Software As She’s Developed

I have the honour of delivering a keynote at the Tools Europe conference in Zurich next week, as well as at the “Mining Web 2.0 Patterns” workshop, which, as you can tell from its title, I’m looking forward to participating in. The workshop chairs are Dragos Manolescu and Joe Yoder.

The keynote is on OpenSocial, Gadgets, and Design Patterns; and I’ll have more to say about it later. I believe it will be recorded too. For now, I’m using my blog to post my response for the pre-workshop preparation.

Sites and materials relevant to my presentation

• What is OpenSocial?
• iGoogle
• Ning OpenSocial gadgets directory
• BBC weather gadget
• TODO gadget

Questions:

• Which features make the gadgets easy or hard to use, and how might the gadgets be improved?
• At UI level, which best practice patterns are apparent?
• What changes to the platform would improve user experience?

Sites and materials relevant to other workshop tracks

Site Navigation:

• SkyScanner Kayak Not sure if it qualifies as navigation, but the live filtering mechanisms are well designed.
• DZone The search results are an example of Virtual Workspace, aka infinite scrolling as opposed to pagination.
• Delicious The quintessential demo of tags and folksonomy.
• Mainly for the way it re-thought mail and how it’s used. Early example of navigation via Ajax calls; “star this”.

Services:

• OAuth Very important for service design in the future.
• Heroku If we’re including cloud hosting …
• Twitter Good example of an easy-to-use REST-ish API that’s led to a proliferation of apps.