Who You Calling A Jesse?

This past week the front-end team that I lead (it includes GUI makers, User Advocates, and UI folks) along with the rest of the team (SOA enablers) are religiously entering a scrum cycle for the remainder of the summer. We have broken into two groups along the lines already mentioned.

The problem I am having is that my group is a mix of the pigs and chickens and I am not entirely sure how to have them all involved. My approach for the moment is to have the UA/UI folks participate as observers in the first 15 min daily with the UI folks really taking the time to go over their tasks from yesterday, for today, and tomorrow. They leave, then the UA/UI folks do their thing for 15 min.

The other challenge as I see it is that we can’t ‘lock in’ tasks for a two week period as the expectation is that clients are giving feedback and expect to see some adjustments on a very short cycle. To address that I have set up two days of ‘respond to feedback’ where we tackle any tasks that can be done in those two days. Anything that can’t fit goes on the list for the next cycle.

This is going to be a bit awkward at first I think… not entirely sure I have it organized properly yet. Hopefully by the next two week cycle I will get it ;) Wondering though, anyone have a similar problem? How do they handle front end development of web applications in a scrum cycle?

Another TODCon has come and gone in a haze of mojitos, great food, and great company. This year it was back in Orlando—my favorite place for it even though it was really hot and humid, I am getting bored with Las Vegas. This year had an amazing line-up of presentations which had little to do with ‘Adobe stuff’ and more to do with developing rich experiences on the web using whatever tools you use. Sure there was some from folks from Adobe showing off some things in CS4. Greg Rewis from Adobe gave a sneak peek of Flash CS4, there was a demo of Fireworks CS4 from Alan Musselman, and some discussion on Dreamweaver CS4.

Really looking forward to next years conference already as I think there are some changes afoot that will make it an even better community focused conference.

My two presentations were on AJAX strategy and Web Project Management. I have stuck both sets of slides up on slideshare but I don’t think they make much sense without the whole presentation ;)

Adobe has made available a public beta of the next version of Dreamweaver. Go give it a try! Scott Fegette has a bit more about the release on his blog.

It is really good to see Adobe do this after they let Photoshop CS3 out in beta last year. The next version of Dreamweaver is a big improvement over CS3 for front end developers although I would like to have seen a bit more for application developers.

Illya posted some thoughts on Agile Release & Testing Procedures and instead of writing a big long comment I figured it was worth a blog post. At the University of Waterloo I have had experience deploying a number of different applications for a variety of audiences… it is next to impossible to get all the details in a post but here is the general truth: there are no enforced institutional wide procedures for web applications. You might think the lack of procedures is bad but it is a result of the relatively low risk environment (even though the campus community has a low tolerance for bugs and changes). There are rarely formal teams of developers, it is mostly the loan coder building a specialty application – enforced procedures would frustrate them.

When you are dealing with a simple web page, say the uni home page, I have essentially covered the typical user acceptance, performance, and stress tests when the page goes live. I go through the gamut of web browser testing, try some OS variations out, and then get it out there. There is a relatively low risk here as the users don’t interact with a database or a whole heck of a lot client side. Once rendering issues are dealt with, it is pretty much unlikely to have other issues. This is with 30 000 or more people seeing it within a short period of time too. I had relative success but I think it was more luck and the fact we kept web pages simple.

Stepping up the development a bit, throw in a Ruby on Rails or PHP application. My testing procedures involved pretty much the same as the web page testing: poke away at it, fix bugs as they appear, and get it ready to go off of the development server to production. We (co-op student and I) never really sat on changes very long. The thinking was that if it went bad on the production end we just roll back the version, fast. When I made the jump to Ruby on Rails development with Capistrano and SVN that became so easy it was scary. On many occasions we had new versions going up two or three times a day. Minor changes, but they add up. This meant a lot of bugs made it out to the community version but as a whole the community appreciated seeing the progress. Our harshest critics were few and usually the type of people that would sit on things until they are perfect, the web is never perfect.

Now I find myself in the .NET/C# development world. I am happily hacking away at the JavaScript on the front end but I still live in the development environment. Here we have a solid team, a lot of developers, some serious tools, and totally different requirements from the client relationship/expectations end. At the moment we are doing limited testing that makes sure it works and then pushing it to an environment that a group has a ‘sanity check’ and gives us feedback. Releases are going out on a weekly build routine with a daily routine for an internal release. The whole process is evolving as we go but in a very general sense we are aiming to maintain a weekly build schedule for one set of users, daily internally. Our goal is to not leave the application in a non-working state and at any time the build could go live. This habit takes time to develop though… I don’t expect us to be in the groove until over the summer.

That is the nutshell version of what I have had experience with, I suppose it is Agile without the buzz terms. Personally I don’t see a reason why any web application couldn’t work on a daily build process. If you break the big change down to a lot of little changes you reduce the risk of breaking it and you ensure stability (so the theory goes). The problem is that in order to break a big thing down to a bunch of little things you need to take the time to talk it out, plan it out, and scope out what goes into a big thing. It is a way of thinking and it doesn’t happen overnight, most people need experience thinking that way.

I am interested to know what other higher education folks are doing with release and testing procedures.

I have been using Minefield (Firefox 3 beta) for a little while now and just didn’t use any extensions. It is just too fast and way better than Firefox 2 I just couldn’t go back. Now extensions are starting to work – Web Developer now does and all I need is Firebug and life will be back to normal. Decided I should try out ScribeFire too. Using Simplelog means I can’t find a blogging tool that works (why don’t I just use Wordpress??? I like pain I guess) and it crashes every few days but generally I like it ;) Anyway, lets see how this post looks.

Update: seems to work well beyond not turning on comments, see what editing a post does (it removes comments, odd because they are set to ‘on’ by default).

You work on something for a couple weeks and then the due date comes close. There is a realization that you won’t meet the milestone unless you get a lot of code written today and deal with whatever UI issues and browser bugs you can. You order in some pizza, fill up on caffeine, and push through a 16 hour or more work day. There is something about that role you get on when you don’t leave your computer, things just make more sense.

