So, day two of the Future of Web Apps!
Mark Anders kicked things off with a demo of Flex Builder 2. That was actually pretty cool, I thought. I'm not much of a UI person (okay, I have no interest in UI design at all, beyond enjoying someone else's nice UI) but it seemed like a pretty awesome way to create a Flash application. Mark also talked about how great ECMA will be in the future (nice) and also gave a quick demo of Apollo.
Next up Chris Wilson from Microsoft talked about IE7.
Khoi Vinh from NYTimes.com talked about site design. This was a great presentation, with lots of interesting things to note:
- It's Web 2.0, baby. Even the big boys at NYTimes.com don't do it the old way, anymore. It used to be that new sites were based on "news delivery." Now, it's all about "news centric interactivity."
- Features are bad. If you look at users, they fit the bell curve. There's a few beginners, there's a few experts, but most people are the run-of-the-mill intermediate users. However, all of your fancy features are aimed at the experts. That means for most people, there's a lot of "feature noise" that they have to tune out.
- Should that be there? "For every single thing of importance, there should be multiple reasons."
- Settings and preferences? That's just a "dumping ground" for design issues that you couldn't solve, and that's not good.
- Do user testing. If you show it to your boss, that's not user testing, that's "executive testing". (Or, usability testing vs. acceptance testing.)
Simon Willison talked about OpenID. Hopefully people will take his advice, now that the war is won, and soon we will be able to enjoy everyone's sites supporting OpenID!
Jonathan Rochelle from Google talked about the lessons learned from creating Google Docs & Spreadsheets. His advice complemented Khoi's nicely, I thought:
- Get UI help early on, because UI innovation is key to success these days, and lots of your front end code will depend on what the UI does - so the sooner you know what your UI will do, the better.
- Speed is critical. Kill those features, and make the important stuff fast. If it's not fast, and you don't have time to make it fast, dump it.
- Get user feedback - not manager feedback.
- Users cannot always see innovation - so sometimes, you have to innovate and create features that your users don't know that they want (yet).
- User data is sacred. Protect it at all costs.
- Use test harnesses, automate your tests, and perform benchmark testing.
Rasmus Lerdorf talked about the history of PHP, and the new
filter_input() option in PHP 5.2. Hopefully some good will come of this!
Finally, the boys from Moo got up and spoke. The product sounds, and looks great. If only they didn't have to go down the innocent path. There are few things that annoy me more than companies that think they are "cute". Fun, I can deal with. Funny, I like. Energetic? Sure. Fresh and funky? Great. But "cute" is just annoying.
