Code Away

I am an amateur website designer. There are a lot of professionals who have in-depth knowledge about User interface and interaction, but every now and then I do like to take a look into design, simply because any web application is what the user can see. Not the data structures used, not the fancy algorithms attached to core functionality. Just what the users can see (and probably how fast they can see it).

In general, I find that website designs can be divided into three broad categories:

Designed websites

Nothing much to talk here. We all know designed websites. There’s a banner, a good stylesheet, possibly a menu with a roll-out animation which doesn’t work anywhere except in IE6, and so on… you get the idea. The craze nowadays is to use glassy effects and some reflection to show “we’re so web 2.0″, not realizing that Web 2.0 was never associated with images. Not just on major icons but everywhere including menu buttons, command buttons, external links. Even favicons are not spared.

But let me rant about “Web 2.0 images” some other time. Coming back to the point, designed websites form the major chunk of what we see on the web. Corporate Information sites, dotcoms for companies highlighting their activities, all social networking sites, most portals, microsoft.com, even this blog: All fit in this category.

Non-designed websites

Any personal website created without a stylesheet, good coloring or imagery falls into this category. But its not just personal pages. Sites like Craigslist and some dev mailing list pages fall in this range as well. The default font in the browser (mostly the very inappropriate “Times New Roman”, if on Windows), white background, the occasional spurt of color (full saturation red or blue) to highlight an important point, it is all very ugly, but still it “works”. The information can be read, and it ends at that. These sites mostly operate on two norms:

1. Content is King
2. I am individual, attempting to post this page in spite of not being very good at this stuff

At the first glance, it seems the beauty of the site (or lack thereof) will most probably lead to the content being treated as junk. After all, looks matter a lot more than these guys think. But this thought doesn’t last long.

I don’t know whether it was Linux mailing lists or TLDP Howtos, but after a while, non-designed pages started to look a lot more sincere than pages in designed websites. The trust factor is possibly explained by the fact that these pages are mostly by “community” and non-profit orgs, as against designed websites which are owned by someone who had the money to pay for a good design (with 3D bulky images, it cost a lot back then), and are mostly planning to earn that back some way. Mostly, the words “evil money-making megacorps” come to mind.

Undesigned websites

I’d love to write a few pages on this, but Alex Bainbridge wrote about it perfectly way back in 2007. I’ll just quote him.

There has been some chatter about the concept of “undesign”. I struggled to find a definition of it that I could publish so I am going to come up with my own:

I now define undesign as a web design that has the following characteristics:

• Copy / text is the user interface – The words, the size of text, the length of the sentence, the paragraph breaks – all of this forms the user interface (rather than creating containers with graphics – and placing text / copy inside those containers)
• Links are text based – not images
• There are no gratuitous user interface elements - I define gratuitous as those that either don’t provide information (for example stars on a star rating) nor assist with usability (for example lines between sections – acting as dividers).
• Usability is prioritised over visual branding - the design is engineered to be used – not admired like a piece of static art.

So what you end up with is a mainly text website. It sounds dull but it isn’t.

Some examples of undesign

• 37signals – Homepage and corporate website. Very clearly the text copy is the user interface
• Google – search and search results
• Amazon – product page – there are very few visual elements on the page except for product images. Apart from that it is mainly text. Some graphics are used to divide sections – but these are kept to a minimum.
• ClearTrip- A travel website example. ClearTrip offer flight bookings for flights within India. The hint towards their design mindset comes from their name!

The cleartrip homepage. See how there is very little imagery. This is travel undesign. Go and take a look at one of their flight results pages as well. Very clean. (While you are there – go one step further – the accordian checkout is interesting)

The idea of undesigned sites has gained a lot of strength recently and portals like cleartrip and 37signals are sure helping the process. I hope this theme catches on as we move forward.

I tried out the Windows 7 RC. Is it simply awesome just like everyone’s been yelling?

Windows 7 is here

Short Answer

I am not as impressed as much as the rest of the community is.

Long Answer

I suppose most of the folks who have written about Win7 are using Windows Vista : The OS associated with most rants since Windows ME. And this time, the online community strength has developed quite a bit. All-in-all, hearing that Vista was a bit of PITA, it seems reasonable to applaud Windows 7, since it uses marginally less resources, has a clearer interface and probably has a better UI than Vista. I wouldn’t happen to know, as my net duration on Vista has been just two minutes (at the Acer store).

In short, the bar set for declaring “good OS” is quite low when the comparison is against Vista. I certainly had mixed feelings, jumping into Win 7 from WinXP. Lets look at what’s good first

• The sidebar seems somewhat useful; I probably need to figure out what I need to constantly see, even while working. But I’m sure many will benefit from gadgets, especially on a wide-screen.
• Aero looks elegant (better than XP anyway), but as a user of beryl/compiz on Ubuntu, aero seems to be a far crippled version of its open source alternative.
• I right-clicked a folder in Windows Explorer and kept looking for “Search in this Folder” menu item for like five minutes! I just wasn’t able to comprehend how Microsoft could omit such an important functionality, only to realize later that it was always present at the top-right corner. Important features placed at good spots.
• And boy was that search fast! Automatic indexing of files. I love it!
• Inbuilt Voice Recognition is good. It took me quite a bit of time to coax the computer into writing a three-line document for me, but that’s mostly because of the Indian accent. I did manage a somewhat American accent and was thankful that I was alone while doing that, else it would have been a joke told for generations.
• Media center has got loads of features, but I don’t use most of them. I’m the sort of guy who prefers XMMS or Winamp 2.0, so yes, the tag “technologically obsolete” will not be wrong as far as music is concerned.
• Increased Security. But that’s not always good. What’s good is configurable security levels: in line with many appeals to leave the security to end-users. Let users control Windows rather than the other way round.

