Ajax News and random

Three bits of interesting UI news today.

First is a spotlight from the ExtJS blog called VersoChat.  Mostly, I just read the blog, skimmed their website and looked closely at the big JPEG on EXT.  Default skin, but very nice icons.  I wonder where they got those ones.  The Information Architecture (IA) is definetely designed for a power user.  It’s laid out for someone who clearly uses the thing every day.  I like it in general, but that is a very hard space to get into.  I think the chat window could potentially have the rich text editor from EXT, but maybe that’s not needed.  I wonder if the user on the other side has the same EXT base to chat.  Overall, very interesting.

Second, Yahoo released a nice stencil kit for making prototypes.  They include the YUI code and design patterns with the stencils.  It’s an excellent way to get people to use YUI, not justinside Yahoo, but elsewhere.  Yahoo definetely has a strong UX team.  I wonder how they feel they are doing.  YUI has sort of dropped down in the list of libraries as of late.

Lastly, I saw news of an ajax library today from a company called Gaia.  It looks ok.  I haven’t used it enough to give it a fair review.  However, it looks like it is targeting asp.net users.  This is a good strategy based on the pain I have heard regarding using Microsoft’s native components.  Maybe Microsoft should buy a company like Gaia?  I had suggested to TargetProcess that they consider ExtJS, but maybe Gaia is better for them considering they are an asp.net shop?

On a side note, I have noticed that Firefox 3 comes with a keyboard shortcut (control-K) to go to the searchbox on the top right.  Previously, WordPress had used control-k to mean “add a link”.  This is the same keyboard shortcut for MS Word.  Since FF3 co-opted that shortcut, not I have to click Alt-Shift-A.  This is annoying.  It’s an awkward position on my hard and I keep hitting the caps lock key in the process.  I wonder why Firefox chose that shortcut since it has been reserved in general for linking.

Like I always say, “A design decision creates the world in which ordinary people have to live.  Someone made this decision and I have to live with it.”


Comments

6 responses to “Ajax News and random”

  1. w/r/t FF3: that issue happens more and more with overlapping applications & keyboard shortcuts. Someone at my company blogged about it just today:
    http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/06/some_thoughts_a.html

  2. Glen Lipka Avatar
    Glen Lipka

    It took me a minute, but I get it now. w/r/t means “With regards to:” http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=w%2Fr%2Ft

    Why not just use “re:”? Seems shorter to type. 3 versus 5 characters. If you count shifting, then its 4 versus 7. That’s 3 characters! Think of all the time you will save!

    Interesting article by the way. I think the world needs a keyboard shortcuts standards body. 🙂

  3. Robin Avatar

    Another Ext related Ajax toolkit is Coolite (http://www.coolite.com). They’re co-ordinating efforts with the Ext team to provide a Microsoft .NET wrapper for ExtJS. I haven’t tried it, and it’s early days, but the project looks promising if you want to get Ext quality in .NET.

  4. Too late 🙂 We already started using ExtJS in reports and going to migrate all lists to ExtJS grid in next releases of TargetProcess. One problem that we should resolve is create custom skin for ExtJS and I expect it will be quite painful task…

  5. Robin Avatar

    Mee too, I’m using Ext with my .NET application and it’s great. There is a Js + Ext learning curve you have to go through, but IMHO it was well worth it! However, some sites won’t suite Ext in my opinion so it all depends on what you’re doing.

    I also looked at Gaia, but found it a bit clunky. I’m sure it’s good for some projects though…

  6. Glen Lipka Avatar
    Glen Lipka

    Skinning EXT isn’t so bad. I was just doing some of that last week. They definitely make it CSS friendly. Check out this one, I like it most of all the themes out there. http://extjs.com/forum/showthread.php?t=15989

    I would schedule about 2-3 man-weeks of css and image manipulation. I am excited to see the lists in TargetProcess. I think it will really help. Especially the inline editing.

    One idea…Maybe have a tree on the left side with all the iterations and releases and when you are looking at a list you could drag and drop an item into the iteration right there. That could also act as a navigation. The layout engine for EXT makes this a breeze.

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