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Dabble Dabble, program and trouble

I often see technology out there that is solid, but lacking a tiny bit of the details from a UX perspective.  Or I would like to extend it a little bit more for a UX reason.  When that happens, every once in a while, someone tells me I am “complaining” and says, “Why don’t you just learn to program and do it yourself?”

I always feel uncomfortable with this.  Programming has been this glass ceiling for me for 12 years now.  I have dabbled here and there, but always get stuck and move back to shallower waters.  With the previous Tree UX example, this happened again.  It certainly was not meant in a mean way at all. I think the guy is encouraging and well-intentioned, and I appreciate that.  So I took another look at EXT’s samples page.  I want to compare apples to apples.

So my next mini-project will be to create the exact same thing twice.   I am going to choose Tabs.  I know how to do Tabs with jQuery.  I am going to try the same thing in EXT, which I “claim” is harder.  But until I do it myself, I can not compare them properly.  I will post the results as soon as I have it.

Comments

3 responses to “Dabble Dabble, program and trouble”

  1. Rob Wilkerson Avatar
    Rob Wilkerson

    For what it’s worth, I’m a developer and I also think Ext is more difficult to penetrate than, say, jQuery.

    For me, a lot of that has to do with the fact that I learn best by example and there are no straightforward examples in the Ext documentation. There are a number of fairly complete, fairly feature-rich sample applications, but that forces me to dig though a lot of code just to understand one interaction. It’s still very doable, but the lack of simple-case example documentation makes it more difficult than it could be, I think.

    The API documentation itself, though, is amazing for such a complex beast. Every time I look at it I’m astounded by the amount of time, effort and energy that has been put into documenting the system components.

    Reply
  2. Glen Lipka Avatar
    Glen Lipka

    Although I am picking an easy one, check out the tabs code.
    http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/tabs/tabs-example.js

    It doesn’t look that bad at first blush. I need to do it though and see. File size is big, but I think I “could” get a smaller footprint…need to ask about that.

    Reply
  3. Sam Hennessy Avatar
    Sam Hennessy

    I’ve also found Ext hard to learn, but I’m always so pleased with the results I think it’s worth my time.

    The worst part of Ext to learn has to be Drag and Drop.

    Reply

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