Application Development, Technology, Web Content Management, Web Development, Browsers, software, Tools

Tools for Troubleshooting Web Sites and CMS Systems July 28th, 2010

Over the years I’ve learned that sometimes trouble comes where you least expect it.

Content Management Systems (CMS) have many different touch points: the physical servers, the server software, connections between servers, the Internet pipe to the user, and the end users’ computers are all involved. Any number of these could be a potential trouble area if there are issues. There are a number of fantastic tools to help isolate bottlenecks, and anyone involved in using, deploying, or maintaining a Web site should be aware of them because it will just make life easier.

Application Development, Usability, mobile, Mobile App

Three Use Cases for Mobile Apps July 21st, 2010

New mobile apps are being developed at an exponential rate these days.  In November 2009, the number of iPhone apps in the iTunes App Store exceeded 100,000.  Android and Blackberry each carries a large number of apps as well, making the smartphone app expansion even more heated.  It is estimated by 2013, yearly worldwide app downloads will reach 21.6 billion. Amid the hype of apps, have you wondered whether your organization should also create one?

Application Development

iPhone Programming Class by The Pragmatic Studio July 19th, 2010

Class begins tomorrow in Reston, VA. I’m taking the iPhone/iPad Programming with Matt Drance and Daniel Steinberg by The Pragmatic Studio. I’m excited to the point of being giddy about going.

Application Development, Web Content Management, Web Development

Transcript of SharePoint 2010 Chat with Product Team Members (public) June 18th, 2010

On May 17th three members of the SharePoint product team participated in a Live Q&A session about SharePoint 2010.  I didn’t see the content posted anywhere yet, so below is the transcript.  SharePoint 2010 Web Content Management topics are covered multiple times!  Enjoy!

Application Development, User Experience Design, mobile

Web App Masters Tour: Form Field Design June 10th, 2010

Along with several other members of the NavigationArts User Experience Design team, I attended the Web App Masters Tour.  Considering design in the Mobile space added an interesting new layer to a common design question:

Application Development, Internet Strategy, Technology, Web Content Management, Dynamic URLs, SEO, Sitecore

SEO-friendly URLs in Sitecore June 1st, 2010

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a critical feature of any Web site. One aspect of SEO is the URL itself – there are certain best practices to follow when it comes to URLs so that they can be best interpreted by search engines, and are built in the best way possible to increase their rankings. When your site is being run by a CMS, you have to make sure that it’s creating SEO-friendly URLs for you.

Application Development, Social Networking, Usability

Creating a Successful Mobile Experience May 27th, 2010

NavigationArts sponsored the Web Content Maven’s Web to Mobile event last night, which will be the first in a series of talks on the topic.  With the proliferation of smart phones and the invention and success of the ipad, mobile is on the top of everyone’s minds right now.  But are we thinking about it in the right way?

Application Development, Social Networking, Technology, Web Content Management

Web Experience Management May 5th, 2010

Having worked heavily with the Open Market’s Content Server at another organization (prior and during its transition to FatWire), I was a bit dismayed to hear FatWire rushing to be at the head of the Social stampede.  Often this type of feature set is designed to be able to check off a box on an evaluators checklist, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in this instance.  I’ve yet to play with it first hand, but the offering seems to be a one-stop-shop should your site need an integrated social solution.

Application Development, Technology, Web Content Management, Web Development

Sitecore Dreamcore 2010 Conference: Part Two – Sitecore Intranet Portal April 29th, 2010

At the North America Sitecore Dreamcore 2010 Developer and Partner conference last week, the first session I participated in was for the Sitecore Intranet Portal, part of the Developer Track.  I’d like to share some interesting points from that session:

Application Development, Social Networking, Web Content Management, Web Development, ASP.NET, Microsoft, Social Networking, twitter

Sitecore Dreamcore 2010 Conference: Part One April 28th, 2010

Last week two colleagues and I were fortunate enough to be able to attend the North America Sitecore Dreamcore 2010 Conference in Boston. The volume of information and quality of speakers was astounding, so it’s going to take a little while to digest and distill it into something that can be managed and talked about easily.

The Sitecore management team literally braved the elements and an angry planet (referring to volcanoes and such) to get to Boston, so kudos to the whole team are in order.

Out of the shoot considering the “live” nature of a lot of conferences these days I thought it would be interesting to share some links and tips that surfaced during the conference from around the Web.

