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What are the HCI challenges of Web 2.0?
Here are a few more:
Clear privacy options
Facebook has repeatedly changed the way it deals with content ownership and privacy. (See here, here and here.) Aside from the obvious PR gaffes, this has also demonstrated the difficulty users have understanding privacy.
Geeks like us are familiar with ideas of inheritance and groups. Heck, many of us work explicitly with permission structures when dealing with files on *nix systems. To most users though, it's not clear who can see what or why.
Service Interoperability
On the desktop we're used to being able to chain together tools to get the outcome we want. A simple example would be dragging image thumbnails from a file explorer to an image editor. We'd expect that to work, but not on the web
The Flock browser goes some way to overcome this shortfall, as does the Google Docs web clipboard, but interaction between web services is still a long way off what we expect from the desktop.
Accessibility
Web 1.0 was primarily text based, so the main accessibility issues were easy to fix: stuff like text as images and tables for layout, which both affect screen-readers used by the blind.
As the content of the web gets richer (more images, video and audio), the chances get larger that someone will be excluded from it. Moreover, making video and audio accessible is much harder than making text or images accessible, so it's much less likely to be done.
Lastly, Web 2.0 introduced a whole new problem for accessibility: dynamic content. How should screen-readers (for example) deal with new content appearing on a page after an AJAX query? WAI-ARIA aims to address these issues, but they still require the web-designer to implement them.
Hope this was useful.
There are plenty as I see it,
Different screen resolutions.
Different hardware capabilities. (mobile; touch; desktop; laptop; soon orientation too.)
Localized content.
Location based.
With HTML5 upcoming, hardware acceleration; native api's; localstorage; offline.
Related
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I have an idea for an application where I would like the following to happen:
A group of people / their devices create a sharing session -->
They can set a time frame for this session (could be one hour or one day, but not long term). -->
Once the session is created they will go through their day capturing the data which I want to be shared automatically between all the devices. -->
At the end of the session each device will be able to choose what of the data collected they would like to keep locally on their device despite who may have collected it. -->
Once each of the devices have saved what they would like, the shared storage would be removed.
What I am struggling on is the best technology for sharing the data. I would rather not have notifications each time data is shared.
I have looked at Multipeer Connectivity as a solution, where each bit of data would get sent to each device and stored locally, but the biggest drawback is the inability to maintain a session in the background, which is likely where the application would reside for the majority of the time period.
Any direction or areas to research would be greatly appreciated. Note: at least to start with I would be looking to implement this in IOS
I would imagine a temporary folder on a web server (kinda like shared cloud folders) would be among the better solutions to this.
Doesn't require physical proximity to other participant. Could be in entirely different countries and it wouldn't matter. There's however nothing stopping you from setting such a limitation anyway.
Would be far easier to implement tech-wise. Especially considering cross-platform support.
You espace many logitical problems, such as storage space on individual devies. Like What happens when participant wants to keep some data, but there's not even enough space to even see a preview of what the participant is missing out on.
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I need to create an interactive map in iOS.
I have to do a thing like Expo app.
An image or a map view in background and draw the way between 3-4 points.
I don't know if use Google Maps, Apple Maps, images or something else.
Developing a spatially aware application is no trivial matter on any platform. It will require careful planning and architecture design UP FRONT or you'll find yourself doing a lot of "extreme programming" (tons of refactoring). In order to develop a spatially aware application you will need several items:
A familiarity with a map API. Apple's MapKit API is fine, but there are others such as Mapbox which offer additional services such as
offline caching, custom basemaps, etc.
A custom basemap: The basemap you're seeing here is certainly a custom job and probably not open source, so you'll need to come up
with one of your own. Unfortunately, every map API has a different
approach to this so you'll need to do some research to determine the
right solution for your API.
Map features: You'll need to understand how to add features to your map. Some APIs call these Annotations, while others simply call
them Features (like ESRI). In either case, you will need to generate
your own feature geometry using the Core Location API and whatever components the map API utilizes. You will also need to create custom graphics for these annotations,
unless you can find something suitable in the public domain. If you
intend to add polylines (for directions) or polygons (to highlight an
area) you will also need to define your own custom symbology (line
color, width, fill colors, etc). Again, not every API uses the term
symbology to describe these details but hopefully you get the idea.
