Jaime Rodriguez : Personal

browser navigation and RIAs..

jaimer — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 09:54:17 GMT

bear w/ some early (and wishful) thinking ...

I have a great RIA, with navigation inside of it (i.e. its own menus and scene transitions in the RIA).

My challenge is that I took advantage of the RIA's stateful model to optimize the experience; in other words, I avoided request-response; I do load new scenes, but of course it is all inside the RIA ...

The problem is that I often find myself clicking "Back" button... and there fore losing the state in the RIA... AAARGHHHH!!

What are the best practices for this type of app? I would love to see an app that handles this gracefully... If you wrote one, please feel free to email me or leave a URL in the comments..

My best answer so far is save state often so I can come back to it.. but I have a lot of challenges (like trying to differentiate between new requests, desired reloads, etc. quite messy )

-- --------------- ----------------

In the mean time, here is a quick (not thoroughly fleshed) wish list for all browsers...

1) Can browsers expose a "Confirm back/forward" event for user to confirm this is what they wanted to do...

What I want is when my HTML page is loaded, and before it loads my plug-in, the browser gets told, please ask user to Confirm if they click (go back/ go forward)..

I am not saying 'ignore the users command, but allow the plug-in to let the browser know it is a RIA and ask user to Confirm when mixing navigation.. The browser can handle the confirmation, to prevent annoying session hi-jacking, which btw I see on plain standards-based sites, so I assume is doable regardless of a Confirm.

Yes, I know some people will find it confirmation annoying, but I think it would be up to the application provider to decide.. The user or consumer is still in control - when I go to a website that annoys me, I just don't go back-. Confirm is an 'opt-in' behavior.

2) While I am dreaming, could the browser allow "Trusted sites" to manipulate the history? Maybe an extra journal and Back button for within the RIA? This way I can enter entries into the Journal and users follow their known paradigm ... but with in the context of the app they are running.. {which I believe is what customers would want a large % of the time}

[ I am not saying replace Back button, I am saying offer more options; user still in control, we have this w/ active documents merging menus with their hosts ]

Thoughts?? I am sure lots a people will laugh and think I am naive about browser session hijacking, etc.. I am cool with that.. I leave it to smarter people ( e.g. IE team or w3c ) to figure how to nail the details; I still think the functionality is a nice to have and I am thinking the problem is solvable elegantly if the browsers or w3 define a standard approach..

Does what I need exist already??
I know smart client gets around this.. but I am trying to stay web (plus a small plug-in like Silverlight ) so bear with me...

Thanks & sorry for rambling or rant... it was in my head today and I did not seem to crack it..

world aids day is today...

jaimer — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 10:13:00 GMT

Most of the time I live in a 'shoe box' not knowing what is going on outside of my family and work; today is one of these days: I totally missed World AIDS Day concert.

Beyond the concert, to me the day is a reminder of AIDS realities:

There are millions of people suffering from it; a lot of these are innocent children born with the disease to an already troubled family and troubled socioeconomic crisis.
This is a fast growing epidemic; I have been lucky to not know any one directly affected but that is likely to change if we don't get it under control (prevention, treatment and hopefully a cure).

Any way, it is AIDS day.. no matter when you are reading this .. it is good to think about that reality once a year (at least)
[For those expecting usual techno ramble, will be back to scheduling programming tomorrow. Apologies in advance for the personal detour]

Interesting posts for week of 6/4 to 6/10 ...

jaimer — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 08:12:00 GMT

I traveled most of the week so did not blog ... from the blogs, I read here are some of my 'faves' for the week..

Glenn Plock shares details on the future or Smart Client Software factory and migration to Acropolis
Jon galloway shares his thoughts on SVG and XAML ...
Only addition to his thoughts/concerns would be that it is very doable to use Illustrator to get to XAML ...Illustrator has a free 30 day trial.. Once in illustrator, not only try the plug-in to export... you can also try opening the ai file with Expression Design... and exporting the xaml from there... I have great results lately with Design's capability to read AI and export as xaml.
{note: expression design also has a 30 day trial, this whole thing is still free}
Free designer training ( Blend and Design ) from lynda.com ... Tim has the details..
Dwayne blogged about HostVisual and creating non-interactive WPF UI in background threads ... good stuff, I subscribed to his blog in hopes he continues to post..
Microsoft User eXperience Evangelist (UXEs) are aggregating their blog at http://design-for-innovation.com/ ... These are sharp designers who know a lot about user experience; though the aggregation is still in the works , it might be worth keeping an eye on it ..
Peggi wrote the most complete article in writing a WIC enabled codec. I worked with an ISV that wrote a WIC Codec for their Vista version of their software; they were quite happy with the 'benefits' ... which Peggi summarizes much better than I ever would:
"Building your CODEC on the Windows Imaging Component platform makes it possible for all applications built on WIC to get the same platform support for your image format as they get for the common image formats shipped with the platform. It also enables the Windows Vista Photo Gallery, Explorer, and Photo Viewer to display thumbnails and previews of images in your format using the decoder that you provide. For Raw formats, it enables more sophisticated imaging applications to take advantage of your decoder's Raw processing capabilities. Depending on the encoder options you support, you can also expose unique capabilities of your encoder to enable applications to take full advantage of the advanced features of your image format" ...
[FYI, WPF is built on WIC, so once you have the codec you will be able to open your custom image format with an <Image Source=".. " /> tag ...]

Cool stuff I heard about :

BBC is using Photosynth 3D to create a show .. has good links to photosynth stuff..
Darren David (ex-Fluid, Northface kiosk extraordinaire) talks about a very impressive WPF app he worked on ..
He mentions the challenge of Multi-input UI ... which the Surface team have solved for their platform ... I wonder if Microsoft will ever expose the implementation for use outside of Surface??

