I recently completed the 4 Hr Work Week, and really enjoyed it. Through the reading, I often found myself referring to it, and even purchased a copy for my father. He recently retired, but is already looking for something to occupy his time. I felt this was in line with my father’s life: he is not working to dedicate all his time to a 9-5 job. What I realized after I gave it to him, however, is that he IS looking for something to do, he doesn’t actually want to completely stop working (as this book would like to ultimately drive you to).

Through reading the book, I was immediately able to see where I could stand to make some changes in my work. I’m not sure I could convert to only checking my email twice a day, although I do understand the rationale behind it.

Checking email at noon and 4pm — you should already know what you have to accomplish when you get to work in the morning. Do it without distraction. Then you can open yourself up to other, less important tasks. There is also the idea of multi-tasking. I am a dedicated multi-tasker, but I do understand how it can make you less efficient. I use feedreader to subscribe to many RSS feeds, and when something new is published, up it pops in the bottom of my screen (the same place outlook notifies me of new email). Naturally, the movement catches my eye and distracts me from the task at hand. Do I intend to attend to the message immediately? Generally, no, yet I allow myself to lose a few seconds looking at the notice.

The other day we were talking about business practices and ROI. Some of the ideas of determining the value of someone’s time came to mind. How much can we save by creating a good, intuitive interface and cutting back the need for as many customer service reps? The book speaks of the Pareto Principle — 80% of profits come from 20% of clients. So focus on those. Your time is worth more than working with troublesome clients for minimal gains. As well, it frees up time to find other clients who more closely align with those who are bringing big returns. In discussions with a coworker after the fact, he brought up the fact that truly embracing this principle would not allow us to work to support minority groups - not looking at users of assistive technologies, or less popular browsers.

There is definitely a vibe of …elitism, perhaps?.. through the book. The author is very much looking out for himself. My father even commented on this — the author tells an anecdote about being a kickboxing champion by ‘finding loopholes’. His fashion of attacking the problem made him a winner, but it certainly didn’t make him popular. I suppose it comes down to your principles, what’s really important to you. The means, or the ends?

The second half of the book provided a wealth of resources for starting your own business. I will admit, he made it sound pretty easy! While I am not sure I am ready to set out on my own and start outsourcing my life, it is wonderous to think about freeing yourself from email and busy work and focusing on what’s important.

On that note, I’m going to get off the computer and cuddle with my puppy…

I have been anxious about some aspects of the flex interface on the site I’m working on right now. I have started and restarted, trying to leverage certain pieces of what I think flex will offer me, and coming across stumbling blocks along the way. Finally mid-week I came to the conclusion that from what I knew of flash, this was something that could be done in flash.. but I wouldn’t be able to do it myself. I got help — and from the way CL approached the problem, I felt vindicated: there was no WAY I’d have been able to do it on my own.

Well today we were talking about it with KS, our resident flash/flex guru, and he showed us how it could be handled in flex. He pointed out the benefits flex would offer, and offered some advice on some of the stumbling blocks I’d encountered. After only a few moments of him time, I think both CL and I wondered if we shouldn’t have given it a try in flex.

I believe we shall: while the flash version will likely go forward in this release, I think we’re both going to look at reengineering the piece. I think it would be a great learning opportunity for us both to do it, and then look at how we each did it, as a learning experiment. KS actually runs the RIA Working Group at work, and he said this could be a great topic of discussion: looking at both versions (all three?) and talking out the pros and cons.

My concern has been ‘not knowing what I don’t know’, that is, not being familiar enough to know the best approach. But perhaps I need to embrace the idea of “getting it done” and learning through the experience. I am very excited about the idea of this being a challenge outside the constraints of a work deadline: just trying to get it done, and seeing how someone else approaches it.

Just read the Bokardo post “welcome to the stream” which got me thinking — with RIAs, we are increasingly getting away from the single path through a website. We interact with an application without page refreshes, we want to be able to define our own paths or interactions. So how is it that this tendency towards ’streaming’ is arising? By its very definition, a stream flows in a single direction towards an endpoint. In the web manifestation, it is linearized in terms of time. It is the blog post as opposed to the wiki..

Perhaps the two can co-exist, and in fact need to. It just strikes me as odd that we associate both free-form interaction and time-sensitive ’streaming’ information as being part of the ‘New Web’.

I am now at that point in my learning about flex that I want to think outside the box — looking at custom components, extending what’s there by default. Unfortunately, my experience isn’t at the point where I necessarily know how to do that yet. I look at basic controls like ToggleButtonBar or MenuBar and I want to make the child elements more rich, but I haven’t yet really figured out how everything plays together. Do I create custom Buttons or can I modify them from within the custom ToggleButtonBar?

It’s good to have these questions rolling around in my head. It will be better once it gets figured out!

Evidently you can handle all of MVC within flex, but I am still seeing it primarily as the presentation layer — perhaps as my familiarity increases, I will be more comfortable letting it handle more. in the meantime, however, it is easier for me to see flex as a way to present data — and only parts of it.

