Simple UI, stupid

Another guest post from Pawel Niewiadomski.

Why programmers create bad UI? They do, you do, I do it too. We all do. It's inevitable. The reason is the curse of knowledge.

You create a code and know all the corner cases or the nifty things that user can set to optimize it. You know it all, it's obvious to you.

So you want to be a good guy and let the user decide, right? Users are smart like you, they know what to do and they will happily jump to modify their settings and customize their application.

WRONG!

Actually your job is other way around. You know all the details and you should hide them at all cost. You musn't be afraid of having some defaults and guessing some things. As long as your app works in most cases for most users.

You need to hide all options that are usually not needed. Only leave those that are crucial and often customized by users.

Remember that allowing users to customize your app is like shooting yourself in the leg - since you allow them, they will do it, and if something goes wrong they blame you.

Unless your business model is around providing consultancy (like SAP) you need to remove all unnecessary clutter to make your app the simplest one to use even if it means some people will choose different one because of the missing feature XYZ.

Apple's great on removing features, not adding. And that's their success story.

And the worse examples you can usually find in tools for developers (see screenshots), because developers are smart and want to control their environment, right?

A few notes from GeeCon 2010

This is a guest post - a set of random thoughts and observation from Pawel Niewiadomski, our colleague who recently attended GeeCon conference in Poznan, Poland:

Adobe AIR is going after mobile market. Adobe presented pre-beta version of their IDE that will allow to create a mobile apps. They are targeting Android first. Beta will be available soon through their developer channels.

IBM has a nice tool for memory leak detection and application profiling. It's called Memory Analyzer. It's free and works with any JVM.

IBM has a nice suite of performance optimization tools for their JVM - it's called IBM Health Center. It's free. But they didn't tell how much their JVM costs ;-)

Vaadin - interesting combination for RIA on top of GWT. Gives you a lot of power, nice themes. It's server side based RIA model so it's easier to do validation, authentication, and so on. But because of that it puts more load on your servers - everything is kept in user's session on the server (couple houndred kilobytes to megabytes depending on your app). They do a pretty good living from supporting it and consulting other companies though.

HTML5 WebSockets - a glimpse of the future. WebSockets will allow full-duplex text based and lightweight communication between web browsers and server applications. Limiting unnecessary traffic and decreasing latency. Looks great. You can even try it out today with some proprietriary solution (even IE6 compatible!). Google Chrome supports it already!

JRuby - if you're tired with Java sth worth checking out. Dynamically typed language that has a pretty decent support. You can run Ruby on Rails apps in JEE container without much of a hassle. But who would want to do that if you have a nice and deterministic Ruby standalone server? :-)

Akka Software and their Actors - next attempt to sanitise threads management in JVM. Use queues, signals, asynchronous communication to achieve better performance and scalability. Avoid deadlocks and other thread nightmares.

These were the most interesting bits I took from my recent attendance to GeeCON held in Poznan, Poland.

"Let's move the Java world" (their slogan) - well, I haven't felt moved but it was quite interesting.