himalia.net | community blogs

Himalia is being retrieved in the first place at least for the following search keywords in Yahoo:

• . model driven user interfaces
• . model driven user interface
• . model driven uis

This is the fist time in the history of the World ;) that any Search Engine retrieves Himalia as the first one in the result list for a search keyword not including: "Himalia", "Leonardo Vernazza" or "leovernazza". I always said that the Yahoo search engine was moving faster that the Google one... ;)

Let me know if there is any new keyword throwing traffic to Himalia.

Labels: Crawlers, Himalia

# posted by leovernazza : 5/23/2007 03:54:00 PM  1 comments links to this post

As Steve Cook points out, the DSL Team's Book is almost ready for sale.

I want to congratulate the DSL Team, they have made a fantastic work with the tool itself and I am sure the book will be great too.

Gareth Jones indicated that you can read it online using Safari.

You can also look for "Himalia" inside it using this online tool ;)

I told you.

Labels: DSL Tools, Himalia

# posted by leovernazza : 5/18/2007 12:45:00 AM  1 comments links to this post

I am sad... they will never pay for a small country as mine.

Labels: Internet

# posted by leovernazza : 5/16/2007 02:48:00 PM  0 comments links to this post

I want to share these two WPF 3D examples:

1. Chris Cavanagh's Physics on XBAP, with source code available. 

Useful if you want to learn...

2. The Asahiyama Zoo (Japan) has released an XBAP called "Mother Earth." It looks cool but I will need some more training with my Japanese to understand what it can do ;)

Labels: WPF

# posted by leovernazza : 5/14/2007 03:08:00 PM  0 comments links to this post

Google Analytics is now providing a new user interface.

Although it was unveiled yesterday, they will be turning it on for each account (yes, one by one) during the next two months. I loose that lottery so I have to wait to see it in action. I don't understand the reasons why are they making something like that, but I can imagine the guy behind scenes making some magic tricks by hand ;)

Once again, only those who have a lot of cash can afford a complete year just to remake a user interface, real world software developers should add some functionalities in the meanwhile too. The Office Team did the same for two years... Could you estimate the investment of that? 

But this throw light on one of the directions the industry is putting the focus: good user interfaces. It is our argument after all, software developers will need to remake their user interfaces in the following years and someone (guess who?) should provide an easy way to do that, and make their life simpler.

BTW, the demo looks great. I am wondering if they have a public API to interact at a data-level. I don't know nothing like this for the Desktop, and I think we could integrate it very easily... I will ask the guys from Urchin Software for that and keep you in track.

Labels: Internet, Usability, UX

# posted by leovernazza : 5/09/2007 10:52:00 AM  0 comments links to this post

This is a very famous principle in maths.

I think Donald Knuth was the one who first propose it in Mathematical Writing, but I am not completely sure.

 

For example: v = c + u(ci − cj + 1)

Should be v = c + ku, where k = ci − cj + 1,

If you're going to do a lot of formula manipulation in which (ci − cj +1) remains as a unit.

 

I still remember it from time to time, but never with maths involved ;)

Some time ago, I remembered it when I started with my investigation about user interface modeling techniques and I found the Hypermedia methods. Nobody knows about Hypermedia and I think the name has a lot to do with it. When you say "Hypermedia" people think in everything but formal models for the web. Well, this is the reason why they renamed it as Web Engineering some years ago...

However, some time ago I remembered this quote again while watching the Dave Astels techtalk about BDD (Behaviour-Driven Development). He was promoting the TDD (Test-Driven Development) philosophy, that says: "write the test before the code". He was the one who wrote the book about TDD that won the Jolt Award, but... he said, "actually, people wasn't using it"...  Why? When you have a very strong deadline you just write the code and then the test (but only if you have enough time, don't you?). 

But then, something came to his mind...

If you rename test as specification everything makes sense: "write the specification before the code". It sounds far better! Specification is a fist-step task in software development and everybody knows it. Everybody understand the Waterfall method. The good thing now, is that the specification can be tested automatically, because, at the end... it is a test.

Sometimes, the psychological influence of renaming things are amazing. This principle is not new but sometimes you can think it is only related with branding or marketing areas. However, it is true also in maths and software development techniques, unnamed or bad-named things can destroy everything you have done.

BTW, the Google techtalk isn't good enough to recommend it, but it has very funny final Kent Beck's quote:

"I always thought Smalltalk would beat Java, I  just didn't know it would be called 'Ruby' when it did." 

- Kent Beck

Labels: Hypermedia, TDD, Technology

# posted by leovernazza : 5/06/2007 04:13:00 PM  0 comments links to this post