1. Sep 28th, 2006

    Rounded Corners – 33

    Get out of my browser. You must have read Roger Johansson’s article reminding us why standards matter. So no point in linking to it. But these two examples of bad UI design: “Purely visually oriented designers and Flash developers who do not want the Web to follow any logical rules at all. They want the Web to be a purely visual medium, and approach it as if it was a printed brochure, a computer game, or television.” and “Back-end programmers who don’t really want to touch client side programming, and let their IDE create the HTML, CSS and JavaScript for them.” Yes, I’m talking to you, and no, I’m not using your site. I like it better when my browser works like a browser.

    Validate this. Check out Luke Redpath’s ActiveSpec: “ActiveSpec is a Ruby implementation of the Specification pattern. … It also provides a way of creating composite specifications in a more declarative manager and on top of that, a simple DSL that can be used for easily defining specifications.” Impressive.

    Extra chunky. Sandy Kemsley: “Lesson #1: The way to find out what people want is not to ask them, since we can’t always explain what we want, especially if we are completely unaware of what alternatives are possible.” Somewhere on the road to better software quality, we adopted the mantra that the customer is always right. But would they be your customer if they could do your job? If they’re smart they pay you to research, experiment and innovate with new ideas they don’t even have time to imagine. And it’s your job to bring these new ideas to them. Sometimes to make that happen you need to remember “Lesson #2: Different styles of products are not better or worse, just different. This democratized what might previously have been considered a hierarchy of product styles.”

    What Gartner is telling your boss. The title of this article lists all the reasons to read it.

    That thing got a Hemi? Why yes, it does.

    Printable PDF | Posted by Assaf Filed in general 4 Comments »

    1. Sep 28th, 2006

      Sandy Kemsley

      Thanks for the reference. The link to my actual post is here: http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/column2/archives/2006/09/extra_chunky_us.php

    2. Sep 28th, 2006

      Assaf

      It’s a great post, and I fixed the link to point to it.

    3. Sep 28th, 2006

      apotheon

      Holy frijoles — I knew Gartner was a bit long on hype and short on substance, but the danger to corporate dev shop practices conveyed in that keynote is downright frightening. Images of a Second Coming of the religious devotion to the idea of development via drag-and-drop CASE tools plague my thoughts. Gartner Must Be Stopped.

      They’ve taken “don’t reinvent the wheel” well past the realm of reasonability. Hopefully, this will only end up hurting massive, lumbering corporate sweatshops that should really just lie down and die at last anyway.

    4. Sep 28th, 2006

      Assaf

      “Hopefully, this will only end up hurting massive, lumbering corporate sweatshops that should really just lie down and die at last anyway.”

      Are you saying that Gartner is doing a public service to all of us and getting paid along the way? Maybe they’re actually up to no evil?

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