My GUI team of co-op students have been pushing themselves this past week and this evening I think they achieved more tonight than all of last week. People will have to wait until May 1st to see it but our internal deadline is much earlier (demos to some stakeholders first and we need April to bug hunt). Maybe I will demo a bit at DemoCampGuelph in April or BarCampWaterloo ;)

Just wanted to post a just over mid-term thanks to Daniel, Shawn, Allen, and Michael for the commitment. They have gone from CS or Engineering students to fairly good AJAX developers in a very short time period. They have made some cool stuff, can’t wait to show it off.

With our second StartupCampWaterloo behind us here in Waterloo we hit a milestone. Over 100 people were in the main area of the Waterloo Accelerator Centre to talk with Startups and help each other with ideas (quick estimate based on 88 chairs in the room plus Ali’s colourful chairs). I am pretty sure all those that demo’d got some useful information and experience out of the evening.

A big thanks to Stefanus De Toit for opening up the evening and breaking-in the crowed by sharing insights like: Turning academic research into a product is hard if you don’t keep your paperwork in order; hire your friends; wow people with lots of 3D chickens to get investment (actually prove your concept with a solid demo). Another big thanks to Austin Hill for closing off the evening with a great presentation which included: don’t be afraid of sharing your ideas because someone already tried it – it is your execution that is important; Canada needs more of its successful entrepreneurs re-investing in the startup scene; beware the vulture investors; do a startup while you are a student; it helps to work for a startup if you are thinking about a startup as startup culture is infectious.

What was learned from this one is that 60 second intros with voting works out really well. Keeping things short and keeping the slides out of it kept the conversation interesting and focused. The big buzzer also helped. Only took one person being caught by it—no one else dared challenge their time limits. Plus it kept us on time, mostly.

I had a lot of good feedback and now can relax—until the next one. What are we going to do next? BarCampWaterloo is on March 29th, a DemoCampGuelph will be in April, and StartupCampWaterloo3 will be sometime in May. If you can’t figure out if you want to go, I have a post coming up tomorrow that will cover that ;)

Other folks to thank for making the trip from places afar and/or helping out last night… The Toronto folks venturing outside of the GTA in their large 4×4: David Crow – thanks for the books and disruption, Jevon McDonald,  Jonas Brandon.   Ali Asaria brought some chairs and name tags and Simon Law for came down from Montreal. The other organizers Simon Woodside and Mic Berman ensured that we appeared as unconference as possible ;)

Most importantly, the night was good because of the folks that were there. Waterloo has a great community.

Over the past year or so the MMNP effort has been working on ways to utilize mobile and media based technology on campus. A year ago a pilot project looked at the possibility of students replacing their land lines in residence is relatively smart phones. Lots was learned (primarily that students are shell shocked by the telco cost and don’t really use them even when a large chunk of costs are covered) and the project moved on to different ideas. One of those ideas was a living environment that doubles as an incubator for entrepreneurial students.

Enter 2008 and the announcement of VeloCity. The Daily Bulletin article covers all the details. From the VeloCity site:

“It’s a place where some of UW’s most talented, entrepreneurial, creative and technologically savvy students will be united under one roof to work on the future of mobile communications, web and new media.”

I was involved with the project early on and it is great to see that Sean has taken his idea and made it a reality. I expect to see some exciting things come from this housing experiment. What a great opportunity for some students!

Ever had a bit of technology your use dictated to you by an IT department? Does it not even come close to meeting your expectations or requirements? Is it usually web based technology that is letting you down? This type of problem stems from what I call a ‘square peg, round hole’ philosophy in IT – when decisions of what technology to deploy is based solely on the ability to provide support, not the requirements of the project and/or an analysis of features required by the user. It seems to happen far more often with web based technology.

In a conversation with a colleague over a beer I tried to understand why this happens. Sadly I still don’t understand why, but I do better appreciate the position of people that decide to hammer that square peg in. But I think it because they don’t understand or have an actual use for the web themselves (that is a totally different post).

I believe this happens in every IT department and it stems from the environment. IT finds itself in a situation with limited resources to hire new staff even though they are tracking time on/and tasks and there is an expectation that IT needs to support everyone regardless of expertise. There is a project or group or department that has decided to use a particular technology. Reality kicks in and the service end has to learn to support the technology so a decision is made to apply that same technology to others that have similar but not the same requirements as that project group.

What happens next is ugly. The clients expect something that usually different because they may want the same features but they would apply a different priority to the features they use/need. This influences their expectations on the total experience. Take a content management system (CMS) for example. One group might put a high priority on workflow management, another on user management, another wants a templating scheme, another wants a forum, and another group really wants a wiki. A CMS can do all these things but I can’t think of a CMS that can do them all as well or anywhere near as good as specialized software.

However, CMS vendors will promise support and the ability to meet the demands of the user. This pulls on the support strings of IT. Rarely, if ever, will you find a CMS that delivers to a diverse groups expectations. What happens is that any number of groups become disenfranchised with the software and the overall project of deploying that technology is doomed to failure or mediocre success at best. The CMS vendor comes off either not being paid and/or looking really bad. The IT department comes off looking unprofessional at best which puts pressure on them to produce, and the cycle continues.

What should happen is that the IT department assesses the features as well as the priorities. They evaluate the technology providers based on that clear idea of what are ‘deal killer’ features for people. If it reaches a thresh hold that makes it impossible to please even 70-80% of the clients then IT needs to break down the technologies and groups not force them all onto one.

The web offers the opportunity for this to be easy. Web services, web sites as your API, universal log ins, etc. all make it possible to integrate different solutions on the data level. Sadly I think IT still approaches web apps as black boxes that work in silos.

The moral of the story for anyone building a web based service is that to really be a hit with medium to larger organizations you need to offer integration and openness in your apps. If you can be the folks that develop the integration tools as well as offer your product you can likely charge more based on a successful track record. At least from where I am sitting ;)

I have been on thing about figuring out coding patterns in HTML. Since I did the UW CLF back in 2004, I have been thinking about a macro-format for content generated on higher education web sites. Any CSS framework uses some abstract naming convention now—so I guess what I have been looking at is a “blueprint” that works specifically for higher ed.

What I did today was grab the code structure from about 10 higher ed web sites (three each from the UK, US, and Canada plus one more). It is just amazing how different HTML can be. Most sites are similar design wise, they have very similar content, and they supposedly trying to provide the same type of experience to the exact same audience.