Data storage: You'll need to decide how you're going to store and retrieve data for the mapview. You can store everything online in a
custom web service. You could also use something like the Parse API
if you don't have the resources for your own web service.
Alternatively, you could store everything locally in a SQLite
database or using Core Data. In either case, you will need to have a
plan for querying the location data in an efficient manner. SQLite
supports R*Tree indices which are a good way to store a geometry's
bounding box (envelope) information, but you still need to roll your own INSERT and SELECT queries. Most likely you'll need to come up with some combination of the two.
Learn the language: Overall, you absolutely must learn the language of the map APIs. Its vital that you are familiar with the
language of spatially aware applications, including the fundamentals
of location technology, if you intend to be successful in this
project. I would suggest beginning to do some research into the iOS
MapKit API, and maybe an open source solution like Mapbox. Learning geoJSON isn't a bad idea even if you don't intend to use it in your app. It is very simple and could help you learn a lot about spatial technology very quickly.
As you can see, there's a LOT going on in a spatially aware application, and this list is just a starting point. I am not trying to dissuade you from your goal, but just be aware that this isn't a "drag and drop" sort of project.
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The Apple documentation seems to consistently state that the user-generated documents should either all be stored locally or should all be stored on iCloud. Here is one example from this iOS page (the emphasis on All is theirs):
All documents of an application are stored either in the local sandbox or in an iCloud container directory. A user should not be able to select individual documents for storage in iCloud.
I would like to allow users to manage documents individually: perhaps they want one to be local (to save space from their iCloud allowance), another to be on iCloud so they can manipulate it across devices, and another one to be on DropBox so they can copy it out into a friend's account or back it up manually or even edit it externally. The all-or-nothing approach would actually get in the way of flexibility, especially when I come to introduce DropBox sync. In my case, the individual choice also makes for simpler UI.
So the question is: Can I expect trouble at review time if I stick to my plans to allow users to choose their storage preference (local, iCloud and soon DropBox) per individual document? I haven't found specific guidelines for this. Edit: None of the guidelines even mention iCloud.
It's a should, not a must (just as you should support all orientations on the iPad, but I don't think they'll force you to if the UI would need a complete rework). If you have a sufficiently compelling use-case and a non-clunky UI, I suspect they'll let it through, but I haven't tested this.
If it's not in the review guidelines, then I doubt it's ground for rejections apart from any requirement for "usability" — but honestly, given the average quality of UIs out there, I would not be too worried.
(Indeed, a strict interpretation of that guideline is that you're not supposed to use Dropbox/Google Drive/etc/roll-your-own-cloud-storage, but that's almost certainly not the intent unless they're inviting antitrust lawsuits.)
I did a lot of testing for an app with iCloud. I started with the supposition that it would be transparent to the user whether everything was in iCloud or not, otherwise why would Apple suggest this approach?
Unfortunately, they did not test this fully before rolling it out. I had many problems in iCloud and UIDocument with iOS 4 then 5 (many radar entries of bizarre crashes). In fact, I probably spent half my development time working on this one issue rather than making the app better.
Anyway, the bottom line was that my app was MUCH slower when accessing docs running only on the cloud. Apple does try to cache docs in the Mobile Documents directories. There is minimal info on how to determine status of the caching and therefore try to work around unavailable docs or slowness. The UI ended up extremely jerky in the UITableViews or outright crashed in system libraries.
So, bottom line is my app stores everything locally. If a user makes a change, the app copies it up to iCloud itself and runs background processes to monitor the status of the doc getting up to the cloud. It also manually transfers files changed by another device on iCloud to keep everything in synch, again in background processes.
I've had no complaints at all from Apple reviewers. If I did, I would point them to the many radar entries.
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Stackoverflow User Luke wrote in this answer:
The boundaries between desktop and web
applications have really blurred.
Whilst once upon a time the nature of
developing for the web was totally
different to developing for the
desktop, nowadays you find the same
concepts [...] cropping up in both.
