Designing Executive Dashboards by Tom Gonzalez

For all those in RIA field, Dashboard is not a new word. In fact it is one of main most asked for requirement in the RIA space.

Tom Gonzalez is the founder and Managing Director of BrightPoint Consulting, and has a wonderful article on Designing Dashboards: Part 1 , Part 2 and Choosing Correct Metrics & KPIs .

I would highly recommend reading this article.

Widget Library

There are some amazing widget libraries out there and one such library is http://www.gwt-ext.com

what i liked in this site is the way the content is organised. the whole site itself is created by the widgets they are show casing.

worth a visit :)

Want your picture on a Magazine Cover???

Who doesnt :D.

Well the wish come true at Mag my Pic (http://www.magmypic.com).

Its one of those fun RIA sites where technology simplifies our wishes ;)

One can share the final magazine cover with friends and ask them to vote on it. The results can be associated with our email. The code can be pasted on to our blog and many more features are there.

Check out my pic on Style Magazine.

Create Fake Magazine Covers with your own picture at MagMyPic.com

Data Visualization in Sports web sites

While we are seeing a increase in the usage of RIA technologies in sports web sites, they have been predominently for video streaming and blog purposes.

Now they have brought in data visualization of the tonnes of data they have. Check out the "Stats Machine" tool of NHL (National Hockey League. Its Java based so dont expect the richness of Flex. However this is a good start and pretty neat in terms of functionalities.

http://www.nhl.com/cgi-bin/superstats/process_stats.cgi?source=NHL.com&statType=team&seasonType=playoff&season=20072008

Microsoft's Expression Design Event @ Chennai India

Well i got to attended the recently held Microsoft's Unique Design Event (Expression) in Chennai at "Dublin, ITC Hotel Park Sheraton & Towers".

Supreet Singh, User Experience Evangelist, and Pandurang Nayak, Technical Evangelist , did manage to impress the audience who had turned out in pretty large numbers.

What i was most impressed with was the sample solutions they showcased especially the travel website. You can check that out in http://www.silverlight.com/.

What i was not impressed by was by the claim that this tool can be used by designers who don't know any coding. The target audience should have been Usability Sales professionals, Business Analysts, Competency Leads, and RIA/usability analysts who need to come up with quick walk through for their clients.

One the whole Microsoft Expression tools shown did promise a lot but the real question was can it generate requirements from the client?

With its immediate competitor Adobe already way ahead and still going strong in this race track we need to see if this rookie can catch up.

Powerpoint as an effective RIA storyboarding tool

I agree it sounds little unbelievable that our good old PowerPoint can be used as an effective RIA storyboarding tool.

But believe me it is - i use it almost daily to showcase various RIA features like Auto suggest, text pop ups, sliders, etc... - i primarily use animation feature in PPT and have also created one "RIA_Story_suite" where the components are created and i can just drag and drop them into the new story board i am creating.

There is one more good article on the same topic in boxes and arrows by Maureen Kelly - "

Interactive Prototypes with PowerPoint"

http://findin.gs/davids/?p=202

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

Tag graph

A simple but intresting way to showcase the power of tags. I would quote this site as an good example of IA and RIA mashup.

http://taggraph.com/

Tags:

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