Only three had Microformats on them, one had errors, and all are ‘valid’ HTML/XHTML. Good and bad ;) Well time for a break then on to more research and maybe even some prototyping. You can call what I am researching is a possible Macroformat for higher ed…

There has been a pretty interesting flame war that has erupted over a posting by Jeff Croft entitled What’s not to love about CSS frameworks? It seems like it has been quite a while since a good flame over web standards and best practices has played out. The tone of the post likely has really fueled the war but the topic itself seems to truly polarize some in the web standards community. Why is that? The devil is likely in the definition and I see it as the less formal art world colliding with the engineering world (something that has been slowly happening for a while with web development I believe).

Jeff Croft posted some follow ups: A follow up on CSS frameworks and The final word on frameworks, from someone way smarter than me. Andy Clarke interjected a comical What’s not to love about instant cake mixes in between that offered some satirical insight. The comments on the posts are shocking in some ways but once the definitions were clarified I think it comes down to artistic approaches meeting formal engineering process.

If you agree a framework is just a collection of reusable code that offers enough abstraction that you could apply it to whatever project you are working on then you have probably some engineering exposure ;) Reusing things is common practice, if you have a problem with that then you are just plain dumb with your time. This reuse of code features is part of what makes Dreamweaver CS3 such a good tool for rapid development. The CSS templates that come with it offer a powerful ‘framework’ to start with. Would you consider that a framework? I dunno. The ‘CSS Framework’ proper that is implied (blueprintCSS ) is in fact a more extensive framework that tries to solve more problems.

I think frameworks are great. I am building one now along with my GUI team of co-op students for a new system here. We are using a more formal engineering process to approach it but what we are essentially doing is creating a framework of GUI elements along with their HTML and JavaScript. Love them or hate them frameworks are just another thing the web dev world ‘re-invented’ from the software engineering world.

My role at work has me looking at a UI for a fairly complex application (known as jobmine) that has three distinct audiences with three distinct reasons for using the web app. The web application is the primary business tool for the co-operative education process at the University of Waterloo. This process sees anywhere from 10-25K people using it at least a couple times every four months. Staff in the CECS department use it for their day-to-day activities.

What is a co-op system? My definition is based on being a student and now an alumni, it is no way the ‘official’ take. Co-operative education is an approach to education that gives students a chance to learn outside of the classroom (and in the case of UW, make some good money) and gain experience in the ‘real world.’ If you are a student you look for and apply to jobs, manage your resume/CV, and find out about interview times and locations, accept and decline job offers. For an employer you post jobs, sort through applications, arrange interviews, and offer jobs. For staff you make sure this all works by supporting both students and employers, generating reports, manage a massive amount of data. Generally speaking.

It would seem easy enough if you walked up to it from a user perspective. You have your role, an idea of what needs to get done, and off you go. The expectations aren’t a whole lot different than say Workopolis or Monster.com.

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The list of web apps for the iPhone keeps growing with some mixed results reported. 37Signals went and announced their customized for the iPhone tada list, which is great but with all this it has me thinking—what about the other 99% or so of mobile users out there? All they really need is a solid browser that supports javascript like the iPhone does I would think. Could Opera Mini do that? I certainly hope so. Take a look at the iPhone interface in JavaScript to see what might be possible.

Contribute is an application that is so easy to use most people probably never take the time to look through the ‘how do I’ section or read up on its features. Rarely will you will run into problems but when you do sometimes it’s just a simple fix and you are done, other times it’s a bit trickier. This post is a collection of common problems and solutions I have had over the past few years as well as a couple picked up from the forum.

General Problem: I can’t connect to my server or Contribute is connecting very slowly or I can’t load my changes onto the server

Solution: Use network I/O logging to log operations and identify problems.

Why? The I/O logging is the first place to look to identify where your problem is occurring. You can quickly find server permissions issues or server speed issues.

Problem: I can’t edit files on the server even though I have it checked out.

Solution: Check to ensure group write permissions exist on the file you are editing. Certain Linux and Unix user set-ups can cause Contribute (and Dreamweaver) to not pick up the users umask settings and the files end up not being group readable.

Problem: I need to edit my source code.

Solution: Many people do not know about the ‘edit in external application’ feature in Contribute. This allows you to edit in your HTML editor of choice and smoothly go back into Contribute to edit the content or just put it back on the server.

Problem: Contribute is not rendering my page properly in edit mode or I want to highlight the places people can edit but I don’t want to use Dreamweaver Templates.

Solution: Design Time Stylesheets – you need to make sure you load the CSS to the server and the Dreamweaver Template itself has it included.

Problem: I need a section of text to have a certain div id or class name.

Solution: Contribute’s application of class or id names to items is stuck with adding them to the tags. So if you highlight a set of text and apply a style it will add that class name to the ‘p’ tags. Try using the library feature to insert a code snip that has the class or id name you want.

Tip: have a design time style sheet that adds a background at edit time so people know if they accidentally remove the region by deleting too much text. They can just insert it again.

Problem: I want to upload different file types to different directories.

Solution: Administer web site, user role settings, file placement.

Problem: I want to modify some style elements on the page

Solution: Page properties allow you to change some basic style elements.

I caught an announcement for a preview of Deepfish (IE for windows mobile) and it got me excited. Why? It renders like a desktop browser. The browsing experience appears to be a big improvement on the Nokia Webkit based browser that you find in the newer Nokia devices (and is really cool for being out for a long while now). Currently it doesn’t look like it will be a better experience than what the Safari browser in the iPhone promises but the point is the browser experience is getting much better for mobile devices.

I am not entirely convinced the desktop experience is a good thing for mobile devices over GSM or CDMA given the outrageous data plans we have in North America (although they are getting better in the US, not so much Canada). With dual mode (wifi + GSM or CDMA) devices it could be very cool. As this technology/experience improves I am reminded once again of the 1990’s and the web. Will developers even bother with the older WAP based slow browsers given most phones are replaced/dead/broken in two years or so? Do you take the time and invest in a stripped down site or do you just work on detecting the smaller screens and making some marginal improvements instead of big changes?

Figuring out if it is worth the effort is a tough call. Almost all the project participants here don’t use their devices for the web largely because they have a laptop nearby and the devices do not do what they want. What they want is the same experience they get on the PC. I think it is a good sign for RIA’s though. They might not need a J2EE version in the near future.