Since I am continually looking to improve my existing web applications, I'd like to know which common features of "classic" desktop applications do most web application miss?
For example, most desktop apps prompt the user to save unsaved data leaving a page or closing a window - a feature that many web applications miss. It could be that some feature aren't even necessary or are compensated in some other way. Maybe there are features which can't be implemented in (a classic) web application?
The thing you'll never be able to imitate in a web application is the low latency and instant feedback of a well written desktop app.
Even with the ajax techniques to load only parts of the pages, there usually is a noticeable delay in the response (or maybe it's just me and my narrowband). You're (for at least a few more years) just bound to the orders of magnitude of speed difference between network access and no network access.
The Undo button.
Right-click application-specific pop-up menus is the thing I've noticed most.
Usually right-clicking on a browser application will bring up the browser pop-up menu rather than an application-specific menu.
Keyboard support on most web applications is weak to non-existent. This is getting better than it used to be but you will still find plenty of mainstream sites that can't even get the tab order to work correctly. Most sites don't handle focus correctly and force users to use the mouse to activate even the simplest of data entry forms. You can usually forget about accelerator key support.
You can't pull the plug when the application hangs. (Yes, I'm serious)
For fairness is to mention, that desktop-applications miss a common feature of webapps: XSS (Cross-Site-Scripting). ;-)
Support for Big Files.
Integration with the client OS.
Support for special Input/Ouput Devices.
3D or anything else computationally intensive (specific to each users).
Advanced graphics: I've written a C program that draws a surface joining Bézier patches in a simple window and I had to tweak it in unimaginable ways to get it to draw in a decent time. I can't imagine that being ported to the web.
I mean, doing advanced graphics is not what every application needs, but if displaying nontrivial pictures is slow, then we shouldn't even talk about animations.
One Proper Macintosh menu bar support.
If you're a long-term Mac user, even with two large monitors, you have muscles that swoop to the top of the screen for actions, comfortable in the knowledge that the infinite depth effect will kick in and you can slide along that edge, picking from the menus.
No in-browser app can deliver that experience.
Two Command-keys, which is a side-effect of the menu bar not belonging to the app but goes a bit beyond that - good desktop apps have command-key shortcuts (accelerators to you Windows guys, I'm not just talking the Mnemonics which work with alt-key support). Great desktop apps show little reminders next to the buttons that have accelerators, when you hold down the appropriate modifier keys and wait a fraction of a second.
Three Smarter tables. There are a lot of apps where some kind of spreadsheet view works as a paradigm, including editing, sorting, resizing columns. I think I've seen some odd examples of partial support but a good table in a web app is still a bit of a dancing bear.
Four Used to be right-clicking but I'm finding more and more apps that do this properly, like Kerio's excellent webmail engine. It is still missing in enough web apps to be worth emphasizing.
Displaying application request/process status or messages on Taskbar or Status bar.
For the web, Javascript can be used to update text on status bar, but its not a common usage.
The usability benefits of standard GUI elements that look and behave uniformly across applications.
(Although this will surely change as web app developers adopt certain GUI elements and patterns that are considered best-practice, notably by eventually using the same libraries, e.g. for drag-and-drop.)
A common feature of "classic" desktop applications is the ability to work without an internet connection. I miss that in Web applications.
For example, MS word works without an internet connection, but you need to be connected if you want to use Google docs.
Of course, it does not matter if the application requires an internet connection anyway. For example, if its a feed reader, I have to connect to the internet, whether I use a desktop reader or an online reader.
Drag and drop from Finder/Explorer into the web app. And vice-versa.
The ComboBox is the most notable widget omission.
On the web, lack of desktop features such as popup dialogues is actually a boon, making for a simpler interaction experience. Think also of the autosave draft feature of Gmail vs. the desktop convention of prompting the user to save.
So consider carefully before trying to reconstruct that desktop feature in your web app.
Decent help. Seems to always be an afterthought, if it's even implemented...
Desktop integration (may change if we get online desktops)
Offline use (does exist but it is early days)
(Reliable) Responsiveness
Reliability generally (somewhat debatable as there are pros and cons - e.g. your data is probably better backed up online, however security generally is less in your control with an online app, and if the network connection fails an online app tends to freeze or fail horribly.)
