We are proud that Develer, a florentine software company, is organizing a software conference here in Florence and we will help them where possible!
The main conference’ topics are agile projects, open source and web 2.0.
We proposed to participate in the talks with an evolution of the Get visitors to read and remember your home page blog posts, which is an important topic for a startup which is attempting self-promotion. We will also give discounts on our products to all participants to Better Software – stay tuned.

The call for papers has just started, all details are here: http://www.bettersoftware.it/call-paper/

http://pupunzi.com

the new Pupunzi site is out!

there you can find all my jQuery components, news and great design

mbideasrepository.com

or

pupunzi.com?

Please, tell me which do you prefer

_DSC5889, inserito originariamente da pupunzi.
]]> http://pupunzi.open-lab.com/2009/08/17/explosion-of-light/feed/ 0 pupunzi http://pupunzi.open-lab.com/2009/06/03/palermo-the-decadence/ http://pupunzi.open-lab.com/2009/06/03/palermo-the-decadence/#comments Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:56:57 +0000 Matteo Bicocchi http://pupunzi.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/palermo-the-decadence/ ]]>

Palermo, inserito originariamente da pupunzi.

beautiful decadence in the center of Palermo

take a look: http://mistandfog.wordpress.com/2009/05/18/the-major-iii-guns-2/

Pietro Polsinelli and me just published a new blog dedicated to graphic novel e-book production!

The new publishing house name is Mist&Fog.
The first issue is published, take a look and enjoy!

a new e-book publishing house.

take a look!

How do mbComponents work in the real world applications?
Teamwork is an example… an exhaustive example!

When we decided to develop Teamwork we were not even sure which was the best development environment to adopt; we knew that the application should have been web based (it was at the beginning of 2002) and we started developing it in asp.
We had no idea what making a software product means, we had no real experience about GUI usability or how dark the web developer jungle would be (and still is) with all the differences between browser’ behaviors, CSS interpretation, different events models.
The first interface model was thought flash based (actionScript + xml) but, fortunately, we suddenly changed idea; those kinds of interfaces can work just on simple and monothematic applications!
Finally we made the best choice!! A java application based on the Hibernate framework, integrated with Lucene; it’s cross platform, cross DB, …etc.

We started using javascript but most of DOM manipulation was realized server side, on the response after a submit; just reload the page and the DOM’ll be changed! (But that was what technology offered at that time). There was skepticism on DOM manipulation, an application was thought as a form with a list, nothing more, nothing else.

Everything goes on!
Before jQuery (4 or 5 years ago) we already had components like orderable table line to set order factors, droppable portlets to customize application pages,  drop down tree menu, a tree visualizer, etc.  Almost all that we have now… but developer with great pain and what a heavy code! That was when I started hating IE and it’s bizarre, unsupportable behaviors! (But this is another story.)

All my javascript components  have been developed because of our  platform needs; at the beginning they were realized writing tons of code hacking.

Lets talk about Now!
Teamwork is a rich, full featured, complex web based software for managing projects. At a certain point we had the feeling that this complexity was damaging the usability of the application! It wasn’t just a feel… it was the truth!
For example: once installed, Teamwork 3 presents you an empty page…!!! An Empty Page!!!  It was almost impossible to start any project because you wouldn’t know how to do that (you had do give a look at ALL the video tutorials to start the complex work)! To store the first project you had to know everything about the security model in Teamwork just because nothing was preset, than you had to set an Area, than a resource… and nothing was explained directly!

Teamwork 4 …
So we start a hard work on usability.
First of all “the look&feel“:

• more affordable containers (mb)Containers
• icons that explain the functionality
  
• bigger font size and more explicit descriptions with tooltip (mb)Tooltip
• a ribbonbar that brings clearly which possible actions the users can perform  (mb)Ribbonbar soonly!
• … and so on
  

We really beleave that “more is more”,
but that is true just if this “more” is easy to get!
So we start working on accessibility.
First of all, once the user logs in for the first time in Teamwork 4, the most configurations are preset so that she can start immediately her work; she’s introduced to each application’s functionality by a clear, well explained interface with few boxes containing grouped links; it’s really easy to start!

And It’s really easy to use too!
We transformed the homepage so that the most commons actions like inserting work logs or to-dos, accessing most used information, alerts, assignments and so on are just at one click distance. Than we introduce the possibility to personalize the homepage so that everyone can view immediately what he really needs.

The feel of the user interface is now something more than just a data entry form! It’s proactive, suggesting the user what is going on and trying to keep the information in a smart way, performing a massive use of ajax to store changes, modify views, manage lists, etc. that increase dramatically performance and gives a smooth approach to usability!

It’s quite unbelievable how just working on simplifying procedures and “smartifying” responses, transform a complex framework into an easy to use, affordable tool!

We adopted jQuery as our javascript library because of its traversing DOM features, the smart syntax, its cross platform and cross browser compatibility (sort of), and its great event manipulation model and we integrated it easily with all our Java platform components giving us the opportunity to realize all the smart features you can experience using Teamwork 4.

It also increases my enthusiasm on developing useful components for experiencing the web!

go to Teamwork site: http://www.twproject.com
Try Teamwork on line: http://demo.twproject.com
view Teamwork guide: teamwork_4_guide

go to mbComponents: http://www.open-lab.com/mb.ideas/index.html