I am hoping to get my hands on a Windows mobile device running Deepfish this afternoon. I will report back if I do…

I had an interesting meeting this morning with a newly formed mobile application development group that is tasked with coming up with something that is useful to UW students and runs on a mobile device for the next phase (Spring 2007) of the project. The usual suspects were bounced around: Quest (student information system), Jobmine (Co-op employer/employee management system), Library systems, calenders, etc. Besides targeted data sources we also bounced around the idea of should it be web based and designed for the unpredictable mobile browser or a java app or a Flash mobile app? Each with their own quirky limitations.

What it boils down to though is what do students actually want to do with their phones? Surely you don’t want to apply to courses and fill out long emails but I bet you want to get notifications, reminders, etc. Maybe access quick information on things, send short notes, text other students, look up phone numbers…

This is an open question to all students (and anyone else really), if bandwidth cost was not an issue what would you like to do on your phone besides call people?

Tonight marks the start of a pilot project here at the University of Waterloo that will explore the feasibility of replacing land lines in Residence with mobile phones. There are, of course, a lot of other things we hope to learn from the project but what this first part needs to figure out is how:

• How useful are mobile phones really?
• How much will it cost (support, monthly service plans, device costs)?
• What is the coverage like on campus, in buildings, etc?

For this first pilot, we have around 50 students (half first year, half upper year) that live in residence. They get either a Blackberry Pearl or a Nokia E62 and are asked to use it as their primary device. There are a number of surveys to collect some data on how they use the devices as well as some group discussions planned.

The UW home page now redirects mobile devices to a customized version that is a lot lighter than the current home page you get on your computer. It has all the elements of the home page but in chunks.

This is part of a larger initiative being led by Housing and Residences to explore the use of leading edge (for Canada) technology in the living and learning spaces here at UW. I am really happy to be a part of the project team but more on the project later… I am really excited about this project and what it could lead to.

Given the IE 7 mention in the Daily Bulletin today and a message I got from John Jaray in the Computer Store that Apple sales are up 69% this year over last, I thought maybe some numbers on what we have seen on the home page might be timely to give web folks. I am currently using Google Analytics on the UW home page to get these numbers and can compare with numbers from a two week long period last year in November of 640 000 users in 2005 to 682 000 for 2006 so far this month this year.

Sorry for the lack of pretty graphs. What to note in this is that:

• Firefox has increased 5% in the last year to 21% nearly (without a campus roll out),
• IE 7 is close to 6% of our IE user base
• Mac/Apple machines have increased from 2% to 4% of the user base over last year
• 800×600 use is under 4% (yet we still design for it)

With the number of users on the home page, 1% is a lot of people.

Once we get a full month of Analytics data (it was off for a year), I will post it in web.uwaterloo.ca for people to have a look. For now, here is what I have to compare…

Browsers Last year (Nov 05):

• IE – 80.1% (of that, 99.13% IE 6, 0.33% IE 5.5)
• Firefox – 15.89% (of that, 1.0.x approx 99%)
• Safari – 1.51%
• Netscape – 1.34%
• Others – under 1% (Mozilla, Opera, etc)

Platforms last year (Nov 05):

• Windows – 96.72%
• Mac/Apple – 2.32%
• Linux – 0.62%
• SunOS – 0.33%

Resolution (Nov 05):

• 800×600 or below – 6.36%
• 1024×768 – 59.27%
• 1280×1024 – 12.65%
• Others are above 1280×1024

For this year the test size for November is similar so far, 682K:

Browsers this year (Nov 06):

• IE – 75.90% (of that, 93.83% IE 6, 5.90% IE 7, 0.09% IE 5.5)
• Firefox – 20.73% (of that, 1.5.x 74%, 2.0 is 13%, and 1.0.x is approx. 13%)
• Safari – 1.93%
• Netscape – 0.71%
• Others – less than 1% (Mozilla, Opera, etc)

Platforms for this year (Nov 06):

• Windows – 94.92%
• Mac/Apple – 4.28%
• Linux – 0.61%
• SunOS – 0.16%

Resolution (Nov 06):

• 800×600 or below – 3.57%
• 1024×768 – 47.78%
• 1280×800/1024 – 32%
• Others are above 1280×1024

That is a lot stats ;)

I was far too sleepy when Apollo was introduced at MAX to really grasp what they were showing me. It looked cool but I heard ‘webkit’ and I thought web browser. Then I noticed the TUAW coverage of Apollo and realized how wrong I was. But now I am left wondering a few things like what is the difference between the web browser as the platform and Apollo?

According the FAQ:

What is Apollo?

Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to the desktop.

This really does beg the question: why? If you keep reading the FAQ you come across this…

Is Apollo a web browser?

No. Apollo is a cross-operating system runtime that runs outside of the browser.

Theoretically you could build a web browser on top of Apollo.

So the skeptic in me says that is what a web browser does. If gives developers a cross platform environment to deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIA). Although a web browser doesn’t give you the ability to package itself up and send it to someone and just work. But is that expecting a decent size change in people’s web browser centric thinking? I think so. There are advantages with regards to offline use an CD-ROM or Kiosk applications which I am guessing is a decent size audience (thinking distance education, part-time students, etc at UW). It could even enable you to create a custom podcast/vodcast reader for your school and thus take care of copyright/security concerns, just distribute it in house and autheticate with your internal system to install.

The talk at MAX was that Apollo would change a lot of things on the web, and it might if people create a web browser on top of it, but it really is just another tool you can try and use. Will people use it? Time will tell I guess. I think it is cool but like Flex I just don’t see a practical application in my everyday web work. Web apps can do the same thing, just not in as cool a way. I wonder if I will change my mind in the next few months?

So far MAX 2006 has been pretty much what you would have expected from the new Adobe. Although yesterday the introduction of Apollo was pretty darn impressive as are some of the implications. What is Apollo you ask? I am still not sure. It seems like the kitchen sink of rich internet applications but time will tell. Keynote day one coverage and keynote day two coverage is better than anything I could type ;)

What am I getting from MAX? Well Flash, mobile phones, and video are the source of a lot of really cool ideas. This morning’s keynote was all about making money creating Flash Mobile 2.1 applications for cell phones. I can see how, but it must be hard for developers to build and test their applications in the phones common in Europe and Asia but not so much here. George Fox brought my attention to the new mobile section of DevNet, it is worth a look if you want to know more. I am sure Flash mobile development would be dead easy for some students around here.