[Movies]

I watched Hannibal rising on the plane from NY to seattle ( my hands cramp if I type on plane) ... fell asleep.. the first 15 mins were interesting cause it explained the 'why?' ... the rest was gory fill-time..
I went to theater for "Ocean's 13" ... I was a fan of Ocean's 11 so I had to go see this one.. Though I laughed a few times, quite a bit of the movie was a little too far fetched for me ... I wish I had waited for video instead of theater..

Desktop matters conference report ..

jaimer — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 23:28:00 GMT

Tim Sneath ( my work boss) emailed me asking how it went , and since I am typing if for my team I thought: "what the heck ... just publish it..."

I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at Desktop Matters last Friday .. It is the "hard-corest" Java conference I have ever attended (disclaimer, I have only attended 2 java conferences: JavaOne and OSCON) ... The conference focuses on client java technologies, a lot of people from Sun's Java2D and Swing team presented.. Also, some influentials building interesting java stuff..

Here are my thoughts:

On the conference:
it was awesome... A small group of Java influentials talking with the Java leaders (Hans Muller, Chet Haase, Richard Bair, etc.) .. there was nothing held back either direction.. The Sun team shared challenges and road-map... the community provided good feedback.. I had a blast and learned a lot ... Read some of their reports here..
The event reminded me of what at Microsoft we call Software Design Reviews ( SDRs ) ... Some of you reading this post might have attended one of these ... You know that it is hard to buy that kind of access, well on the Java client community you might have the answer in this conference..
A nice touch different from the SDR was Ben Galbraith the organizer who kept it light .. making equal fun of every one there

On Java SE and Swing:
I was surprised and (as a technologist) happy to see progress on java and Swing ; their 'filthy rich' demos looked pretty good ; That said, I still think they are very far behind Microsoft (both Windows forms but specially WPF) in tooling, customization, richness, etc.. You can definitely do good stuff on Java, if you are willing to write a bit of code or hire experienced devs.. [yes, I of course acknowledge they do it for the cross-platform promise.. if you must go x-platform and can't go AJAX, I think that is one of the best choices out there]

On my presentation/message:
When I arrived, I had a deck with 40 slides covering the ins of WPF ( templates, styles, resources, etc.) by the second day I had changed it based on a private conversation with Hans Muller - I pitched him on XAML and he seemed overwhelmed with properties, triggers, styles, etc.. but he really got the "oh, makes better tools" idea..

So, in the end, I presented a simple (much slower-paced ):

Why is MS doing WPF..? It is ALL about User Experience; I elaborated that UX is business value to the everyone.
On day 1, the Java folks listed why write client software and the list was usability, richness, performance, leverage local resources, etc.. most of these are factors of user experience.. so it resonated..
UX is also business value for the Dev/ISV/SI selling the solution... It provides differentiation opportunity, branding, pride of ownership, etc.
How is MS we improving UX with WPF?
1. Integration of all our UI Stacks ( Text, 2D, 3D, Video, etc.)
2. Declaratively; we invested in a declarative model to optimize toolability and fully incorporate the designer role into application development .. this is the silver bullet in the long-run; along with rich services to embrace the declarative modell...
What are we doing on x-platform?
(IMHO) WPF/E is a huge step for Microsoft. Not because of what we are delivering in Version1, but because it is a commitment to innovate in client software that runs x-platform. MS is best positioned [we have the framework, WPF, XAML, etc. to act quickly in that space, since we have a lot of the lessons learned - and the code ;)

I did two demos:

The Healthcare demo I was short on time and wanted to keep it focused -- check for a post on that demo later today or tomorrow there is some good news there--.. I think this summarizes well WPF integration since it shows most UI stacks..
I spend 15 to 20 mins in Expression blend building stuff from scratch ;

created the data templates for the healthcare demo ... and
created a 3D button with animation ( triggers on mouse over) ... the latter was mostly to make explain how we compare to Chet's animation engine for his book...

The feedback
I was very surprised on the 'kudos' ... Quite a few people came to me afterwards and shared kind thoughts... I got a lot of "I get your experience message"; and "I love what WPF can do", "XAML seems very neat", etc..

My best two take aways...

An interesting cross-platform combo in the interim? :
While sitting there listening to their challenges, goals, etc. and after receiving the feedback on my presentation I was thinking... what if "XAML was a standard" and the Java community embraced it to create UI? .... They could keep their performant cross platform engine .. but use our tooling to create rich apps" .... does it sound crazy?? I think it is a good interim while MS gets a strong x-platform client out (if we ever do, I can't confirm nor deny, only hope )... The type of apps these folks are writing requires rich development frameworks, rich programming languages, and powerful drawing engines... I can't think of a good solution for that today if you include a good tooling/debug story.
Some lower hanging, more realistic takeaway for Microsoft:
I think we need to re-visit simple styles and create several "cool" versions of simple styles... We have the designer tools.. but there will be teams out there that do not have designers.. We need to pony up for a few good design templates that developers can use to create "cool looking apps" with out a lot of designer support... If MS provides styled primitives then developers could put screens build on these simple styled controls... For example, I recently downloaded the "Roxio" client, nice gradients, stylish controls, yet nothing extreme (other than a few cool vector graphics that could have been images) .. I think with "cool simple styles" this could be accomplish with out much design work...

That is it ... I hope the conference repeats next year .... If it does, I would recommend it if you are a Java client developer ...
I also hope I don't get fired for a post w/ the word java so much ... My first test to see how far I can take it ....