RIA for Automobile Industry

Automobile industry has been one which has been the long time patron for new technologies. I would say they were the pioners in using RIA solutions.

Volkswagen Used car locator is one such example. I would not rate it high on innovation as we come across such sites by the dozens now. However i would rate it high on the simplicity and neatness of the application.

Highlights of this application are good Information Architecture, highest degree of task optimization and content level navigation.

Check out - http://www.volkswagen.co.uk/used/search

Creating a usability dashboard

http://www.userfocus.co.uk/articles/dashboard.html

Now this site is a must read for those in BI, RIA or UX line. The article is constructed around the usability of creating a dashboard. But i see it as the tutorial for collecting the KPI which form the foundation of all dashboards - this is realted to B1's

The representation of the KPI's in one page forms the RIA part

And the overall readability forms the UX part of it.

Why i am asking you to read it is that you will not get such a explanation with examples in any real life situation.

Read it and let me know ur views

What will be the focus in 2009?

Good question isnt it. Well this is what i have been thinking from my last entry. Well my answer to that is RMA - Rich Mobile Application.

You might ask hey why is Subbiah jumping from Rich Internet to Rich Mobile application. My answer is simple - mobile screens are going to be the next window to the internet.

What i am talking about is the next revolution. Imagine doing most of the work we do on the computer in the mobile itself.

Blog,
Share photos
read/send mails
Check the news
RSS feeds
Pay bills
Fund transfer
book tickets
Play games
............ and the list goes on.

The catch now is how much of this can be done in such a small device. Come on where is the user experiece angle here.

This is where the RMA steps in. Not only will will one be able to do the above and more but they would be satisfied using the mobile for it.

Watch out for more on RMA

FLEX-3 Tutorials - For Beginers

Lots of people have been asking me for good Flex tutorials. So i have decided to post such good tutorials as and when i come across them.

To start with here is one such good tutorial. I would highly recommend this for first timers.

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/beginners-tutorial-flex-3

Flex Office tools

MS office tools have been getting stiff competition from AJAX based online office tools. Now Adobe Flex has entered the ring and are coming out with some really cool web based office tools.

There is no single office suite yet in Flex. Samir Bhatia is working on one such suite called Live Documents. Which offers Word, Excel and Powerpoint tools.

While we are waiting for that, there are people focusing on one of the above and really bringing out some amazing Flex based office tools.

I would recomend the following

Slide Rocket - For PPT features. This has cool features of Mac Keynote. Making it more attractive.

Buzzword - for word documents

idubee for Excel spreadsheets.

There are more tools available and more being launched as i am typing this. So if anyone knows these tools pl do add it to this post.

Flash Plugin touches 12 million downloads per day?

Not only due 98-99% of the browsers in the world have the Flash Plug-in but has about 12 million downloads per day.

This should be a bigger push when trying to sell Flex technology :)

However - i read about the 12 million statistics, but am yet to come across proof of the same.will post the same as soon i get my hands on them.

Some general statistics about Flash player penetration:-

http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/
http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/PC.html

Flex based search engine

Vizzl - The Visual Search Tool.

A really cool search engine. But only to search within sites like Amazon, ebay and youtube. The power of sorting the search reults is show cased here.

A must use tool if you a online shopping freak.

http://www.vizzl.com/

Flex based virtual desktop

For those who assume FLEX is only for playing around with page data and UI elements. Here comes a pleasant surprise.

http://www.thereplicants.net/flex/test/Dashboard.html

Imagine a 4 sided desktop which can be personalized. Here one can drag and drop availabe tools on to teh desk top and also rotate between the desktops using the following key comobo

Shift+Esc+mouse click(right or left) to rotate the desktops. This gives a 3D cube effect.

Geni - Online Family Tree

One of the most easiest and cool sites i have come across for creating a family tree. Its pretty simple, just keep adding ur siblings /spouse / kids information and it will automatically relate you to that person.

Here you can invite anyone or all in ur tree to update their links so that your treee gets to grow real big.

There are lots of features and information one can use or just stick to the basic feature of the site.

http://www.geni.com/

INM eLibrary

A good structured way of showcasing and retrieving documents. Here one can see the usefullness of Flex as well as Google book search (image thumbnail) kind of mashup.

Its pretty simple to use and can be a good demo of Flex documentation and retreval capabilities

Flex, Apollo, JavaFX and Silverlight Comaprison

I came across this good comparision between top RIA technologites at " Tech Team Lead News" blog site. Would strongly recomend this to all who want a high level overview of the technologies mentioned.

http://ttlnews.blogspot.com/2007/05/test_22.html