AJAX has been another hot topic as well with the Dreamweaver team being asked about it at the birds of a feather last night and again today at a presentation on Spry. They used this persona of a front end developer that looks interesting and probably true a year ago but I think front end developers know a lot more about JavaScript and AJAX then they assume now. I could be wrong… anyway, the Spry demo was cool.

Scott mentions a few things about tomorrow’s keynote but what I like most of all is that Flex 2 for OS X is available. If I had time to play with it, that would be nice but it’s off to another session for me!

It is now just over a week until I head down to Las Vegas for Adobe MAX.Last year in LA was just amazing, Adobe was about to take over Macromedia and everyone was speculating what that would mean for the community and the technology. There were a lot of great presentations and conversations (lots of talk about AJAX vs Flash) but the whole thing was overshadowed by the merger. Now this year the merger seems like ancient history… what will be the buzz of MAX 06?

I am guessing I will hear a lot about Spry, Flex, and Flash. The purchase of YouTube by Google will likely be mentioned as a huge win for Flash video. To me, Google has just given 1.65 billion reasons that Flash video is here to say. I am also planning on attending MiniMAX on the Sunday night which has both Tom Green and Scott Fegette talking about Flash video and such.

What I really want to look into, now more than ever, is mobile technology solutions. I probably won’t be able to talk about it much until January but I am involved in a project that makes mobile technology more important to me now ;) It is in the early stages but once a pilot is underway I will post more about that – its not me being secretive either, its just I have no idea where this project is going so its best to say very little about it but just so students around know we are trying to do cool things with technology.

I hope to learn lots, meet some interesting people, and refine some ideas while at MAX. At the very least I get to go to Vegas for my first time!

The University of Colorado at Denver and Health Science Center (heck of a name) has a nice little AJAXcourse management system that doesn’t yet plug into their main system but is designed to help make course registration easier. The basic functions do work if you have JavaScript off but you can’t save your work or use advanced functions. Fair enough. The list of browsers in the help might be a bit optimistic (IE 3.x?).

This is a pretty cool application for higher education though… probably the most relied upon application outside of course environments is setting up courses and I would be most schools systems are crude at best. This example of how it could be done is worth a peak – especially considering its not hidden behind a password ;) Any other schools have something similar?

Brown University has introduced a new public beta site to the world that is certain to cause a lot of discussion amongst the edu and even the design community. What is so bold about it is that it steps away from the traditional web site design into something more interactive and minimalist. For higher education there are few sites that try this (maybe because of the large amount of committee oversight) but those that do are often compared with MIT’s homepage whether they like it or not.

It uses javascript to establish an automatic accordion response on mouseover, which could be problematic for some if they aren’t expecting it or have fine motor control issues. It also has a dark background, light text (some people don’t like that very much) which does focus on brown oddly enough.

I like it. They use some elements I have thought about for UW’s 50th refit and I really like the darker background. Given UW’s colours of black and gold I am a little inspired by companies like Lightmaker to give it a try. We did have black background sites about 5 years ago here… they looked good too. Just way too many graphics and spinning logos.

Anyway, have a look at Brown’s test site and let me know what you think…

After a little thought about dates and talking with CECS, I can now say that BarCampWaterloo is a go for September 29th! We have a location now all I need is a few people to help out and maybe someone to donate some food budget (people that have food are always much happier). Oh and we need people to sign-up. Check out the site if you want to know more about what a BarCamp is and sign-up. Given that this will actually be my first BarCamp some experienced help would be greatly appreciated.

This event will be open to everyone in the community (staff, students, faculty, off-campus folks from other schools, alumni, etc). I know I talked about one the end of this month but that really isn’t a good idea given that this place is a ghost town that time of year. I will certainly post some more information once it is available…

Around 140 people attended 18 different sessions that focused on technology and inclusiveness. Topics ranged from designing learning spaces to web technology to mobile devices. Derek Featherstone opened up the day with a great keynote (last minute sub for Joe Clark who had to cancel on account of illness) which I think left everyone with loads to think about for the day. There were students, staff, and faculty in attendance as well as a good number of off campus visitors.

I presented with Antonia Palmer (formerly of LT3 soon to be in Distance Education) on adopting new web technologies with an accessible mind. Our presentation notes are available in the usual place for my presentations.

All the presentations were recorded so both audio and video will be available but it will probably be a couple weeks before they are all online. I will post more when they are ready.

Just a brief note: Day 1 of TODCon 8 has wrapped up things for the day. The day opened with Derek Featherstone providing the keynote followed by some great sessions and discussion. I managed to get into a few sessions but the discussion in the halls is just as informative at TODCon. Scott Fegette has pretty much spent the day chatting with folks about everything Adobe. Tomorrow is a Dreamweaver 8 birds of a feather with folks from Adobe to start the day. Looking forward to that.

Good thing I have until Sunday to polish up my presentations! ;)

Got this on a list today:

“We have been working hard on a Course Scheduler web application for the University of Colorado at Denver. We are now in our beta phase and are looking for feedback from other designers and developers. If you ahve any spare time, take a look at http://courses.cudenver.edu. We are looking for comments related to usability, browser compatibility, and accessibility (although it is under Accessibility review right now).”

Go have a look and give them some feedback. At first glance its rather pretty and Web 2.0-ish… but I think some of the functionality is disabled. Plus there isn’t even a doctype the W3 validator can read in the code. Too bad, it looks good but it’s ugly underneath.

Adobe has released a new AJAX framework called Spry through their Labs site. It is a pretty slick implementation of AJAX but it is very much a first release and they are looking for feedback:

“The Spry framework for Ajax is a JavaScript library for web designers that provides functionality that allows designers to build pages that provide a richer experience for their users. It is designed to bring Ajax to the web design community who can benefit from Ajax, but are not well served by other frameworks.”