And now for the sad parts

• Memory consumption: Too high for any OS, however modern. At a time when most activities of the common man are online (and the activities on the computer involve little more than word processors or spreadsheets), I do not see a reason why people should invest in a state-of-the-art processor and memory only to support OS bloat. No wonder people are still saying “no, thanks”. Its because XP already is so good at delivering what they need. (I do admit that I had exactly the same feelings about Windows XP when it was released. One can easily see how I cannot be the father of technology in any way whatsoever)
• This also means that having Vista as a guest OS in a virtual machine is next to impossible unless you are on a very high-end machine. Win XP, in contrast, fits the bill here perfectly.
• Placement of components on most windows and dialogs is new. I already talked about the “Search” feature before. Now take a look at the personalization dialog for example. Actions available on the left as well as at the bottom. Actions on the left are easily visible because of the XP experience. In addition, they are shaded with a different color (blue in this case). I could not notice the icons at the bottom right away.

Windows 7 Personalization

That’s about it. The rest of my problems lie in the fact that I installed the 64 bit version, which works perfectly by itself, but a bunch of software has problems working with it. I’ll write a post about that some other time.

The rants above on memory hog are quite lame in the long run, actually, as is the point of learning curve. Memory and processing power is always going to increase. And we did have to spend a few days in Windows XP to get used to the “new interface” after running Windows 98 for a long time, didn’t we? So overall, the issues I have listed are pretty trivial with the sole exception being virtualization: that running the Windows 7 OS as guest on most “home” machines is not very likely, atleast for a couple of years.

Its a good upgrade, but not a must-upgrade for now. Windows XP is good. Ubuntu Linux is better than XP. It is not as polished as Windows 7, but hey, it’s free! I’ll stick with Ubuntu for now, and keep trying newer stuff with the Win 7 RC for a few more days.

A peek at creating the Django Admin interface for any model has floored me completely. I did make a feeble attempt to create something similar for this in Java way back in 2005, but it is quite a daunting task.

The integration offered by Django and RoR really makes one feel that not using these frameworks is just the thing why software developers are in demand today. Hire fifteen to do a job in php which two could do using Django.

Some may say these facilities are just keystroke-savers. Agreed. The important question is why do you not want to save those keystrokes . A common application development (without the right kind of framework) spends a significant amount of time (I’d hazard a guess of more than 25%) doing plumbing work. Lets take a Java example for an “edit” screen, which shows the user already stored data, and allows him to make changes:

• Take data from repository, probably as a generic List
  • Oh yeah, connect to the DB first, and run a DB Statement in a try-catch block, right within your business logic
• Populate a data bean with all the data. All manually. If the DB cursor contains 25 columns, have a object with 25 attributes, 25 getters, 25 setters and populate all attributes one by one.
• Send the data bean to the view
• In the view, have hard-coded UI components for each attribute of the data bean to be displayed. For any related queries to be executed, hard code page links which will fetch those.
• On event of user clicking OK, program a set of validations to ensure user has not entered bad values. Most of these are not business validations, but checks to ensure no bad characters are present in the input.
• Populate user entered values obtained through form into a data bean
• Code a SQL Update script which will take each value from the data bean and update the backend
• commit (don’t forget that!)
• Rinse-and-repeat for all related queries

Any framework support (struts, spring, hibernate) is a keystroke saver in addition to being responsible for formalizing (a subset of) the programming for the application. Django and RoR simply take the integration between MVC to the next level. I had mailed a friend a few months ago about what Rails has:

1. Integration with AJAX: You see whether the type of request from the client (browser) is ajax or plain HTTP. You use those conditions to provide a specific response. In case it is an ajax request, you can play directly with elements rendered in the browser (e.g. Put text “Saved Successfully” in the information bar and blink it once). This integration, and resulting 5 lines of code is far faster than anything we would do by ourselves. (client side use ajax-specific library functions to send request, then check XML returned and perform activities in browser using javascript again). This integration is thanks to use of inbuilt prototype and scriptaculous libraries

2. Test Integration: I know that if a nice high-level test framework didn’t exist already, we would never get serious about writing real automated tests. It would always be like “lets develop this cool feature now that we have time… we’ll check out tests later”. Fortunately, tests are easy to write, and we can start small. (full page tests and all can be written later). We can also write Model level tests for ensuring relationships etc. N e a t.

3. MVC Integration: Neat MVC code, easy to write. Controllers and views nicely integrated. All variables declared in controller are directly available to views. Which should have always been the case, but in other barebones J2EE/php, you need to pass a data object explicitly, because MVC is not mandated.

4. Fixtures: Stuff to fill your “Test” database with data. Easy to write YAML (byebye XML). This will auto-run when you run tests, so your test database is ready with required data. If you don’t know yet, Rails will auto-create dev, test, prod databases for easy demarcation. Rails will also auto-clone the dev database schema to test database prior to loading fixtures.

The learning curve is a bit high, and I am spending a lot more time understanding the components in comparison to J2EE. Yet, given the benefits, I think it is well worth the effort.