61–70 of 77 posts
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Somebody should write an equivalent which will create Rails views.
I've been thinking about it... too many ideas as it is already, though.
Use it to build management guis, customized to the user. "Ohh, you want sales per hour, but don't care about inventory?" Here you are.
This really is amazing. But it makes me nervous. I'm open to the idea, but just as I prefer using a text editor to write my HTML code rather than Dreamweaver, I'm concerned that this can take me too far away from my web app code. Like any other tool, in order to use it effectively you have to master the tool just like you'd master a language. Hopefully what's under the hood here and the code it generates makes it eas…
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You're right about the designer/coder separation. I didn't think of that because I have never worked in an environment where designers created functional UIs. Yes there is abstraction in templates. Templates typically let you indicate (visually or otherwise) what the static parts look like and where the dynamic parts go. That's it. We have done that forever. There's no progress. Templates don't describe interaction a…
Templates can be reused across projects, and there could be a hierarchy of inheritance (don't know if that's done though). I agree that visual programming seems to be one of the great failed dreams - lots of academics and practitioners tried it, and it just doesn't seem to work. Although, the crop of XML-mappers (mapforce, biztalk mapper) do represent simple functions in a visual language, and seem to own that market…
What's important, though, is that these people don't build UIs. First and foremost they manipulate or analyse data. The data is at the center. The important thing is a simple data model that follows the closure principle (filter tables and you get tables, filter text and you get text). The UI is there to support this simple data model and it has to be similarly reductionist I think. Placing arbitrary UI widgets on forms is not the way to do this.
Yes, more fundamental research please :-) Maybe machine learning could be used to let users correct the system's guesses rather than initiating some action. That would go further in the direction that graphical UIs have begun, which is to let users select from what is offered to them and react instead of making them give commands to the system.
Or maybe some of the thinking that has gone into computer games would be useful, I don't know.
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Stimulating points, but it's far from "failed" in commercial terms; and the best GUI designers often aren't coders, but designers. Different tasks, different values. Challenge: how could one make a visual version of abstraction? Would you say that there is no abstraction in templates?
Adobe is working on a promising product called Catalyst that aims to allow designers working on Illustrator/Photoshop templates to convert them into Adobe Flex UI screens (mxml). It is promising because from what I've seen so far the mxml isn't very developer friendly. The aim, of course, is for the designer to generate the exact look and feel for the wireframes and render them (using Catalyst) to MXML for the Adobe…
(That goes for any other Flex developers here as well. Seems that the intersection between HN readers and Flex developers is pretty small!)
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If you knew anything about what happened to WebObjects, you would be hoping that such a scenario never occurred.
A summary of that would be great.... I know that Apple pushed WebObjects to the back burner when they acquired NeXT in the mid 90s but I'm not sure why it would be bad for them to buy 280 North today.
Heh. Serious power, terrible polish. They blew off all the NeXT veterans when they destroyed it as an objective-c development platform, but didn't finish the job of porting it to Java for five years so you ended up working on this platform that feels like a developed-in-isolation mainframe monster. Dev tools looked nice but made you want to slit your wrists from random crashes and other strangeness. There were a couple of periods where they looked like they would kill it which was stressful for people with codebases on it. All efforts at documentation did a very poor job of selling its incredible patterns and features.
But everyone I know who stuck at it has done well - many ended up at Apple working on very cool projects. I'd love to read a history of whoever wrote it one day - it was so far ahead of its time - I've got a theory that they had some people on it who had done serious research and practical time on some sort of web-like thin-client platform that pre-dated the web. Culture in Apple is different now too.
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I've been thinking about it... too many ideas as it is already, though.
In a previous life I wanted a much narrower implementation of that idea. Combine igoogle (drag & drop widgets), with a more freeform grid. Use it to build management guis, customized to the user. "Ohh, you want sales per hour, but don't care about inventory?" Here you are.
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"-enterprise IT as a business with no future. He'll be right, in more ways than one." Can you clarify? Because that seems very misinformed. Unless you mean on-premise deployments, which has been on the way out for years. With SaaS + cloud computing, Enterprise IT is just starting to get interesting again.
I can't give this topic the justice it deserves in an HN comment, but yes I'll clarify. In 10 years time, the "IT Department" virtually won't exist at most small-mid size businesses. I think a lot of business software is going to be taken off-the-peg, or plug-boarded from open source software as interfaces approach ubiquity and organisations like government, banking and b2b start to expose consistent "APIs". It's alr…
I suspect Gen X and Gen Y (which includes me) generally doesn't have a clue at what goes on in a "real" IT center - meaning one that is not (a) some awesome start-up that will be forgotten dust tomorrow or (b) a web oriented consumer-facing business. Nothing in IT is anything like "buying a photocopier" nor will it ever be. The company that takes that approach will be run into the ground by its competitor that innovates.
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You're right about the designer/coder separation. I didn't think of that because I have never worked in an environment where designers created functional UIs. Yes there is abstraction in templates. Templates typically let you indicate (visually or otherwise) what the static parts look like and where the dynamic parts go. That's it. We have done that forever. There's no progress. Templates don't describe interaction a…
Templates can be reused across projects, and there could be a hierarchy of inheritance (don't know if that's done though). I agree that visual programming seems to be one of the great failed dreams - lots of academics and practitioners tried it, and it just doesn't seem to work. Although, the crop of XML-mappers (mapforce, biztalk mapper) do represent simple functions in a visual language, and seem to own that market…
LabView is pretty powerful. Commercial, expensive, often annoying -- but pretty powerful. Integrates very cleanly w/ Visual Studio for text-based programming, too.
Atlas is going to save me a lot of time.
Sure you can still edit the plist by hand or programatically but I don’t find it more efficient neither easier.
can't seem to get on right now.