Take a look at the overview by Paul Gubbay. From looking at the tutorials Spry offers a real simple way for AJAX newbs to get a feel for the technology, just be careful about using it on production sites at the moment as I don’t think the demos are accessible as yet. Maybe we will see some Hijax in the next version ;)

Go give it a shot, try the tutorials, and give them feedback. This is pretty cool.

As mentioned in a number of places, Dreamweaver 8.02 update is available and you can read all the details on the release notes. The two big fixes are:

• a fix for SQL injections
• a fix for active content (Flash and the IE ActiveX issue)

A quick note about the fix for active content. It automagically creates a javascript and drops it in a ‘Script’ (if you already have one in lower case ’s’ it goes there) directory on your site.

As well as drops in a JS call infront of your object. I am not a js guy so I can’t go through what it does but looks like it essentially is Adobe’s recommended work around. I don’t see this as being as clean as the simple fix I looked at a few weeks ago but DW does do this for you by default so at least you don’t have to think about it anymore for new sites. Which is good.

update: You should read Tom Muck’s post on problems with 8.02 if you are thinking about this update. Read the technotes. Oh and the ActiveX fix in 8.02 might not work in all IE installs.

Chatting with Derek and venting about issues that have come up in the day-to-day related to log file and traffic analysis, I have come up with my catch phrase for that pretty much sums up my thoughts on the whole thing with regards to web development/design/etc: know your audience, not your web site. This new ‘mantra’ of mine comes from a few discussions recently that are motivated this new found obsession with web stats that seems to pop up (maybe thanks to Mint,Measuremap, and Analytics ) and studying user traffic on your web site.

The intent of the whole know your audience, not your web site thought is to be a reminder about the importance of the audience over the numbers found on the server. It is my mantra for the summer.

Know your audience

A quick search for that phrase on Google will give you a load of results. Knowing your audience is the key to any presentation, written or multimedia or in person. Getting to know your audience can be achieved using a number of different approaches from straight assumption based on anecdote to observational study (usability studies). Does the value of this really need to be explained? It seems like a no-brainer besides the little problem of how do you get to know them.

The answer appears to be simple: watch the site traffic patterns and see what content the users are going to. If we get real tricky with something like Analytics or Mint we can look at how long they have been on that page too. What does that actually tell you about your audience? Not much I think. It tells you more about your web site than anything else. If you look at your page and see that people are going to this one page a lot but are spending very little time there it could be that:

1. Your content has a popular keyword in it that ranks high in search results so people go to that page, scan it, move on.
2. Your content is well written and people just scan and get what they need.
3. The page sucks and people think they have the right place but the page sucks so much they just leave.
4. I could go on.

The point is you really have no idea why people are leaving your page. They could be happy with it, hate it, or not even looking for that page. You don’t know unless you know what audience that page is supposed to cater too and what that audience is looking for.

Know not your web site

I am by no means saying that log files and traffic analysis should be ignored. What I am saying is that the emphasis should be on the audience and what they want first, your web site should be studied only once you have a good grasp on who these people are. Traffic analysis and assessment of value with regards to web content as a key part of a pro-active approach to your web site content management is essentially voodoo.

The value of this data comes from being able to study patterns of usage over time and figure out if a site you have put a lot of resources into generates the traffic to justify the expense. If it doesn’t maybe you need to ask your audience what is wrong? It may be nothing and you really should ask.

“I want to know my audience”

First you need to identify your audiences. Pick your primary, secondary, tertiary audiences – sure you can have more than one audience in those categories but it is critical you identify them. Next you want to solicit feedback from those audiences and assign weight to those responses relative to their status as primary, secondary, or tertiary. Just be sure to get feedback from more than just a few otherwise your information could be a little skewed one way or another.

You don’t need too do it but a usability study is invaluable if you can get enough participants from your primary audience at least. If you have a diverse primary audience like say the UW home page than try to get a couple from each group. I will post more about how to do a test at UW in the future. Really, just make the effort to get to identify and get to know them as your audiences will appreciate it and from that you can better utilize your server data.

This is my whole motivation around doing the usability study of the home page at least once a year. I want to observe people using the page, hear from them their thoughts, see their reactions to links and images. From a small group of them I can start to see patterns and hopefully identify things that need to fixed. Also, I hope to be able to better anticipate features that might make their experience better. I want to you, the audience, as best as I can.

Cross-posted on my personal blog.

If you have a few minutes take a look at Durham College’s web site and then drop by the design blog and tell them what you think—of their current site.I am not entirely sure if they have a before and after shot but maybe you nice folks that read this blog can bug them about that ;) They are looking for feedback on their current design and what can be improved. It might be especially valuable for students and others that have no idea what or where Durham College is to give them feedback.

Speaking of which I am pretty much out of time to pretty this place up for May 1st’s reboot…

update: need to learn to read email better, I have fixed the wording to reflect that they are looking for feedback on their current site that hasn’t been redesigned yet.

There are relatively few sites on campus that use Flash but they are starting to show up more and more. CPA has a couple pages and I want to make sure the Flash ran smoothly with IE 7 and soon IE 6 when the security update is applied. Basically because Microsoft lost to Eolas over the plug-in patent they have made some changes which means Flash or other embeded objects need to be activated by the user before anything is loaded. It’s fun, really it is.

Techniques out there

There are a number of techniques out there which has made deciding on which one to use confusing. Microsoft, Adobe, and there are some nice standards friendly ideas floating around along with the unobtrusive flash objects. This is by no means an exhaustive list either… but the one I like is posted on Beakdal.com and created by Jason Baker. It’s called the activateActiveX and all it requires is that you include some JS in your head. Check out the site for the details on how it works.

A gotcha if you use the head version of activateActiveX: onload

Using this simple fix I ran into a problem. If you are using nifty corners you can’t use the head version… it appears the onload in both scripts conflicts with each other (guessing you need to be careful with multiple onload usage in DOM scripting). Not being a js guy I don’t want to try and figure out exactly why, I just want a way to make this work. It didn’t take me too long to figure out I need to use the version for the footer—I really hate calling in my js in the footer but it works. I likely would have figured this out sooner if I read the site properly and wasn’t so stubborn with the footer.

