Who has the best practices for web app design and what do they do to make world-class applications? Jared will share the latest research in the techniques and methodologies that can make a huge difference.
Among support for a number of HTML 5 specifications and updates to improve the tab experience, Fireox 3.5 now supports CSS Web Fonts. From Datamation:
One of the most visible changes that Firefox 3.5 will enable for Web developers comes by way of support for CSS Web Fonts.
“When you think about it, Web designers have had to play with the same ten fonts that they could reliably ensure were on everyone’s computer,” Beltzner said.
Beltzner explained that the way fonts have worked in the past is that a Web developer specified a particular font that needed to be resident on a user’s computer. If that font wasn’t present the user would get a default font. With CSS Web Fonts that model changes and developers can now specify any font they want by providing a reference to where the font is available.
“You can just say ‘use my handwriting font, here’s the font and it’s a 20kb file,’” Beltzner said. “So when the browser hits the page, we pull down the file and render the page in that font. When you leave the page, we dispose of the font.”
The video from our last WebPub meeting is now online at TechTV and iTunes. Due to some technical difficulties the recording starts a few seconds in to Jared’s presentation, however I’m sure you’ll find the content extremely enjoyable! Many thanks to the MIT HyperStudio and IS&T for sponsoring the podcast.
Here’s the summary of the topic covered:
Web Apps: The Collision of Design and Business with Jared Spool
Who has the best practices for web app design and what do they do to make world-class applications? Jared will share the latest research in the techniques and methodologies that can make a huge difference.
I was surprised to find that email is deader than ever among teens. As more of their parents and teachers are getting on Facebook (or MySpace), they see little reason to email with anyone. Thus, email is increasingly needed for having an account on various sites and for getting access to or sending attachments. But even when teens do use email for “work”, they do not use it for social purposes.
…Many teens have ZERO interest in interacting with teachers on social network sites, but there are also quite a few who are interested in interacting with SOME teachers there. Still, this is primarily a social space and their interactions with teachers are primarily to get more general advice and help. In some ways, its biggest asset in the classroom is the way in which its not a classroom tool and not loaded this way. Given that teens don’t Friend all of their classmates, there are major issues in terms of using this for groupwork because of boundary issues.
…They don’t use Twitter. When asked, teens always say that they’ll use their preferred social network site (or social media service) FOREVER as a sign of their passion for it now. If they expect that they’ll “grow out of it”, it’s a sign that the service is waning among that group at this very moment. So they’re not a good predictor of their own future usage.
…Do they really care about/use school library websites? Twitter? Pageflakes? Libguides? or only if teacher insists?
Nope, they don’t. All but Twitter are categorized as school tools and are only used when absolutely necessary and Google won’t suffice.
The product of four years of development, Alpha is an engine for answers. Its ambition is to delve into “all the knowledge in the world,” Wolfram says, to find and calculate information. Though Alpha’s interface evokes Google ― whose co-founder Sergey Brin once spent a summer interning for Wolfram ― it’s more like the anti-Google.
Type in a query for a statistic, a profile of a country or company, the average airspeed of a sparrow ― and instead of a series of results that may or may not provide the answer you’re looking for, you get a mini dossier on the subject compiled in real time that, ideally, nails the exact thing you want to know. It’s like having a squad of Cambridge mathematicians and CIA analysts inside your browser.
Type in “Pluto” and Alpha calculates the dwarf planet’s distance from Earth at that very instant. Bang out a series of letters like “ACTCGTC” and Alpha recognizes it as genetic code and tells you what strand of DNA that particular gene lives on and what we know about it. Wolfram has licensed ― or created ― a whole library of databases and massaged them so the information is pliable. (To date, they include Wikipedia, the US Census, and “about nine-tenths of what you’d see on the main shelves of a reference library,” he says.) Combined with the near-magical abilities of Mathematica, Alpha is a powerful computational engine that can effortlessly answer queries that no one has asked of a search engine before.
Consider a question like “How many Nobel Prize winners were born under a full moon?” Google would find the answer only if someone had previously gone through the whole list, matched the birthplace of each laureate with a table of lunar phases, and posted the results. Wolfram says his engine would have no problem doing this on the fly. “Alpha makes it easy for the typical person to answer anything quantitatively,” he asserts.
I’m testing out a new media browser called KIDO’Z with my son, and think its good enough to pass along here. I found out about it through TechCrunch, here’s the blurb from their newsletter:
KIDO’Z is a pretty nifty Adobe AIR-powered desktop browser app that gives kids a safe and fun environment to play games, watch videos and/or visit pre-approved websites. When you first install the AIR app as a parent, you can configure the age and gender of your offspring as well as your location and preferred language (there are 17 available).
What’s nice is that all these settings are taken into account at a content level, so KIDO’Z automatically caters the media it think is most suited for your kid(s) at first launch. As a parent you get password-protected access to an admin panel where you can add more or restrict access to certain content, set limited time frames for usage, and so on.
All content only shows up when a KIDO’Z team member approved the content beforehand, and to add more layers of security all scripts, file downloads, pop-ups and any other attempts that could lead to content which has not been approved, are thoroughly blocked.
To use the app, kids won’t need to know how to read or write since obviously the whole UI is quite visual of nature, and very colorful to boot. The main menu of the KIDO’Z browser currently consists of three categories: games, videos and websites. All media can be opened and viewed inside the app’s interface, and in fact kids can only leave the KIDO’Z environment by exiting the browser altogether. CEO Gai Havkin tells me the tool will later be extended to a closed network of communication tools, including e-mail and instant messaging features (see last screenshot), making it more of a social experience but without the security and privacy hazards of existing services.
