I recently found out about a competition being held in Australia, by the Government 2.0 Taskforce called Mashup Australia. This taskforce, as taken from their Terms of reference.

will advise and assist the Government to:

• make government information more accessible and usable -- to establish a pro-disclosure culture around non-sensitive public sector information;


• make government more consultative, participatory and transparent -- to maximise the extent to which government utilises the views, knowledge and resources of the general community;


• build a culture of online innovation within Government -- to ensure that government is receptive to the possibilities created by new collaborative technologies and uses them to advance its ambition to continually improve the way it operates;


• promote collaboration across agencies with respect to online and information initiatives -- to ensure that efficiencies, innovations, knowledge and enthusiasm are shared on a platform of open standards;


• identify and/or trial initiatives that may achieve or demonstrate how to accomplish the above objectives.

The Mashup Australia competition was created to emphasis this and provide a practical demonstration of the benefits of opening up sets of their data.

There was quite a large amount of data sets available albeit some not exactly in the most usable format. It was a great way to make the public aware that this data exists, and for us as developers to have fun with how this data could be presented.

I spent a few days on a couple of entries, using flex and flash for the UI. It would have been nice to have a bit more time to test them and to add a few more bells and whistles.

1.

The first idea I had was called the GCI PhotoHUB. Because a number of Government Cultural Institutions publish their photographs onto flickr I thought it would be nice to have a central application to be able to search/view these common image sets.

I used the neat as2flickrlib API however I did realise that the commons API was not included in the lib so I had to write one myself for getting that particular piece of information.

I wanted to create something that was intuitive for the end user and something a little playful for them to interact with.

This is the entry here

2.
The second idea was to create more visually digestible way to display crime statistics in Australia. I chose a number of methods for this which included primarily a map overlay, secondary - charting components, thirdly - a raw data set. I felt that this would give the end user 3 options depending on what they felt comfortable with.

The initial UI was changed slightly after working through some UX concepts from a good friend of mine who works as a UX consultant.

There were a number of design cues including the map indicators taking reference from police lights as well as the font chosen for the map overlay to help with the overall theme.

The data set provided was in the form of an xls document. Because .xls documents aren't exactly the best format for web applications. I created a webservice to read the xls file and serve up the data as both a ColdFusion query set as well as a call to return XML. Making the data much more useful for both Flex and potentially other developers eventually.

This is the entry for crimewave here

Both these apps were built in quick time so I'm sure there will be a couple of bugs crawling around :) so if you find one feel free to let me know. Overall it was a fun way to utilise this newly exposed data from the Government and even a better way to expose it using Flex as the tool.

I've just come back from attending the Brisbane leg of the Australian Adobe User Group. It showcased the new features and overall direction for the development suite of products which included the new Flash Catalyst, Flash Builder, Flex 4, Cold Fusion 9 and Bolt.

I was really interested in Catalyst as it's something that I could see a lot of benefit in using personally.

Adobe has made a conscious effort to further improve the work flow between designer and developer which the introduction of Catalyst.

A tool to help create interactive user interfaces transitions and all, without having to worry about a single line of code. It also enables the user to port this directly into flex for the developer to turn this into an application.

By having something like Catalyst can remove the steps involved going back and forth between Interactive Designer and Developer as the explanation of transitions and state changes are nutted out in the design stage for the developer to see. Of course this is the ideal scenario and we all know it never exactly works out as smoothly as that.

For a designer it can eliminate the need to provide multiple screen shots of piece of interaction and the need further explain your concepts through emails, phone calls, power point presentations, smoke signals or interpretive dance.

It's still in Beta so I'm sure there will be many more tantalizing features to come but so far it's looking great. Overall I can come away from the user group meeting knowing that Adobe is indeed heading in the right direction. They have identified the need to streamline the design/development work flow, as well as further enhancing an existing suite of core products.

