Clear off the table

[ taking some time off the ongoing mysql->mongo series ]

Been visualising data a lot lately.
Scatter charts, realtime indicators, good ol' line charts and, of course, tables.
It's really easy to fill the screen with loads of information, screaming colours and as many numbers floating around the screen. This makes orientation difficult for the user, especially non-technical users.

Some of our users simply need insights and recommendations, but need the graphs for credibility.

This is a great post from darkhorseanalytics explaining how a good table looks like. [hint - not your good ol' office 1998 excel highlight table]

http://darkhorseanalytics.com/blog/clear-off-the-table/

Reading time #3

Once again, some nice reference stuff to read and enjoy.

First, a must read for every dev manager/ architect: I bet you over-engineered your startup - Try and read the comments as well - There's one I really like about backbone.js.

Here's something nice: An app for bullying reports. I think municipalities and local police departments should implement such apps, to see 'hot spots' of violence, and also make reporting a lot easier. A mobile phone does so many things, it's about time that it would help the community keep themselves safe.

My friend Moshe Kaplan from dSero with a nice article about SEO in Amazon AWS news.

Some new frameworks and tips:
- KineticJS makes 2d drawing easy, and is also pretty fast.
- A wonderful tutorial for creating clouds with css3. Opens your mind for lots and lots more ideas (Try use faces instead of clouds...)

Another useful UX related article: Overhauling a UI without upsetting the users (Thanks Itai:)).

And finally, a thought: The big tech companies have learned from the pharma industry: Since anyone can develop everything right now, and manufacturing is easy, intellectual property is the only way to make sure you have control over the market.
And unlike the pharma industry, you don't need to be a scientist, and spend years of FDA approval to get your product out there. Microsoft are buying patents from AOL, Apple is suing everyone, Samsung counter sues, and seems like the big techs' legal budget is going to be bigger than their R&D.

This is going to kill the small and medium businesses in the industry, unless legislation will somehow be able to protect them. Otherwise, we might as well give up our jobs, or relocate to China, where copyright rules are... More flexible :))

Reading time #2!

It's time for some more links to inspirational stuff...

This 2009 article at wired is one of my favorites. It talks about how 'good enough' easily beats 'great' in so many aspects. Whenever approaching a big design or architectural task, I tend to go back to this article a little bit. People tend to over design stuff, and try to come out with a Lamborghini (That costs like one to develop, sell and maintain), when all their customers want is a Mazda...

If you're always looking for 'the next thing' in dev technology and new stacks, you have to visit the changelog regularly. Lots of emerging technologies, useful libraries and code - All the goodies us geeks need.

For all you non-coders out there, here's a great article on starting a tech company without coding knowledge, and, this great article by @martingryner shows the other side of entrepreneurs recruiting a tech co-founder.

The new iPad paves the way for laptops, PCs and tablets with astronomical resolutions. As resolution gets higher, sites with dynamic adaptation to screen resolution need to scale differently. A simple reflow is not enough - Reflow your site, and your font size will be too small to read. Scale your site, and graphics quality degrades. This article gives some pointers about redesigning your website for retina displays.

And, finally, here's an article comparing between the two leading cross platform mobile development SDKs - Phonegap vs. Titanium. If you're considering cross platform app development, you should read this one.

Simple Gallery - The next phase

Been thinking a lot about my Simple Gallery Management Project.
So far, it's been downloaded ~200 times (130 for version 2.0), and after implementing ~6 projects with it, I'm thinking about taking it to the next step, and making it an even simpler, more generic CMS.
This means generalizing the database, redoing the management portal into a cool, hierarchy-like content portal.

I'll still be using HTML/ JS/ PHP (For json API)/ MySQL as a platform, simply because the cheapest hosting services are under that platform. I could implement it with node.js and mongodb, but that would be overkill. Only when I implement a simple social network, then I might use these platforms - There are few services (Like dotcloud) which do node.js and mongodb hosting, and they are not meant for the SOHO customer requiring our services (myartichoke).

This also got me thinking - What about social networks? Does anyone really need to implement a social network anymore? The 2 major risers in the social network battlefield these days (instagram and pinterest) are less about social, and more about sharing and following, rather than full fledged social networks. This means that these social networks have the 'core' social features (contacts, feed, responses and likes) built into them, but not much more - Facebook and Google+ have a whole envelope of features which try to integrate the web into their sites.

Of course, all these networks also have RESTful web services, allowing for third party developers to integrate into their network as well. This has also become a common practice.

I've also considered multi tag support, but came to realize that I'm using this feature as a 'category' (news/ objects/ shows etc.) when implementing sites - That is why I'll probably change 'tags' to 'categories', and maybe add multi tag support later.

In scope as well is making the GUI a little more '2d' and consistent. Adding an integrated toolbar per item (Like twitter's), maybe convince my wife to design some buttons for me :))

I'll update soon, once the new version begins to show signs of life.

Reading time!

Part of my work week is dedicated to reading and learning.
Most of my reading these days is actually UI/ GUI related stuff, as we're closing a large project at work, and are going through some final GUI iterations.

The 'Little Big Details' blog is dedicated to small but neat and significant UI features found over the web/ mobile world.

This blog, of presentation expert Jan Schultink (Idea Transplant) contains all sorts of tips and notes about presentations, presentation design etc.

Wired's webmonkey has some neat notes in their UI/ UX section.

Here's a neat book by Google about web design.

Terry Martin's great blog got some great insights about design, tech and startups.

And, finally, some management stuff:
My company's COO is a big believer in Theory Of Constraints, and has started to implement this project management methodology in our company (Time To Know).

Basically, TOC works by identifying the project chain and building blocks, trying to deal with each building block as fast as you can (Which also means using as many resources in parallel on each building block to speed up the task), and daily reviews to find the critical (Longest) chain, and speed it up.

This method, though counter intuitive sometimes, has been implemented in the project I'm leading, with wonderful result. My team (~20 UI/ GUI/ Developers/ Testers) have sped up our project delivery times, management overhead is lower, and we're actually enjoying the process...

If you're managing a medium to large size project, my suggestion would be to give it a try. Though it takes some commitment, it seems to be working well for me... As well as reduce original cost in ~30%.

A link to our TOC consultancy company would be added to this post soon.