Software As She’s Developed

And so, a new series begins, based on the Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530). We’ve already looked at the technical details, now we’re looking at what Ajax can do for users and how to implement these features. I’m asking guests to join me for most of the remaining Ajax Pattern podcasts. […]

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The Search Engine Experiment - a blind test where users rate relevance of results - reveals that Google is better, but not that much better. The methodology is reasonable - the only serious flaw might be if people are assuming Google is always relevant, then trying to pick the Google results. Or if people go […]

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I just added an Ajax Searchroll with Rollyo, the new search engine that lets you “roll your own” (get it?) search. For example, click on the following link to search for “xmlhttprequest” on my selection of Ajax sites: http://rollyo.com/search.html?q=xmlhttprequest&sid=2220 (The 2220 ID corresponds to “Michael Mahemoff’s Ajax Search”.) Rollyo lets anyone add up to 25 sites, and then […]

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Don Norman questions the conventional wisdom on Google: Anybody can make a simple-looking interface if the system only does one thing. If you want to do one of the many other things Google is able to do, oops, first you have to figure out how to find it, then you have to figure out […]

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Scott Isaacs on a new Start.com feature (quoted on Ajaxian): DHTML-based Gadgets: Start.com consumes DHTML-based components called Gadgets. These Gadgets can be created by any developer, hosted on any site, and consumed into the Start.com experience. The model is completely distributed. You can develop components derived from other components on the web. Remote portlets take […]

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I just discovered a new feed meta-search: TalkDigger (via Data Mining). It’s Ajax search all the way (buzzword overload!). The site shows how ideal Ajax is for meta-search. Each time you enter a query, the browser fires off multiple queries - one for each engine it searches. That means the results all come back in parallel - […]

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