Having said that I still think a developer that can touch type could save you more time :)

You can download the beta version of Catalyst from the Adobe Labs here

For Christmas last year I received an airbrush which was I was totally ecstatic about. When I've had time I've tried to keep the creative juices flowing. I thought it would a good chance to create a quick image viewer to combine Flex and Air(brushing).

It's XML driven and uses Flex's inbuilt animation properties to shift between indexes. The navigation is bound to the selectedIndex property of the image viewer.

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Finding inspiration in the everyday.

Often when I'm working on a certain aspect of the UI design phase for while I sometimes find analogies in everyday occurrences that I can relate back to the current UI I'm working on. It doesn't matter if it's a good or bad experience it's all part of drawing information and ideas outside the context that you're working in. I may look at it and work out how could this be improved or what makes this a good experience.

It's true with everything though, the more interest you take in something the more you notice it, and the greater the detail you notice it with.

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What's behind the pre-loader?

CursorManager.setBusyCursor();

When designing a new UI it's important to delve inside the end user's cerebral hemispheres to understand what drives users to perform the tasks they do.

The pre-loader as a concept has been around for a long time in various forms not necessarily related to web applications. It can be seen in the form of a support act when going to see a band, or the lighting before a thunder storm, or the clowns before the lion tamer. In one way or another the pre-loader has provided a way to distract the user from the time taken to get to their main goal at that given point in time.

Adobe has obviously has understood the necessity for the pre-loader concept and have included pre-loading functionality inside the flash component library, and more recently Flex. Flex also has the capability of setting the busy cursor on service request thus emphasising the importance of notifying the user and keeping them aware that that data will appear to a screen near them. Of course this type of distraction is minimal, however providing something that is too distracting may result in a slight loss in the ability for the user to focus back on the task of interest.

I remember reading about a case study about a property owner of a large corporate building. Not a day would go past without a complaint about the building's lift and how long it took to arrive in the lobby. It came to the stage where something needed to be done about this. For the owner there were two obvious solutions, one would be to spend thousands on getting the lift replaced or let the issue go and continue being at the end of the complaint stream. An associate suggested that the owner get a psychologist in, they agreed to bring him in after much speculation. His suggestion was not to worry about replacing the lift but to fit full length mirrors in the lobby. The mirrors were installed and as a result not a single complaint was received from that point on.

In this case the mirrors were the pre-loader and the data was the lift. People were distracted by the fact that they could look at themselves while waiting for the lift (there was probably some sort of Flexing involved too). It was a very simple yet elegant solution.

Inside the flex applications that I build I like to pre-load all requests to the server whether it be as a busy cursor / text notification / progress bar or even sound (elevator music anyone?). The simplest way way I've found to do this is to have a public String property on my Model of course you may want to create a more detailed class but I'll use the string in this example. By setting this property from my commands it allows the application to listen/test to the changes to this and display the required feedback/preloader to the user.

an example would be something like this

ModelLocator.as

GetLiftCommand.as

MainBuilding.mxml

In todays development world where the amount of information that is being pushed back to the client is getting larger and larger, pre-loading is important to not only give feedback to the user but to give them a slight distraction prior to the data arriving.

CursorManager.removeBusyCursor();

Crumbline navigation has been around for a long time. The first instance I can recall was when Hansel and Gretel used a Crumbline of pebbles to navigate their way out of the forest. It was only when they used bread crumbs instead of pebbles did they become lost.

Crumblines are a great way for uses to navigate through the UI especially if the UI contains wizards and or drill downs. It provides instant feedback to the user in relation to the depth and direction of their navigational choices.

Uses can then step back to the exact position they want by selecting the specific crumb at any given time.

This is an example I created in Flex 3 to illustrate the Crumbline Navigation in it's most simplistic form.

This component takes in a collection of Crumb Objects. The Crumbline then dispatches "crumbEvents" when a crumb item is selected, letting the view dictate how it handles the navigational change.

eg.

In this example I used a simple viewstack and bound this to the Crumbline using it's selectedIndex property.

A demo of this can be seen here

Special thanks to the Brothers Grimm for the Crumbline model.