January 2009 Entries
Tuesday, January 27, 2009 8:00 AM
After 3 year of blogging I decided to write my technical blog in English and do not blog in Italian any more.
Why? I hope to involve not only Italian people into my discussions. As I follow a lot people that write in English because it is the only language that is common among people, especially for those who works on the web.
I leave my Italian articles in the archive.
Let's start.
Technorati tags: blogging
Thursday, January 22, 2009 8:00 AM
I begin to look for a software for project managment .... basically I want to run away from Project, it fits for everything, but It seems to me like PPT :(
Probabily if I attended a course about it I would have known a lot of tips, but there are a lot of things that I can't use easily.
The plan of a project is very important, it helps you to orient through the time and what you are developing: it is like looking for a shirt among wardrobe compare to looking for it in a pile.
So I read on smashing magazine this article with a comparison of 15 project management tools and some of them caught my attention:
Jumpchart, I got excited by it because it's a tool specifically made to plan the navigation of a website, but then I realized that it is not exactly what I was looking for because it’s not strictly a project management application. :\
" You can also add text and formatting to pages and then export your CSS files and site map when you’re finished"
Then skimming the text, I read about No Kahuna and Basecamp. I have an account on the latter, its quite simple and useful.
But now the question is: where there is already a software as a standard, how I can change it? Mumble, rumble.....
Technorati tags: project managment, Basecamp, Jumpchart
Wednesday, January 14, 2009 8:00 AM
Under the term schematics in Wikipedia we can find:
"A schematic is a diagram that represents the elements of a system using abstract, graphic symbols rather than realistic pictures."
In a project it is an abstract representation of a system, a database, an architecture of information system, a site tree, its information architecture and navigation.
Designing a model is very important to build coherent applications, especially if they are interactive. If not used when designing the user interaction of an application the risk is that you don't build a user-friendly application.
For years web development was no men's territory, so you can see a lot of project management attitudes.... and the interface development was always the latest thing. But now something is changing.
The schematic is not like graphic design, but it explains the concepts, how you put the contents inside and which is the user interaction.
Only after this step it is possible to develop the system, because you have a global vision of every process. It's not necessary fixed, it could be flexible, it depends on you.
This is one of the schematics that I designed for the backend of Subtext an open source blog engine.
I put into the schematic only the vision of how I immagine the content will be and the possible interaction with this.
You could be more descriptive if you write a scenario.
How to use schematics in a small project with short time? Design the main part, the main interaction types that can be reused in other functions.
The way I use them is:
- understanding the main areas of the user experience;
- understanding the critical points;
- and then draw the schematics only of these features.
There are way to draw schematics: you can either use draw on paper and scan or go more sophisticate and use visio (blahhh), PPT or even Illustrator. Unfortunatley, there are not many tool specifically design for this kind of operation, but one that lately is gaining a lot of attention is
Balsamiq: a software to draw schematics using a standard component with a resulting hand drawn look&feel. I might try it in the future.
Technorati tags: UI, schematics, balsamiq, usability
Wednesday, January 07, 2009 8:00 AM
The problem with PowerPoint is that most of the time it is used by people that don't known how to make a presentation:inexperienced presenter with PowerPoint acts in the same way as a children in a workshop with many things to make noise with. He can use many bells and whistles but he's not able to build anything.
I think that it's very difficult to make a "catchy" presentation using PowerPoint for such an user, because he is driven by the tool to a wrong approach. But PowerPoint is the most used application, the most usable software to share short presentation and it can be used for any topic and target.
After a series of boring presentation with speakers whose body language says the opposite of the concept they want to expose, my question is often the same: which was the message?
When we approach a presentation the first question should be: which is the message I want to transmit to the audience? How I can say it without boring and leaving a positive sign in the memory of my audience?
So I have to pay attention to the focus. Then organize the content in a logic way, that will be immediately clear to my audience.
We can put a summary in the beginning and other one at the end of presentation: it naturally drives to the conclusion.
We could introduce the topic area and then go to the focal point. It's not necessary to write everything in the slides, only the most important things: pay attention to the words you write and give them the right place on the path of presentation!!
