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• 15 Comments 5100 Views

  Wake Up and Smell the Ribbon! A little while ago it hit us that our website was almost 3 years old. It had aged well, but the polish was starting to come off, and it grew to the point where its navigation was no longer adequate. It was time for a complete re-vamp. While brainstorming the new website and its navigation structure, we quickly came to the subject of ribbon - a new user interface element introduced by Microsoft Office 2007. We felt that it worked really well in desktop applications, but at that point we had never seen a website driven by it. We decided to give this idea a try and allocated some resources to research it. The problem with getting website navigation wrong is that it essentially makes your entire site useless. If people are not able to find what they are looking for, they simply won't stick around. Trying to do something new and unusual is asking for trouble and should be heavily scrutinized - it would have to be extremely intuitive and well executed in order to even begin to compete against solutions that people have previous experience with. It was interesting to observe the stages we went through while trying to design the ComponentArt.com ribbon. We went from initial excitement to anxiety, to denial and despair. :) After a couple of weeks of building various mock-ups we came to the conclusion that it was simply not going to work. I was actually trailing behind our website developers by about one week: at the time I was excited they had already reached the denial phase. But by the time I came around and started having doubts about using the ribbon for website navigation, the guys came back to me and said: "No, wait! It's going to work! Check out these wireframes... " We then spent many hours populating the ribbon with tabs, groups, items; giving special attention to the overall hierarchy as well as carefully crafting each individual title, label, description. We wanted our navigation to have a no-nonsense vibe to it, so we stayed away from cute or catchy terms and phrases. We are quite happy with the final result. However, our website visitors are the ones who have the final say on whether this experiment was a success. What do you think, does it work? Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! Posted by: Miljan Posted: Thursday, May 03, 2007 9:14 AM Filed under: ComponentArt, ComponentArt Web.UI, UI, Ribbon, Office 2007 15 Comments

  
  
  

• 0 Comments 2629 Views

  AxoSoft OnTime 2007 - Powered by ComponentArt Web.UI The latest incantation AxoSoft's bug tracking and project management software - OnTime 2007 - was officially released yesterday. AxoSoft is a leader in its space, offering a product that hits the sweet spot for customers looking for high-end tracking and team collaboration features found in packages such as Visual Studio Team Services, but without the complexity and implementation headaches that are typically associated with those systems. We've been using OnTime 2006 for defect & feature tracking for about a year now, and I can highly recommend this product. We are also quite excited about moving to the latest version. One of the major new features in OnTime 2007 is the brand-new web client interface, powered by ComponentArt Web.UI for ASP.NET AJAX. If you are interested in seeing a fully featured web application built with ComponentArt controls, I recommend taking a look at the following 3-minute video: - OnTime 2007 Web UI Here is what AxoSoft guys had to say about their new web client: "You haven't seen a web application rival the Windows user experience until you've seen OnTime 2007's web UI. This is the way a full-featured Web application is supposed to work." I definitely share their enthusiasm. However, I don't think that this is the "final frontier" for OnTime's web client. Many new exciting and yet unseen features of ComponentArt Web.UI 2007.x have the potential to help take the richness of OnTime's web client even further. For more info on OnTime 2007, be sure to check AxoSoft's Media Center . Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! Posted by: Miljan Posted: Wednesday, February 21, 2007 5:26 PM Filed under: AJAX, ComponentArt Web.UI, Video, UI 0 Comments

  
  
  

• 2 Comments 1903 Views

  Loving the Pearl I picked up the new BlackBerry Pearl a couple of months ago, and I absolutely fell in love with it: I always envied people with BlackBerries because of their constant access to email, schedule, contacts, etc. However, my jealousy didn't go far enough for me to actually buy a BlackBerry and carry one of those bulky things around. I stuck with my old cell phone for years, hoping that a high-powered smart phone would soon come around and converge phone, PDA, and MP3 player features into one small device that fits in my pocket. My expectations were high, and this remarkable piece of technology from RIM really delivered. It's smaller than my previous cell phone, but it does everything I mentioned above, and includes a USB port, MicroSD expansion slot, Bluetooth support, and headphones. Since 64Mb of RAM that comes with the product doesn't really cut it if you want to store a small library of photos and MP3s, I ordered a 2Gb MicroSD card, which finally came in last week. If you haven't had a chance to see one of these cards, check out the photos below; it's tiny! Hard to believe that there's two billion of anything on that: I just had to include a photo of the box that the card came in. :) Having said all that, what impressed me the most was the UI. Being involved in UI business myself, I can really appreciate the amount of hard thinking and attention to detail that went into designing this device. Everything is so natural and just makes sense. The trackball is perfectly located in the center of the device, and it is extremely powerful for single-handedly navigating Pearl's vast feature set. Skins and the overall feature set are incredibly customizable, which is a great indicator of the quality of the underlining software design. Speaking of which, after two months of heavy-duty usage, I've only had one software crash. Very well done RIM, very well done. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! Posted by: Miljan Posted: Wednesday, December 13, 2006 1:03 PM Filed under: UI, Gizmoz 2 Comments