach since everyone naturally wants to evaluate such a product before buying it (with all the hype this product should sell itself, should it not??).

Then I was presented with a nice screen telling me to give away my creditcard information, even though I had choosen a free subscription, they wrote they needed the information in order to validate my personal information.

Oh well.. The result was that, I like most sane people; hit the “Cancel” button, the wizard closed – and I will continue to try and live happily without this marvel of state-of-the-art oracle of an application…

I did however get a good laugh when reading about their patent pending ui “navigation bubbles”, which more or less resembles 200 game ui’s already.

Glide Effortless