Entries Tagged 'User Experience' ↓

ShowOff is a presentation software where you create your slides by writing simple text files containing markdown formatting. Styling is done using CSS. The slides are served by a web server and can be displayed in a web browser. With a simple command, a presentation can be deployed on Heroku for everyone to see. ShowOff [...]

The last couple of days the battery life on my Windows Phone Mango has been catastrophic. I wasn’t able to last more than 3-4 hours, tops. Then the battery saver icon appeared (battery with a little heart over it) and gave me a couple extra hours, it really is a saver. The only thing that [...]

Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X and “Growl lets Mac OS X applications unintrusively tell you when things happen”. The about page shows an example of what Growl looks like. If you have written a Java application and want to enable Growl notifications for it, you previously had the possibility to use [...]

We (Andreas Hammar and I) are just returning from Tech-Days 2011, we delivered a session on developing applications for Windows Phone 7 in Blend and code. While we were preparing for this session something stuck in our minds – when it comes to mobile applications the top priority is in design and performance. Design and [...]

Touch is great thing, suddenly you can touch, tap, double tap, flick, pinch and stretch to manipulate virtual object. It really revamped the whole mobile business mainly with the release of the iPhone and the capacitive touch screens, used in most smartphones today. But also in the stuff using infrared matrix screens like the Neonode [...]

One of the major complaints on the Windows Phone 7 platform is that you can’t run third party applications in the background. I had the same complaint on iPhone for a long time but over the time I have started to think about the problem and I’m not sure background operation for third party application [...]

I was trying to make a mockup in Balsamiq for a windows phone 7 series application and thought i needed a few items to get things right. So I started creating the parts needed. The basic phone, with a see-through screen so it’s easy to create panoramas to lay behind. The keyboard variants (there are [...]

Also cross-posted on my personal blog After three days of the Microsoft Mix10 event the brain tend to overflow. So I sit down at a Starbucks and try to summarize my thoughts before my mind explodes. It’s easy to get caught up in positive buzz during events like this but I really think Microsoft is [...]

I was attending the “The Productive Programmer: Mechanics” session, held by Neal Ford, at Oredev last week and I wanted to share one trick that will more or less force you to get faster when developing in Eclipse. The Eclipse plug-in MouseFeed, written by Andriy Palamarchuk, will repeatedly nag you with what keyboard shortcuts you [...]

For our new StreamFlow project I wanted to try and get management functions in properly right from the start, which basically means exposing configuration, service management and administrator functions through JMX. I figured that if I did that on my part the customer would simply be able to get a decent JMX console and get their work done efficiently through that.

But then yesterday I did some research into the current state of JMX consoles, and in particular downloaded and tested all the OpenSource consoles in Java. The end result of that is a realization that they all basically suck. There’s no point in naming names, and no point in going into detail, because they all seem to have the same basic problem: the developers haven’t talked to a domain expert.

Liferay is the leading Open Source enterprise portal platform in the Java market. It’s certainly an impressive piece of software. I’ve been following it for some time now and the product is improving a great deal in many areas, perhaps most in end user usability. One area that, in my opinion, could still be improved [...]

Apple has arranged a world tour of iPhone Tech Talks, and in cold december it was Scandinavia’s turn and a crew of software evangelists from Apple turned up at KTH in Stockholm for a full day of sessions. The sessions are confidential so I will keep this post vague on the technical parts, not revealing [...]

All APIs have end-users. How and whether these users use a certain API depends on how useful the API is to them. This in turn is determined by what problem the API solves, how easy it is to learn and understand, and how easy it is to use. This article will give some (perhaps obvious) [...]

It’s not always easy to decide whether to add yet another dependency to yet another framework. It’s especially hard when it’s about a very central part of the JDK, like Date and Calendar. They are not great, there’s little doubt about that. However, the benefits of a new framework would have to be numerous in [...]