In the future…

Why did I use this fix? Because I can add a call to my include for my scripts and that is all… no having to find each page with Flash and fix it. This is so simple I don’t see why I wouldn’t use it. In the future something like UFO over the default Dreamweaver code might be attractive although it appears accessibility wise the method used by Dreamweaver 8 might still be ideal even though it triggers a validation error.

Update: It appears April 11th (today) is the day it starts, Flash sites be ready!

I have disabled the CSS on this blog for Get Naked Day on April 5th. This is what the real UW CLF is all about, you strip the style and we all look identical. Hope you enjoy my nakedness as it demonstrates proper XHTML, good structure and semantic mark-up.

If you are wondering what the underpinnings of accessible design are—you are looking at it today.

note: comment submission seems broken… working on it. Fixed.

April 5, 2006 – 10:50pm: Clothes are put back on… enough nakedness for one year ;)

Over the past few months I have been trying out different JavaScript based applications to monitor site traffic. The three I have looked at so far are Measuremap (recently purchased by Google), Google Analytics, and MapSurface. I have written a bit about Analytics, I have haven’t had much to say about Measuremap yet (I like it but it is only for blogs really), but MapSurface is just cool.

Andy Budd has a great review on his site if you are interested in knowing more. If you want to try it out just hit ctrl-x on Windows or alt/option-x on OS X after you load this page. You will then see how low the traffic is on this site but also how cool this application is as well.

It only measures the page you are looking at, not all the pages on the site combined and all you XML readers don’t get counted either.

There was a rather pleasant meeting of minds organized by Mark Morton in Lt3 with one simple agenda item: podcasts and what is going on around campus? The short answer is that a lot is going on around campus but nothing organized as yet. There will definitely be lots to blog about in the future. For now though… what does it all mean?

The seminar last week in Toronto made some really good points. What I took from it was:

• Technology introduced to the classroom needs a reason to be there, using the technology for the sake of using it just does not work.
• In most cases podcasts are well received and used by students who appear to benefit from it.
• Podcasts learning curve is flat enough for most people to take advantage of from both the content creator and listener point of view.
• Podcasts aren’t only about recording and distributing lectures.
• Senior level buy-in is important.

From my point of view I want to think about how podcasts can be used in communications and marketing. Is there something we can offer the UW community as a whole that is worth at least trying out? I think there is.

There are a number of issues however:

• Accessibility – text alternatives, are they required in all cases?
• Copyright – although if you are worried about the copyright of content in your lectures maybe you should just avoid the podcast altogether ;)
• Being evaluated by the quality of the podcast – again if that is a concern don’t do it.

A few more issues are likely not listed there but generally at this point in time podcasting should be for those that want to do it and I hope more people try it out. Accessibility is probably the biggest concern though, I am working on a podcasts and accessibility post so look for that shortly.

There has been some talk in certain higher web people mail lists recently that suggest Contribute Publishing Server is no more. Some have heard this from the sales team at the new Adobe. Just for the record, I have heard from the Contribute dev team and they assure me CPS is alive and well. Which is good.

It is good because it is CPS that makes Contribute 3 much more useful. Sure you can live without it but if you have a server end controller like CPS that allows you to access certain things through an API you can do a lot of things.

What things? Well hopefully in the next month or so CPA will be using the API and some PHP to generate RSS feeds from the stories we publish. With the news release site we actually parse mailman archives and pull them into a database. This works but only because news releases go out to a mail list. For our news stories that are featured on our new CPA page we have had to get a bit more creative.

Stories are published with Contribute 3—and we are just trying to figure out how to automate things. First we needed to get the site up and have someone maintain it. Then we can figure out how to automate certain things.

Besides Joe Clark’s Failed Redesigns part 1 and part 2, the Globe and Mail has gone through a major redesign that I think is pretty cool, Collylogic is showing us all a really cool way to deal with width-based layout, and when designing how do you do up site maps for web applications?

There is an awful lot going on so far in 2006… I have a new ‘beta’ skin for the home page based on a lot of other stuff and a little JS. Collylogic’s width based layout just inspired me though. Stay tuned.

Just thought I would take a look at the beta 2 version of IE 7, really looking forward to it as well. Well gosh golly gee:

I think I know what is going on there. IE 5.5 does the same thing as well as certain configurations of IE 6. Not sure whether I should be fixing my CSS for it or not, but I guess I need to pay close attention to it.

For those trying it out, be sure to go to the IE 7: Beta 2 checklist page. Loads of information. Don’t forget to fill out bugs for the IE team too.

update: Looks like the folks at Project VII have documented the bugs I see. The IE team have a post explaining the CSS changes in IE 7 beta 2 – and that is a nice list of fixes. Hopefully they will take care of the new ones that have come up ;)

I was going to list a few predictions for 2006 and then link to a bunch more… but that would be boring. There are a load of predictions for 2006 in the web world out there and I will stick some in the cool stuff category. One thing for sure—there will be some real great stuff developed but I wonder if the web things people use everyday will improve or not? Like student registration systems, banking websites, buying books, searching for course information, etc.

What I plan for 2006 is more JS, XML, XSLT, PHP, mySQL, Adobe tools in my dock, and OS X.5 hopefully ;) What does that mean for the users of sites I am responsible for? Well so far my goals:

• searching for people, places, and things and UW will become much more useful—but must be careful to not provide the information overload.
• a much better designed, elastic width UW home page designed (not sure if it will ever see production but I am working on it now).
• news and information from CPA will come in many forms, maybe even with some podcasts.
• more images. Someone please hook me up with the UW photography club! I would love to feature their photos and credit them ;)
• ..and for me: organize myself better—not in a Getting Things Done sense, just in a ‘i want to see my desktop’ way.

With that out of the way… bring on 2006! Five goals that should be easy to achieve. Oh, and check out who made Joe Clark’s Failed Redesigns list. Its good.

Its mid-December, 2005 is pretty much over, so how did I do with my predictions from last January? Well lets take a look…

sIFR

This one is easy. We use it on the home page but I failed to get it included in the CLF template. Why? It is easy but it strays from the ‘Keep It Simple Stupid’ I was going for. It’s not hard to add though, if you are interested all you have to do is let me know.

Essential tools for web development and web management

Think I was beating around the bush on this one. Basically I was pretty against a Content Management System and I still am. What has changed is that CPA has basically created one. More on that in 2006 ;) As for tools, in 2005 the essential tools:

Applications

• Studio 8 + Contribute Publishing Server
• TextWrangler
• NetNewWire Lite – to keep on top of all that is going on.