To better explain the content, metaphors and examples are very useful. We can introduce pictures, one per concept that we want to discuss. It's not important the pictures' quality, but the association of pictures and word. We have a visual memory, so if we use image and word associations it's easier that we'll remember a concept.
Don't forget that people don't have an infinite capacity in our memory, so if we use few concepts and spend time to explain each one, we help our audience to remember.
And don't forget to repeat and summarize every important part of your discussion.
If you feel confident with the audience, you can introduce some jokes during the presentation, especially when the topic is very difficult and you see the person in the front raw close their eyes :)
So what do we have to remember for our next presentation?
One slide for each topic (more than one only if is really necessary), metaphor+concept association and leave EMPTY SPACE on the slide: don't put a lot of phrases, pictures, data on it!
If we build our presentation that way, clear and simple, where we can introduce effects? And why? Are they really important to focus on our topic?
I leave the answer on your decision.
I leave you with two links:
@media 2008 (and the old version): here are some presentation made by “designer” to designer. They are static pdf presentation and they are pleasant and useful .. this leads me to think.....
E. Tufte: One of the data visualization guru. In this article he starts with an example that puts the focus on the importance of organizing the content to expose the topic in more effective way.
Technorati tags: PowerPoint, presentations
Sunday, January 04, 2009 8:00 AM
A list apart and Smashing magazine talked about CSS framework, but an article is just words but using it is different.
So, I needed quickly (strange thing.... never happen!) to start working on a grid of a web application: this is the real great help of a framework, it helps a fast start.
In this situation I used the framework inside Dreamweaver CS3 and I chose a grid, I put the bases of my skin and during the development of whole interface I changed step by step the original template. At the end Nothing of the original grid survived.
Why? Because it's not simple to work on a code not written by you. You have your own way to organized things and named them.
In my opinion the biggest problem in using a framework, is that are if you are used to code it's easy and fast to customize it, otherwise it's a loss of time to understand how it works. It' s very important to understand which is best for us and the one that we are most confident in.
I don't like to work with "alien" code, I think it is common for the most webdesigner.
In my opinion the best way to work is to create a personal framework, witch reflects our experience, but not many people can do it or have the time to do it. Furthermore framework developed by people that put all their effort in it are more flexible and extensible than the ones build based only on our needs.
But sometimes I used framework to begin a project.
For a little project with my husband I used the YUI grid (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/ - http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/).
It's a very useful because has a lot of possibilities of grids and it also has a online grid generator to help fast start, but I think it's better clean the code from the classes that will not use...
Here an example:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>YUI Base Page</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="..../reset-fonts-grids/reset-fonts-grids.css" type="text/css">
</head>
<body>
<div id="doc" class="yui-t3">
<div id="hd"><h1>YUI: CSS Grid Builder</h1></div>
<div id="bd">
<div id="yui-main">
<div class="yui-b"><div class="yui-g">
<!-- YOUR DATA GOES HERE -->
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="yui-b"><!-- YOUR NAVIGATION GOES HERE --></div>
</div>
<div id="ft">Footer is here.</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
CSS:
#doc,.yui-t3{margin:auto;
text-align:left;width:57.69em;
*width:56.25em;min-width:750px;}
#yui-main .yui-b{position:static;}
#yui-main .yui-b{position:static;}
.yui-gb .yui-u,.yui-g{float:right;}
There is an interesting feature called Standard Nesting Grid that makes it possible to nest grids one inside another thus making possible to have an infinite number of grids.
I think that I'll test it :)
Technorati tags: CSS, XHTML, frameworks, YUI, Dreamweaver
Saturday, January 03, 2009 6:31 PM
In realta guardando nell'archivio dell'anno passato di wemakemoneynotart ho trovato questa interessante retrospettiva sulla visializzazione dei dati.
Certo, molto fa già parte della nostra comune conoscenza, ma chi di noi non tiene manuali e vocabolari a portata di mano per controllare qualcosa che non si era capito o solo dimenticato?