Mahyar SEPEHR

Few months ago, i was wondering why we do not work with jquery mobile (See also the Demo on your Mobile Device and your Desktop! ) for some classical web applications.
Here a little demo of using a Mobile Device as a Desktop Computer!!!

A new Demo of jQuery Mobile Framework has been released. Check it on your Smartphone. The User Interface is really pleasant an sufficient for 99% of need. What if we work with it even for Desktop? I just don’t remember why we work with grids, columns, layers…

When working on a web project, you will one day need to illustrate, even when prototyping. The purpose is different from one job to another but the need is the same:

• You are Web Architect, Tech Lead or Project Manager, you need some cool and already made icons.
• You are webdesigner, you want to get inspired or to make some faster design.
• You are ergonomist, you shall need some clean and minimalist illustration for your wireframes.

If you are one (or more!) of those :  try the design vector icons library.

It is not free (So what? Do you expect to eat for free in a restaurant?), but it is not expensive either and most of all, it is nice & simple!

If the GWT concept is nice, its use was frusterating : the code generated by the core framework was mostly composed of … Html Tables, which is just a headache to render properly. And most of all, what I did not appreciate with GWT was how people introduced it: “with GWT you don’t have to work with Html”. In my opinion, if your aim is not to deal with Html, then don’t work in web technologies. As a matter of fact, web is Html and Html5 is not Xml yet…

I talked about that with a friend of mine who is my GWT psychologist (thank you Nicolas!) . He told me to have a look to UIBinder, a framework integrated into the official GWT since 2.0.

What I find really exciting in that framework is the possibility to define exactly what you expect as rendering.

But UIBinder brings the real solution: add the component that you expect, add any Css styles you need and bind it to your data. That’s it! The View implementation is very easy and efficient: a template made in xml, a widget class that is bound to your different fields with annotation. You can have the benefit of the whole GWT Engine combined with the best use of the browser with Html and Css.

I hope the GWT Team will integrate that in their best practices, because for me it is the best way to work with the GWT client.

One of the hottest aspects of today’s software market is on mobile devices.
In the other hand, many many software discussions are currently around standards and the User Interface process, the hole question is : what is the most appropriate representation standard for today’s internet need?

• Content Management Systems (CMS) versus Web Applications.
• Rich Internet Applications done with technologies as Flex, GWT versus HTML5 oriented as Javascript frameworks.

JQuery is a serious actor, my favourite User Interface and/or Javascript framework.

This month, it comes with one very exciting news : JQuery has just announced they are about to bring jQuery to mobile devices.
http://jquerymobile.com/2010/08/announcing-the-jquery-mobile-project/ As they say in Mangas : To be continued…

Usually, when you need to mockup a user interface, you start working in a tool Photoshop or Illustrator and after hours of functional oriented ideas and some creative solution, you realize that your final user interface is not compliant with for some technical reason…Here is maybe a nice solution : an iPhone prototyping app tool that runs right on your iPhone.http://lesscode.co.nz/interface. I like the idea.

Sitepoint has just added an article describing 16 Design Tools for Prototyping and Wireframing
It gives an idea of which tool is the best for your budget & your needs!

As far as i know, i would recomend different tools:

• Visio for its complete plug&play with Microsoft Word
• StarUML: it is quite complete for UML diagrams and easy to use AND it is opensource
• Illustrator & Photoshop for users who work quickly with them
• Powerpoint (yes, i mean it :)) for people who are not familiar with UI interfaces
• Axure: i did only use the trial version and it seems quite close to the html integration. Thus, it is very useful for the Scope Statement

Nice website where people talk about user interface, useful advice for wireframing.

http://wireframes.linowski.ca/

Simple question, isn’t it? But if I say: give me the three steps to ensure that your (x)html is for sure in utf-8, would you give them to me?

Let’s just ask the W3C Internationalization for the answer!
Another usefull link just to make sure that every character sets & encodings in web pages are under control…

As a User Interface actor, I must often describe web applications.

This is a difficult step of the project : how to find the best word to describe one functionality? you have an idea, your collegue understands something else, so does the client

One solution is made by this nice web-site:
Web Patterns: A UC Berkeley Resource for Building User Interfaces

Anyone can suggest a pattern. Every pattern is illustrated by screenshots with links to the corresponding website.

Simple & efficient!