…and one that has squeaked in this term:

• Zend Studio for PHP

Languages

• PHP
• Javascript
• XHTML
• XML
• JavaScript

Servers

• LAMP – Linux Apache MySQL

No version control in 2005… lets hope for 2006.

LAMP/Web application development

LAMP has been where all our work is done in 2005. Just a great platform that is primarily responsible for the development of most of the fall 2005 projects. The flexibility is perfect for web development.

Web apps on campus though? Leave that to the users but I think a lot of PHP based applications have appeared. Even Ruby on Rails is making an inroad.

What about 2006?

Just thinking about that now… I will have a post in January for that ;) For now check out these predictions already posted from others:

• Bold Predictions for the savvy designer, 2006 edition
• Web Design and Development Trends for 2006

More will be added as they appear.

I have updated web.uwaterloo with an article comparing Google Analytics with AWstats. There will be more documentation posted on or around the 15th as well with regards to the search and a few other tid bits including a podcast for the WatITis conference sessions. If you are counting down the days of this festive period for the big day of presants, check out out the 24 ways – the advent calendar for web geeks.

Vincent has also fixed the case sensitive problem we were having with tracking search terms. Its now case insensitive so the term tracker should be better represent what people are searching for.

…and we have more than enough people signed up for usability testing. We are just in the middle of it now. There will likely be some more testing in January and we will be in contact with those who already signed up first before we go looking for more. Thanks everyone who signed up and participated so far.

The main site for CPA’s web development has been updated. As part of the update I am working on updating content and streamlining access to that information. There is also a monthly schedule for updates and a better set up along the left for RSS feeds.

The big update is in the search documentation. We have added a dynamic graph of the most popular search terms and the total number of queries, accurate to the moment you load the page. If we find the page is popular we will have to change that.

Update: If you go the search documentation page you can grab the excel sheets of 101 169 search terms/phrases and the number of results in UW dir, UW keyword, and Google. Enjoy.

I am a little late for the November 1st deadline of the Fall CSS reboot but better late than never. Behold the new skin for the web dev blog. I am pretty happy with this design that evolved from the CLF and was refined by Vincent Marta and myself. Big thanks to Vincent for the work he has done so far this term. There are still a few little things to do but more on that later.

What a tough decision this term. I interviewed three great students on Wednesday and I had to rank them yesterday. Each had great qualities and no two were the same. So who did I choose? Well they should already know as I have ranked them ;) but for the other two, I would hire you both if I could. There is just no space and no budget—there is plenty of work mind you…

The Co-op process at UW is great though. They (Co-op and Career Services) handles everything, all I have to do is post the job, review some CV’s, interview and meet some great students, and then make a decision. The hardest part is actually keeping up with them during the work term.

Anyway… hope to introduce next term’s student soon. I also hope to showcase the work of Spring 05 (Areeb) and Fall 05’s (Vincent) students soon too. Stay tuned.

Day 3’s round up is a couple days late due to plane travel and overall being tired. The theme of day 3 for me was the Dreamweaver AJAX conversation and the conversations it created. First off lets start with Dreamweaver 8.

Dreamweaver 8

There were next to no real in depth sessions for Dreamweaver 8 really at all at MAX. That was too bad simply because of all the improvements that the team has done with standards, accessibility, and rendering. CSS is really simple with DW 8 and people need to see that. Steph’s presentation on CSS could have been a 3 hour hands on and it would have filled the room.

Randy Mode Rendering

Well you heard here first, DW 8 rendering is officially named ‘Randy Mode Rendering’ after careful consultation with fellow DWTF member Steph. What is it you ask? It’s a hybrid of IE and standards. As I am starting to figure out, it can really help you cut down on hacks (or maybe I use them too much?) by having decent rendering to remove the reliance on browser testing and you only viewing in one browser. If it renders properly in DW 8 it is likely to render in IE 6 without too much hassle. There are a few things DW 8 does better than IE 6 but it doesn’t appear to be worse. What this has to do with MAX is that I finally got to meet Randy Edmunds, the man behind the rendering and it just popped into my head ;)

AJAX in DW 8-ish?

There was a nicely conducted round table conversation on AJAX and DW 8 on Wednesday morning. The DW team gave a closer look to what they demo’d at the sneak peak and then asked questions about how any future version of DW should handle AJAX. It was pretty informative but I think some work needs to be done on techniques used and such.

Also, there is some potential in Flash 8.5… more on that in a future posting. Shall work on a total summary next week. I need to think a bit on what I got out of the conference. Generally though I met some great people, caught up with some folks I met last year, and left feeling inspired.

Day 2’s round up is being written in the middle of day 3 because, well, Disney Land was a lot of fun last night. It was a really long day but loads of fun so here it is.

Keynote

MAX 2005 is about Flash, which isn’t great to me but it does give an opportunity to check out new features. The Keynote covered a range of demo’s using the theme of Studio 8 match up. It was well acted and a lot of fun to watch. The star of the Keynote was Adobe Aftereffects and not because it is a really powerful and cool video editing software, not for me, it was the user interface that impressed me. It is just amazing. Dig around Flickr, I will update this post with some links later.

Sessions

For the day I will have to rank the sessions at a mediocre. Why? Well there is so much Flex/Flash talk it draws tears. It is a cool application and really demonstrate some power and simplicity that I have never seen in business application development. ‘Flex’ is flexible… just I don’t use it. But Java coders rejoice, with MM going to ECMA your java skills are wanted and given what SAP has done with Flex you can count on some big contracts in the private sector. More on that in the summary.

The Contribute team did their Birds of a Feather in the evening and that was really the next best part of the day. Finally got to meet a couple more members of the team that weren’t in New Orleans last year and learned about some seriously large and complex Contribute 3 deployments. Really impressive. Mike Hazard just has to give me all the custom code he has done for CPS ;)

Sneak Peak OK but Disneyland made my day

I wasn’t overly impressed with the sneak peaks but only because there were just some little things shown and what I really wanted after that keynote was ‘here is our new UI.’ Still, entertaining and fun.

For the big night out Macromedia rent