Application Development, Technology, Web Development

Mobile and App Testing Tools April 23rd, 2010

As the count of mobile devices multiplies, so does the difficulty in checking your web apps and mobile apps against them.  Here’s an excellent collection of testing tools to help you wade through the mountain of devices as needed.  The example applications range from the iPhone to the Blackberry to the Android and all the way back again to the Palm OS.

One of note to many will be the iPad Peek that lets you see how a web page will render on the iPad.

Hat Tip: SpeckyBoy

Application Development, Technology, Usability

How to Gather Better Requirements for Custom Software Development April 21st, 2010

I’ve been building software applications for about 15 years and I have come to one inescapable conclusion: the best apps are the ones that I think of myself and build myself!

Sounds quite pompous doesn’t it? I guess what I meant by “best” apps is that the custom apps that worked the best, fulfilled requirements the best and solved the intended problems the best were the ones that I thought of myself and built myself. Why is this?

I think this is because the most difficult part of custom software development is not writing the code or building the architecture or picking the tools – it’s describing what you want. It’s figuring out the requirements. The hardest part is translating the needs and desires of the customer to the developer. When I write software for myself I am both the customer and the developer so there is no translation needed! But when I write software for someone else there is a transfer of knowledge, needs, desires and requirements that is required.

Why is this so difficult and what can we do to make it easier?

Application Development, Technology, Web Content Management, Drupal, open source, SEO

Web Content Mavens on Open Source CMS April 1st, 2010

Meredith Casey and I of the NavigationArts Marketing team along with Pete Rose from the Business Development team attended the Web Content Mavens meeting at Il Mulino this past Tuesday night to discuss “Open Source CMS – Is it right for your Organization?”

We heard from Jeff Walpole of Phase II comparing and contrasting different Open Source CMS’s and on why he uses Drupal for so many of his projects, including WhiteHouse.gov.   We heard from Mike Vertal of RivetLogic on Alfresco and why it works so well for some of his clients (enterprises mostly) but that it is not for everyone.  And lastly we heard from Martin Ringlein of nclud on how the popularity of WordPress has positively influenced its SEO capabilities and simlified things such as application development.

Application Development, Technology, Web Development, AS3, Flash, iPhone

Flash on the iPhone March 31st, 2010

Ever since the first release of the iPhone, people have been eagerly wondering when Apple would provide a Flash plug-in. I’m sure I’m not the only one who thought the iPhone would be the perfect platform for the interactive nature of Flash.

From this article a while back, it seemed it would never happen because of Apple’s licensing issues about third-party applications, which dismayed many Flash Developers.  It appeared the only way to develop iPhone Apps was to download the software development kit and learn Objective- C.

Much has changed since then….

Application Development, Insight Article, Interaction Design, Technology, Web Development, ASP.NET, ViewState

Dynamic Web Controls in ASP.NET March 16th, 2010

ASP.NET’s ability to populate controls into pages at runtime is a very powerful feature. Instead of knowing exactly what the structure and content of a page is at compile time, webpages can be made to be more programmatic, adjusting to situations on the fly. There are certain amazing things that can be done with CSS, such as controlling the styling and positioning of webpage content, but an ASP.NET programmer can literally add and remove controls on the fly as they see fit.

Application Development, C#.NET, VB.NET

Short-circuiting in .NET February 16th, 2010

In the Microsoft .NET Framework, regardless of the particular language in which you write your code, the compiler breaks it down into a lower-level language called CLR (Common Language Runtime). The most popular .NET languages are Visual Basic.NET and C#.NET, but because both are broken down in the same way, they’re identical by the time a program is run. Because of this, the particular language that you use is exclusively a matter of preference.

I’ve put in a good amount of time with both Visual Basic.NET and C#.NET, and my personal preference is C#.NET. Usually, developers gravitate toward the language that they’re most familiar with (which is often C#.NET for those who come from a C++ or Java background, and Visual Basic.NET for those who have a Visual Basic background). In my own case, it all comes down to a single gripe about Visual Basic.NET: it doesn’t handle “short-circuiting.”

Application Development, Web Development, CSS, JavaScript, performance

Shinkansen for ASP.NET-based CSS and JavaScript GZIP Compression February 10th, 2010

I recently saw an innocent enough tweet about something that just happened to be exactly like something I’d been looking for for quite some time: a server-side ASP.NET CSS and JavaScript file concatenator and GZIP utility called Shinkansen. It’s from Milan Negovan and it’s hosted over at CodePlex. Looking over the documentation, it looks easy enough to set up and configure. He’s blogged about it here.