I plan to use SWFObject to include flex components within a larger page — and that also lets me add the content directly to the page, to be swapped out by the richer component if it is supported. That seems to be a decent solution for search as well as acessibility. Perhaps mobile as well?

Now, I have never been a fan of alternate presentation based on user agents, etc (browser sniffing, etc). Build to standards for a more robust, consistent solution. Otherwise there are more maintenance and consistency concerns (not to mention the fact that you can offend users by offering them up ‘dumbed down’ content). That being said, I do like the idea of progressive enhancement- which is how I am choosing to see this. I don’t want to deprive users of important information, but I do want to offer the best user experience to those who can support it.

What I’d like to figure out is how to ensure the same content is being served up, regardless of the presentational format. So if we’re feeding XML into the flex component, I want the same content written to the page. I did some quick prototype work using XSLT at LN, I’d like to investigate building modules not simply of flex, but of the entire package: XML (data), being rendered on the HTML page and supplemented as possible in a richer format.

Exactly the sort of site I love and hate at the same time:

http://www.dontclick.it/

Extremely innovative, it forces the user to change how they interact with the interface. There are some simple activities for the user to perform (in addition to navigation), and occasionally the user is asked if they ‘miss the click’. It’s interesting to see how engrained the activity of clicking is in our web experience. Do we need it? Maybe not…

And of course, on the flipside — this is a very rich, non-linear experience. How would a screen reader handle this interface? What about users who cannot navigate using a mouse at all, or have difficulty keeping their hands from shaking? Perhaps there is a reason why we are accustomed to forcible action-reactions: if I click, it’s because I intend to elicit a response. Users are starting to get used to hover effects on the web, and sometimes they are useful in surfacing unexpected information, but we need to ensure we do not disregard the benefits to the existing model..

It is interesting to be getting into the RIA realm. I see the benefits on several levels (’stickiness’ from a business perspective, general usability), but I am also very aware of the challenges.

I have a background in accessibility, so that is a large concern for me even as I want to turn to using these new technologies. I engaged a co-worker who works in the search arena, to ask him about ajax/flex/flash. His first response was the same as the accessibility response, that they’re less than ideal. What struck me, however, was the difference in how to deal with the issues.

One thing I need to remember is that there is SOME difference between the two. We were looking at rapidly changing content — that content doesn’t need to be ‘understood’ by a search engine. However, it does need to be available to users of assistive technologies. From a search perspective, a hybrid site in which the ‘main’ content is text, and therefore indexable, is ok. It’s not from an accessibility standpoint.

Avenue-A Razorfish just published an article on SOFA — (search optimized flash architecture. The idea is that the content is written to the page in XHTML and then presented via flash. The concern is that this could be considered to be cloaking. However, if the content is the same, simply presented in a different format, this should be immaterial.

I am really enjoying my work. I’m learning plenty, and am also finding there are plenty of opportunities to share my thoughts and opinions and explore other areas as well. I don’t know if it is partially due to the small size of the company and the tremendous growth they’re undergoing that processes are still fluid and there is opportunity to make an impact, but it is definitely a great environment for me!

In other news, if anyone is an information architect or a flex developer looking for a new job with a fantastic company, drop me a line… !

Co-worker and classmate Jonathan sent this article to me yesterday: Want to be a computer scientist? Forget maths and asked what I thought.

Jonathan took a ‘traditional’ computer science undergrad, so I don’t know if he’s aware that I never took discrete math as I went through my program. Did it hinder me at all? There’s not really any way to tell. In one of my java classes, they mentioned Big O Notation once, but I cruised through that one lecture none the worse. Heck, I was thankful not to have had to take math.

Then I got into my grad program and ‘Theory of Computation’ was one of the first courses I took. It also has turned out to be one of my favourites. I really enjoyed the theoretical aspects, the fact there was no definitive ‘right’ answer to the problems we looked at. (To be honest, I think that is why ‘traditional’ math never appealed to me, I’m not a fan of ‘the single best answer’.) What’s sad is that our MSCS program has actually retired the course, replacing this course of theory with the more practical “topics in computer science”: UML, patterns, etc. Who knows, perhaps the belief expressed in this article is more accepted than I would have thought.

I’m working on my first flex interface, and a few questions have come up. I am going to store them here and then I can also document what I find.

1) is there such a thing as ‘float’ in flex? I have seen some references to ‘fluid’ positioning, but nothing along the lines of the css ‘float’. I don’t want to start going back to grid or absolute positioning..

2) how to embed/position background images within elements? I have seen Embed, but it’s not clear to me if there is the ability to specify whether the background should repeat, or how specifically it should be displayed as the background

3) how is the opacity set? When I specify colors of components, they are overlaid over others, which changes the colour actually displayed…

4) toggleOnClick (in a toggleButtonBar) lets you select and deselect a button, but if you deselect, clicking again does not reselect unless you go to another button, then come back. Huh?????

(So far I’m learning by experimenting with the Flex 2 Style Explorer and the Flex Eclipse plug-in.)