Blue Screen of Death
A task-specific UI with no extra controls. A web app, in addition to all the controls of the web app, also has back, next, bookmarks, etc buttons. You end up with an extra inch-high set of buttons that don't directly support the task at hand.
This isn't necessarily a programming feature, but the audience of an application will be different. For a web application you are cutting out a complete segment of your audience (those with slow or no internet access). While this is a relatively low number, it is a difference between a desktop application and a web application.
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What do you use to capture webpages, diagram/pictures and code snippets for later reference?
Evernote http://www.evernote.com and delicious http://www.delicious.com
Evernote
Notepad2's clipboard feature (Notepad2.exe /c as a link in Launchy)
Windows Clippings or PrintKey
Firefox extension Page Saver
Delicious
Microsoft OneNote.
I just have an emacs instance running on my home machine, under screen. Whereever I am (and have network) I can connect to it remotely. I stick all useful urls, birthday present ideas, future dates, code snippets, ideas for docs etcetc in there.
I rarely have doodles/diagrams I need to capture, I tend to draw them in ascii in my file if needed.
I must admit I'm a bit stuck if I have no network/wifi somewhere, but that's rarely the case.
I find google notebook is very good for drive by code snippeting and google bookmarks especially as when used with the google toolbar, for web pages.
The benefit of these tools are that they are available from any pc on the web, though a good use of semantic organisation using labels is recommended.
Here's my response to a similar question:
The combination of OneNote with a tablet PC is awesome! I was a bit of a skeptic at first. I used the trial version and then forgot about it. A year later I had an unruly collection of files, project related emails, notebooks and scraps of paper all scattered throughout my life. I went back to OneNote and all my problems went away. Some highlights:
Everything is searchable. The character recognition is good enough that my chicken-scratch meeting notes can be searched. Text within images is searchable.
OneNote syncs with Outlook so finding meeting notes is a breeze.
I now embed all files into OneNote - pdfs, spreadsheets, word docs, images, web clippings.
OneNote is constantly saving all changes so, combined with a scheduled automated backup, everything is in one place and is safe.
There are some built-in collaboration tools I have yet to try but that look useful.
It is SO worth the price. It allows you to get started on a project and avoid all that time spent deciding how to organize things.
Zotero, is a nice plugin for Firefox.
SnagIt
captures everything you could want, and lets you annotate it.
I prefer to use the good old url for delicious
Apart from that i use the Scrapbook extension in firefox when i want to save something on the disk. It's possible to tag the page, edit it and remove those stupids ads before saving it.
I also have a Wiki on a stick that i carry around on a usbkey for code snippets that should go to other clients when i'm travelling around
Mostly, my code snippets are embedded into projects i carry on the same usb key, which allows me to demonstrate some technologies right off to the client and get his advice based on a demonstration, not a listing of code...
For screen shots, I use a mix between ScrapBook and ScreenGrab. They are both firefox plugins that are pretty amazing when you need to get a screenshot of a page for editing. Works great for consulting.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/427
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1146
Delicious Bookmarks extension for Firefox
It's a little primitive, but I've been using tiddlywiki (self-contained, single-file wiki) http://www.tiddlywiki.com/ which works good for basic text and markup. I combine it with a plugin to sync it with Outlook's notes (http://syncoutlooknotes.tiddlyspot.com/#SyncOutlookNotes) so that I can then sync it to my blackberry using the standard outlook-blackberry sync mechanism. This has the significant advantage that I can look at my notes and even write new notes when I'm out and about, away from my laptop, or just don't feel like lugging the laptop around to a meeting that I don't really need it for.
I'd prefer using something more advanced like Onenote, but being able to take my notes with my in the little blackberry has turned out to be a significant advantage.
Google Notebook is very convenient tool. You can clip and save any parts of web pages without leaving your browser tab. The Notebook plug-in automatically saves them as separate notes in your notebooks and keep the links back to the original web pages. You can organize your clippings later by moving them between your notebooks and/or tagging them. Very good for code snippets and references.