vesuvius said:

current exchange rate is £1=$1.58, but I hear you.

 

I've been saving up to get a bunch of .NET 4.0 books. It's a Bl**dy joke!

 

Amazon.com

 

Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4.0 Platform, Fifth Edition by Andrew Troelsen (Hardcover - Mar. 15, 2010)

Buy new: $59.99 $37.79

 

Available for Pre-order

Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping.

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Amazon.co.uk

Pro C# 2010 And The .NET 4.0 Platform 5th Edition (Hardcover)

by Andrew Troelsen (Author)

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I usually get my english books from amazon.de... prices are in EUR and are still a rip-off when compared to USD, but usually way less expensive than whay I get from amazon.co.uk. If you don't qualify for the free shipping, you may want to take a look: the book you mentioned goes for 37.95 EUR.

DCMonkey said:

CreamFilling512 said:

*snip*

Speaking of search, there's something I noticed in the demos of WP7's search button. It never seemed to actually put the focus in the search text entry box. The demonstrator always had to tap in it to get the keyboard to pop up. Hopefully that's just something wrong with current builds and will be fixed by release.

I may be wrong, but I don't think the gesture is related to focus: tapping the search box could be what brings the virtual keyboard on screen... I guess that with a physical keyboard you could just start typing.

That's the kind of problems that surface when the hardware specs are flexible...

ZippyV said:

giovanni said:

*snip*

I think some products are going to die like OpenOffice.org and MySQL. In Oracle's view there is no reason to keep those projects alive.

I don't even dare to imagine the anathema something like that would bring on Oracle's head.

Especially dropping MySQL - thus breaking the LAMP model - would provide them with enough bad press to last them a generation or two. I think it's more likely that they might try to tie their name in somewhere...

Bass said:

figuerres said:

*snip*

What's interesting is most AI researchers in that survey think it's easier to make an intelligence can produce nobel-prize quality work then pass the Turing test.

That's becuase, in order to pass the Turing test, a computer would need what we call "common sense", something we acquire over the years by interacting with others and with our physical environment and that is hard even just to define.

Computers are so sensory (and emotion) deprived nowadays that they cannot undergo this kind of training. Yet.

kettch said:

Blue Ink said:

*snip*

Is it quite so bad to make it different than anything else? This whole touch thing is very different than anything we've had to deal with before. Of course "yuck" isn't a good response, so "different, but without the yuck" would be good.

 

I second the request to see what the mothership would like us to be doing with touch based UX. We've seen that touch can work well at a small scale on phones, and at a larger scale on Surface. The only thing missing is at the scale that tablets are made in.

That's an old rule that I have problems to break. The way I see it, the more an application uses familiar concepts, icons and layouts the more it will feel intuitive to the user. Things get more extreme when an application implements some well understood concept: in that case any difference will be perceived as a -100 points hurdle.

To make this clearer: if an application can be seen as a file explorer, it better resemble Windows Explorer or users will notice the difference every time they switch between the app and Windows Explorer.

Maybe I'm just being old fashioned on this... or may be that the whole touch/multitouch/pen thing is still somewhat blurred. Some guidelines by the UX gurus would be quite welcome.

Charles said:

Blue Ink said:

*snip*

Isn't there a platform SDK for the iPad? Why spend the cycles to port the app's UI/UX to a world it wan't designed for? Write a new UI layer based on what the iPad APIs offer you (or confine you to, depending on your perspective). You can still recycle your businsess algorithms and data strategies. This sounds like a UI makeover, not a complete re-write (but this depends on how you originally designed the application, of course....). This is a native app, right?

 

C

I can see how the title may have been misleading... I got to my senses in time to delete the long elucubration that made it make some sense... sorry about that.

Yes, the application is native, but the preliminary plan is to port it to C#/WPF. Hopefully we can get a decent deadline that allows us to use 4.0.

@kettch: yes, that would work, except that rearranging controls that way makes the application completely different from everything else. The most common reaction to the prototype we made (me included) was "Yuck!".

Making everything rearrangeable is also an option: users can decide how much "yuckiness" they can bear...

figuerres said:

Well i would say spend some time looking at what the app is supposed to be doing.

and look at how the users can do that.

 

possibly have the app provide two modes: classic and touch

in classic it looks and works like it does now.

in touch mode the UI should be what works.

 

that might mean forget the ribbon / toolbar and even menu items possibly.

 

make some things larger and make them dragable

 

try puting things on paper, like paper cutouts of parts of the app or parts of the ui

 

then use that to try and discover the right ui.

 

like drag a customer to a box to get a details view.

or put large ish sort buttons at the top of the list or tree view.

 

invite the customer to help you understand what works. explain to them that this is not the same old thing, that it's new to you and them. that you need to understand the best way to do this.

 

like when i start any new code i ask the users and the managers to explain the process to me as if i was a new hire. i explain that i have to learn the job so that i can then teach the computer how to do it to help them.

 

 

 

Yep, that's where we started from (except that I used Sketchflow instead of the paper bits... more to try it out than to save the Rain Forest, but whatever)...

The issue I'm having is that all I could find about touch focuses mostly on the size of the targets (as Harlequin correctly pointed out) and seems to disregard the fact that the hand provides a sizable viewing obstacle. I can understand how this would be a minor problem with a touch screen (where the fingers are normal to the screen surface), but with a tablet held on the user's lap, the most natural position seems to be with the hand almost flat on the screen. Bummer.

Your idea of having more modes is scary... but it's probably the most sensible approach. Thanks

Maybe it's just a coincidence, but one of our most conservative customers startled us two weeks ago asking us to revamp an old application "so that it looks good on one of those tablet thingies".

After straightening out that they weren't thinking of the iPad specifically, and that just any tablet would do, I started to work on that thinking we were in for a quick buck: the application is as simple as it gets, with a toolbar, a treeview, a listview, a preview pane. Strikingly similar to Windows Explorer, Outlook Express or about a million other applications.

As soon as I started playing with the first prototype, I realized we were in trouble... the layout works great with a mouse, but is simply hopeless on a tablet if you are right-handed (like some 80-90% of the population):

- as you move your finger across the treeview, the palm covers the listview

- as you move your finger across the items in the listview, the palm covers the preview pane

- as you try different settings on the toolbar (now a ribbon), you can't always see the real-time preview too well as the hand is right over the best part of the window.

A quick fix was to reverse pretty much everything, with the ribbon at the bottom, the treeview on the right, the preview pane at the top. Now it doesn't require to keep hands and necks crooked at odd angles but... boys, it sucks. The layout is so unfamiliar that it takes a while to get used to, not to mention that it doesn't look like anything else in the OS.

I'm really stumped here... I don't know whether I can rely on the novelty of a few gestures to keep the users happy or I should take the sensible road and break every UX guidelines I know of. Suggestions?

It's always sad when a big name disappears... having cut my teeth on a VAX-11, I remember feeling a pang of nostalgia when Digital was absorbed by Compaq (now HP). For some reason, though, I don't think the Oracle-Sun deal will be that bad: as fas as I know Oracle and Sun don't overlap much, so I guess a lot of the product lines will remain active (and for what it's worth servers are still listed as "Sun Servers", "Sun Blades" and so forth).

From a programmer point of view, I can only hope that Oracle will bring some new life in Java... .NET needs some serious competition. Time will tell.

Yes, I get the same behavior (I don't have a google account either).

The solution is fairly simple: since you shouldn't need any scripting on google, you can just place google in your restricted sites list. Scripting is forbidden in that zone, so all that gimmick simply doesn't work.