Application Development, Interaction Design, Internet Strategy, Usability

Jared Spool’s Favorite Articles From 2009 January 13th, 2010

The usability guru picks his favorite articles published by his organization, User Interface Engineering, for the year. I quite enjoyed “A Recession Strategy for Web Apps” article.

Application Development, Web Development, ASP.NET, Chart

ASP.NET Chart Control December 3rd, 2009

This is technically old news, but because this control doesn’t ship with Visual Studio .NET, it’s easily overlooked. This is a graph/chart control that’s easy to use and is pretty powerful. It’s sub-par compared to any custom controls that you can build in Javascript, but if you want something that’s quick and gets the job done, this control does the trick.

Application Development, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Internet Strategy, Social Networking, User Experience Design, personas, prototype, scenarios, smithsonian, strategy

Smithsonian Commons: Vast, Findable, Shareable, Free December 3rd, 2009

Have you visited a Smithsonian website lately? Probably not. Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Even those we interviewed on the National Mall in Washington DC at a physical Smithsonian museum hadn’t considered using a Smithsonian website. It’s a shame, considering the rich education available on their numerous affiliated websites. Few also realize the tradition of excellent and influential research conducted by the Smithsonian. What a lost opportunity to learn from one of the nation’s greatest collections of history, culture, art and science.

Application Development, Web Content Management, Web Development, ASP.NET, Video

.NET Brightcove Video API Integrates with Sitecore November 19th, 2009

So a follow up to my post on Professional Video Services, here’s something I just found.

Application Development, Information Architecture, Internet Strategy, Social Networking, Visual Design, Web Content Management, Web Development, Video

Professional Video Services for Businesses November 11th, 2009

An unlikely source for cutting edge technology news of course, but USA Today has an interesting article discussing the future of online video for businesses. They point out that video has a huge and critical future for most everyone doing business online these days, and there’s several major players coming in that exceed the offerings by such commonly known entities from YouTube and Vimeo.

Specifically, pay services targeted for businesses include:

Application Development, Web Development, JavaScript

Google Releases Closure JavaScript Tools November 9th, 2009

This past week the “almighty” Google released what looks like a very interesting set of Web Development tools for JavaScript development. It’s a set of tools they’ve created to build rich user interfaces and increase the performance of the scripting involved.

The release consists of the following:

Application Development, Social Networking, Web Content Management

ExpressionEngine – Beta Test V2! October 21st, 2009

It looks like Ellis Labs is about to enter into the second phase of its beta testing for its ExpressionEngine V2 offering. If you haven’t had a chance to learn about it, here’s your chance! Looks to be an exciting offering, sitting on the CodeIgniter framework (also developed by Ellis Labs).

Application Development, Information Architecture, Web Development

Knowing When to Say "No" October 21st, 2009

Something to think about….

Steve Jobs gave a small private presentation about the iTunes Music Store to some independent record label people. My favorite line of the day was when people kept raising their hand saying, “Does it do [x]?”, “Do you plan to add [y]?”. Finally Jobs said, “Wait wait – put your hands down. Listen: I know you have a thousand ideas for all the cool features iTunes could have. So do we. But we don’t want a thousand features. That would be ugly. Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.”
-Derek Sivers, president and programmer, CD Baby and HostBaby (from Say NO by default)

Application Development, Social Networking

Jive Talking to Microsoft – More to Come October 10th, 2009

With products like NewsGator already on the market and targeted directly at Microsoft’s SharePoint audience, Jive Software has introduced its newest module for its Social Business Software package.

This will enable users to collaborate in a social setting on data typically stored in a CMS. The first module will target Microsoft Sharepoint and the company has plans for a Documentum one as well. As this market place will only become more crowded, getting in early and getting it right are key.

Application Development, Visual Design, Web Content Management, Web Development, performance

Web Site Performance Software October 6th, 2009

At NavigationArts, the client-side development team focuses heavily on optimizing the performance of Web pages and how fast they load. Some of the leading research in the area is from the likes of Yahoo! and their front-end engineering team.

Application Development, Web Development

Build Applications for iPhone and iPod Touch Using ActionScript 3 October 6th, 2009

“Flash Professional CS5 will enable you to build applications for iPhone and iPod touch using ActionScript 3. These applications can be delivered to iPhone and iPod touch users through the Apple App Store.”

Application Development, Project Management, Web Development

Waterfall vs. Agile vs. The Real World September 11th, 2009

In a nutshell, the “Waterfall model” to software development consists of taking a project from design to implementation in one single pass; the “Agile model” consists of very short iterative cycles.