Yesterday’s first meeting worked out pretty well, to the point where I needed a quiet morning. Good turnout for the kick off thanks to everyone that made it and especially to Christian for providing space.
Security Primer talk now online here (PDF). Also a couple of snaps from Christian.
Next mission is a “re-branding”, prompted by Esther pointing out that PHP is too narrow a topic – new name to be something like “Web Tuesday”.
Also had an offer to host next month’s meeting at the Zurich offices of search.ch (OK – I talked Denis and Urban into it).. S
hould be interesting: the search.ch dev team are doing some leading edge stuff. You may have seen map.search.ch (was released some time before Google maps and, IMO, still has a much slicker UI – check out the left and right mouse button zoom for example). Their latest app immo.search.ch adds a new spin on searching for real estate, acting as a “meta UI” for various Swiss real estate sites – although on English l10n (German or French) it’s well worth checking out. From chat last night, sounds like they’ve got some more cool stuff in the wings – watch this space. Bottom line is these guys are ahead of the curve – if they were based in the States, they’d have made /. a good few times by now
good to see you at the meeting. Had a great time. I enjoyed the delicious bagels too!
March 15th, 2006 at 4:43 pm
Leading edge stuff like refreshing an entire page when minimizing a content box? I’m not blown away. A lot of interface elements are inconsistent (seemingly random list alignment, etc) and it must be frustrating to be one of the very good back-end developers having the front-end guys put it together like that. Or perhaps they leave the front-end to the back-end guys, which would explain everything. Sorry for being so picky about it, just really think such a functional service needs a better interface. Refer to the recent Sitepoint blog on craigslist’s design.
March 15th, 2006 at 6:54 pm
Not sure what you mean there – the only page reload I could find is when changing between the tabs like “Obkject Browser” – what are you referring to with “content box”? Or are you talking about the map?
On the UI design front I really can’t comment – I’m most impressed by the way they’re putting various technologies together. Perhaps it’s worth bearing in mind the app is still in development and was first “beta’d” end of Dec 2005 but perhaps they could use somem usability expertise?
As far as functionality goes, I could see myself using this – there’s some interesting ideas for how to present a lot of related data to allow fast analysis and comparison by humans. When renting a flat for example, there’s many factors that come into making a choice – what’s the going price for a particular area, availability of public transport, facilities etc., in addition to just finding a flat that matches your basic requirements. From playing around it does help develop and overview very quickly, which is hard to do otherwise.
March 15th, 2006 at 9:07 pm
*checks* oh, okay – for a second there I though I’d clicked on the PHP Zurich User Group page…
March 16th, 2006 at 9:35 am
I downloaded that PDF and I thought it was really instructive even though it was abbreviated somewhat. I think you should post it on the sitepoing PHP forums.
March 17th, 2006 at 7:44 am