This post has been kicking around in my head for a few weeks now, and I’ve only just found the time to finish it. The last few weeks have been very hectic, in fact, since I returned from Phoenix last weekend I have only spent a few hours at home! For most of the week I was up in London at the Future of Web Apps, that was quite enjoyable and I’ll be writing more about that later. Work aside, I have also been working on building some ActionScript classes which will allow easy interaction of some of the Amazon Web Services and starting to play with some things for Apollo. I also attended a brilliant Skillswap presented by Richard Rutter on the state of Typography which was surprisingly interesting. Anyway onto statistics…Over the past month, I think I have become addicted to statistics &endash; there, I have admitted it! Part of the reason, I think, is because of the rental car which I have been driving. Aside from the many facts and figures I could access on my fuel consumption and engine temperature, I also had a Garmin GPS device. Now this is an amazing little box of tricks, not only helping you get from a to b but also estimating the time to destination, current speed and compiling consolidated statistics of your average speed/times. It felt as if I was playing Project Gotham Racer!Within a few days I found myself getting a buzz if I managed to ‘beat’ the estimated arrival time, as well as trying to set new speed records (unfortunately the rental car seemed to be speed limited, which sent me looking for hills…). I wondered to myself what was different, all I could figure is that normally I wouldn’t have access to that kind of data, aside from the speedometer on the dashboard I have nothing which keeps track of my statistics last night. Now, driving around the lovely state of Arizona, I could instantly recall a wealth of information which I had accumulated – I liked this, it was somehow reassuring.One weekend I took a trip over to Las Vegas, spending most of my time on the MGM Grand poker tables, but taking the time out to see an IMAX movie of a US Air Force training exercise. From the AWAC control room, the supervising General had access to real-time data from many different aircraft. All of this data was represented on a 3D representation of the battlefield, with yet more statistics. Its weird but without lots of numbers on the screen, I’m pretty certain it would have looked much less impressive!So, why in a world where many designers preach simplicity and minimalism does it actually feel like a better experience when there is so much additional information at my fingertips?I think its a matter of relevance and importance. I found myself using my GPS to monitor my speed a lot more frequently than checking the temperature of my engine, because that particular piece of information was more relevant to my immediate situation, and also because changes to my speed were more immediately reflected. Also, with regard to driving, it is easily the most important piece of information.If we apply this same principle to interface design, the information presented should be both relevant and important. On a blog post for example, there is value in showing the date of a posting or what it has been tagged with, but there is significantly little value in providing information in perhaps showing the full profile of the poster (assuming blog posts usually come from a single author). Looking at something more technical, such as web reporting, the important pieces of information when monitoring a web site are usually bandwidth usage and page views, so these should be given prominence. Trivial (and often static) pieces of information such as the server’s operating system and processes should be removed from the interface or at least relegated to a secondary page.There is a lot to be said about simplicity, but there is also a lot to be said about providing the user with ample relevant information and feedback on their interactions. (more…)

This week, I managed to attend the Future of Web Apps conference in London. Having found last years conference a large source of inspiration, I had high hopes for this one, and I’m glad to say that it met most of them!Obviously, taking a one-day conference and making it a two-day conference means that you need to find double the amount of speakers. Often, you end up with a few big names and several sessions which could be described as filler. In the case of FOWA, the filler-effect was mostly avoided, though there were many 10-20 minute ’spotlight’ spots scattered throughout the two days, most were entertaining.The conference itself seemed to focus on three things in particular: Social Web Apps, Attention/Filtering and Starting Your Own Business. Being a corporate whore, one of those perhaps holds lesser interest to me but it was interesting to hear about it nonetheless. Plus, there were some great opportunities for networking with fellow web geeks; though, ironically, I managed to miss most of the people I wanted to meet!One thing I did like was the open mic slots - opening the stage to attendees’ to present on a topic of their choice. This can always be a bit hit or miss, but kudos to everyone who got up on stage and gave it a go. I think each of the sessions I watched taught an important lesson when it comes to doing a successful presentation:

