Homework Two

Hello and welcome to my Homework! I resigned the CSS descriptions of my blog giving it a new look! Although I am not entirely satisfied with it, I think it was a good way to brush up on my CSS knowledge!

And I'm finally glad that my team issues are resolved! Go Wombats!!! (tentatively!)

Week Four- More Del-icio-us!!!

Given the growth of the web-surfing culture, the need for online bookmarking has increased. Websites such as del.icio.us and furlit.com cater to this need improving the surfing experience of millions of users. However it is our observation that their user-interface needs tremendous improvement. We have formulated the goals of our project by understanding the basic functionality of online bookmarking sites and the downsides of their user-interface.

Current Situation

Primary functionality of Online bookmarks Managers

• Allows users to save visited links on the go, by posting the links into their web-accounts
• Customizable tags to help u associate websites names with generic terms (such as email, movies, blogs etc)
• Provisions for sorting links based on frequency of a user's visit to the link
• Provides a count of people who have saved the same website (providing means to collaborate with people of common interests)
• Allows views of popular and recommendable tags to help discover websites catering to user's interests

Downside

• Lack of visualizations and other features that would help a user to identify bookmarks faster
• Tags can be ambiguous, when the user provides different names to bookmarks of the same "taggable" category
• Limits the number of sites that could be displayed in a page, requiring the user to navigate through several pages to find a bookmark to even the most visited sites
• Search provision is either unavailable or unsatisfactory
• Does not display or save images

Project Vision

The scope of the project is very large, with plenty of features that could be accomodated. However, through the course of this quarter, we aim to narrow down and implement the most significant design changes and functionalities. We have brainstormed many ideas, as mentioned below. In the next couple of weeks, we will improve on or eliminate some.

1. Our goal is to design the user-experience, targeting non-tech savvy web-surfers for whom convenience of use is a priority
2. The time spent by a user to identify the desired book-mark should be minimum (even across a potential of over hundreds of links)
3. Frequently visited sites must appear clearly\n
4. Provisions for searcing across the website
5. Track Freshness: User's favorite websites will be monitored for frequent updates and appropriately pop-up
6. More visualization
7. Provisions for saving personalized searches such as driving directions etc.\n
8. Provision for saving images and displaying them, possibly as a slide show\n
9. Come up with a name of our team and website!
10. Search provision is either unavailable or unsatisfactory
11. Does not display or save images

I have a Team

Team name: Haven't decided
Team-members:

Kelly Miyashiro Blog
Karen Au Blog
Eric Pan Blog
Divya Kumar Blog

Hurrah!

Irony

Writely

I love the idea of being able to use Word no matter where I am. I love Firefox so much that I want it to become my Desktop! It gets frustrating to have to email myself copies of my documents and files everytime I create/view one. Writely would solve this problem be providing online security to my documents. I could edit this blog and get it publish from Writely! Besides Google owns it now and I'm pretty sure the UI will be slick!

Week Two

Getting down to business...

Why do I need HTML?

• Documents of the World Wide Web called "webpages". No one connected to the internet can view these pages accurately without using a browser (although there are ways to route some data to a text-viewer that doesn't support GUI). Browsers understand a language called HTML. HTML is used to structure information.
• XHTML is easier to process and maintain. It combines HTML with stricter rules of XML

What about CSS?

• With Cascading Style Sheets, HTML code because much simpler. The persentational attributes of a webpage are written in a CSS file. Based on the type of display you wish (for visually-impaired or for the mobiles) an appropriate CSS file can be chosen.

Week One

Could people without technical expertise be isolated from the progress of the Digital Age, or could great technologies become disregarded as their efficacy is never understood by communities? It is in my opinion that civilizations should never be in a position of choice between the two formidable contentions. Technology is only a tool that enables individuals pursue their passions and livelihood with relative ease and smoothness. The creators of these tools often fail to see that not all share their credentials in understanding the purpose of their inventions. The field of Human Computer Interactions strives to ensure that neither the creators, nor the users need bridge the gap between the two worlds. Interaction Designers are responsible for it.

Through this course, I aim to garner the tools necessary to enhance the experience of a user in the World Wide Web. End-users must be abstracted from the nitty-gritty of programming. Programmers often fail to understand the nuances of web design that could improve the comfort-level a user needs in order to acquire information. Interaction Designers connect the goals of content providers and developers. They play the roles of a programmer, an artist and a manager.

I traversed through a brief history of the World Wide Web this week, and have noted many interesting facts on its evolution, based on some articles. I have summarized them below:

As We May Think

This visionary article by Dr.Vannevar Bush speaks on the impact of tools that could improve collaboration among scientists. The futuristic machine that he speaks of (Memex) sees its naissance in the era of electronic communications and storage we live in today.

Berners-Lee’s Original Proposal

Another inventive proposal, revolutionizing the idea and purpose of Internet, moving it from an isolated link of computers to an evolving network of information systems. He envisioned the usefulness of such a system that later became the World Wide Web.

How It All Started

A chronological representation of how the Internet was shaped from 1945 until 1995.

What is Web 2.0?

My personal favorite of the articles covered, “Web 2.0”, presents an overview of, well, Web 2.0 and its foster children, Google, Yahoo! etc. It compares and contrasts today’s version of WWW to the short-lived Web 1.0 of the “Netscape’ era. The survivors of Web 1.0 are the giants who have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence. This article often suggests that the style in which web-content is connected is similar to the association formed by synapses in the brain. This is the natural flow of information and intelligence. It justifies why Web 2.0 is more than just a meme and describes the phenomena that Google, Overture and other such web-based, service-oriented applications have demonstrated. Software is delivered to the user as a service and not as product. The rise of proprietary databases could result in the free database movement within the next decade. This article also discusses the business models of such services and concludes that we're entering an unprecedented period of user interface innovation, as web developers are finally able to build web applications as rich as local PC-based applications.

AJAX

I’m looking forward to using AJAX in my projects. Ajax isn’t something you can download. It’s an approach — a way of thinking about the architecture of web applications using certain technologies. A summary of AJAX is as follows: AJAX is short for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web. Ajax incorporates:

• standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
• dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
• data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
• asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
• and JavaScript binding everything together.