• Always make sure your presentation has some kind of point, which the audience will appreciate. Messages like “Well, I started a business and bought all my employees laptops” and “We work remotely so don’t see each other” , delivered in an obituary tone don’t really educate the audience. They would much rather share your lessons learned from the above, rather than hear about which version of SVN you are using!
• If your presentation does have a point, is it meaningful and relevant to people/companies other than your own?
• The best approach is often to prepare your presentation in the pub the night before!
  • Always make sure your presentation has some kind of point, which the audience will appreciate. Messages like “Well, I started a business and bought all my employees laptops” and “We work remotely so don’t see each other” , delivered in an obituary tone don’t really educate the audience. They would much rather share your lessons learned from the above, rather than hear about which version of SVN you are using!
  • If your presentation does have a point, is it meaningful and relevant to people/companies other than your own?
  • The best approach is often to prepare your presentation in the pub the night before!

   Its hard to compare things to last years conference as in my mind they had much different themes. I was not really inspired this year and on the train home I found myself catching up on this week’s ‘24′ rather than designing my next web app. I think that had a lot to do with the content of many of the sessions - rather than grand presentations like Tom Coates’ excellent session from last years conference, it was more a case of “Hey, I built xyz.com, here is what I discovered…”, most of the sessions were re-treading the same ground rather than perhaps shining some light on a new topic or a new idea. Not that this was the fault of any of the presenters, they all did an excellent job. I think its more the general state of the industry - the AJAX buzz is over and it is no longer ‘cool’, its the norm. The same with things like tagging, filtering etc. Thankfully, there are still a few cool things on the horizon to get excited about, like Apollo!

 Its hard to compare things to last years conference as in my mind they had much different themes. I was not really inspired this year and on the train home I found myself catching up on this week’s ‘24′ rather than designing my next web app. I think that had a lot to do with the content of many of the sessions - rather than grand presentations like Tom Coates’ excellent session from last years conference, it was more a case of “Hey, I built xyz.com, here is what I discovered…”, most of the sessions were re-treading the same ground rather than perhaps shining some light on a new topic or a new idea. Not that this was the fault of any of the presenters, they all did an excellent job. I think its more the general state of the industry - the AJAX buzz is over and it is no longer ‘cool’, its the norm. The same with things like tagging, filtering etc. Thankfully, there are still a few cool things on the horizon to get excited about, like Apollo! (more…)

Today has been a fairly frustrating day, mainly because most of it has been spent following up on why some of our customers have been experiencing problems with our pages not loading properly. It turns out that these customers have one thing in common - they have all recently updated to Windows Vista… so what is going on?! It appears that updating to Vista has the potential to upset users using the Flash player. Here is what I’ve discovered so far:

• Windows Vista does not ship with any version of the Flash Player, so if you buy it in the stores and perform a clean install then you will need to grab the Flash player from Adobe and install it separately.
• Many OEM’s have refused to accept this, and are shipping hardware with both Vista and Flash pre-installed. As far as developers are concerned, there is no way of knowing which version of the player is being loaded, but its probably safe to assume it is a version 9 release.
• If you upgrade an existing install of Windows, you may break your Flash Player and have to reinstall. Last week Adobe released an updated version of the player, listing Windows Vista support in the feature list. If you have this version installed when you perform the update (9.0.28), then you should be fine. If you have an earlier version of Flash Player 9, then Flash web pages should still work, though you are obviously missing the Vista compatibility updates, whatever they may be. If you have an earlier version of the player, such as Flash Player 8, then the upgrade to Vista will somehow corrupt your player install. You will need to reinstall and the corrupted player will still register as installed to web pages using Flash (though it may not work).

I’ll post more updates as I get them, but at the moment its looking a bit messy!I am curious as to why Microsoft chose to ship Vista without Flash, or at least without ensuring that upgrading to the new OS doesn’t have any ill effects on browser plug-ins. I’m sure the conspiracy theorists will point to Microsoft wanting to damage the ubiquity of the Flash player ready for the roll-out of Redmond’s long rumored Flash-killer, but that doesn’t really make sense given that the said Flash-killer is still some time away. If anything this can be seen as a good thing, user experience implications aside, as it is driving updates to Flash 9 - enabling developers to really start kicking with ActionScript 3! (more…)