All posts by onlyconnect

design, development, software development, web authoring

Book Review: Smashing UX Design (a great read for developers too)

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That the abbreviation UX can appear in a book title without expansion says a lot about the extent to which user-focused design is now embedded in the web development industry. The theory behind it is that User Experience is primary when designing a web site. The word "experience" suggests that this is not just about usability, or attractiveness, or performance, or enjoyment, but rather about all those things and how they combine when the end user is navigating your site.

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This book is for professional designers who want techniques for putting UX design into practice. The authors, Jesmond Allen and James Chudley, work for UX consultancy Cxpartners, based in Bristol in the UK, and the book is written from their perspective, including tips on how to work with your clients. That said, this is an excellent read even if you do not fall into that niche, thanks to the expertise and professionalism which informs the content.

There is a note right at the start of the book about the interaction between development and design teams which seems to me of key importance:

In order to produce designs that development teams can utilize, it is helpful for UXers to understand the development process they will be using. As external consultants, we do not always have the opportunity to work with development teams on a daily basis as they create a functional product from our designs, although we always strive to make ourselves available to developers as they work. Internal UX staff will likely have a much closer relationship with their development teams.

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Some developers may see UX activities as troublesome big design up front. However, UX activities contribute to requirements gathering and backlog prioritization activities. These activities typically take place long before development sprints begin.

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In order to produce robust products, it is important that UX research and design activities take place throughout the design and build cycle, whether it is product managers, UXers, or developers who perform the activities.

The emphasis is mine. A bad scenario, for example, runs like this. The project is initiated and handed to a design team, who come back with good-looking sketches and mock-ups. The developers then implement the design, but discover that it does not quite work as-is, maybe because the designers did not appreciate every nuance of the workflow, or because of evolving new requirements, or performance problems, or any number of other issues.

At this point the developers may endeavour to match the not-quite-working design as closely as possible, blaming shortcomings on the “bad design”. Or they may adapt the design to work better technically, potentially wrecking the design concept and delivering something which users will perceive as odd. This scenario is more likely to occur when budgets are particularly constrained and the design team external.

Note that Agile methodology has always emphasized that the team is the whole team – stakeholders, developers, designers, users, everyone – so it makes sense to keep designers involved right through the process. Put another way, do not allocate a design budget and spend it all up-front, before development begins.

It all comes down to communication, respect and understanding between team members, which is why this book is one that developers as well as designers should read.

Be clear: this is not a book about technology, so look elsewhere (perhaps to one of the other Smashing titles) if you want help with making beautiful web pages using CSS, or a how-to guide for building web sites. Smashing UX Design is about the process rather than the outcome, though there are plenty of practical tips along the way.

The book is in four parts. Part one is a general introduction to the concepts behind UX design and planning UX projects. Part two covers tools and techniques for UX research and evaluation, such as running requirements workshops, usability tests, surveys, analytics, and expert reviews.

The third part is about tools and techniques for UX design. If you are wondering what an Ideation Workshop is, you will find out how to run one here. Another technique described is how to create a "user persona", a fictional user who represents a category of users. There is also a discussion of wireframes, sketches and prototypes.

Finally, the fourth part looks in more detail at UX design for specific site pages, including the home page, search, product pages, shopping carts, images and tables. This is the section of most general interest, being full of practical suggestions and thought-provoking comments on what makes web pages work well for the user.

There is a too-brief chapter on mobile UX and this is a weakness of the book: not much on how tablets and smartphones are impacting UX design.

If you run or plan to run a web design business, then the book is perfect. It is also a great read for professional web developers. Individuals who are doing their own web design, or just want to understand it better, will find good content here but also a rather jargon-heavy style and probably more information than they need about working with clients and running workshops of various kinds.

 

microsoft, professional, windows

Microsoft announces launch dates for Windows 8: software will be done early August

Microsoft’s Tami Reller has announced the launch dates for Windows 8, the company’s controversial new operating system which combines the familiar desktop with a new touch-based user interface and associated runtime. She was speaking at the Worldwide Partner Conference under way in Toronto.

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The team is on track to complete the software in early August, a milestone known as RTM (Release to Manufacturing).

This means that the final version of Windows 8 will be available for download by developers and enterprises from August – just a couple of months from now.

PCs and tablets preloaded with Windows 8 will be in the shops from late October.

The appearance of Windows 8 hardware is more significant this time round than is usually the case. One reason is that most PCs currently on sale do not have touch screens; and even those that do will lack the range of sensors expected in Windows 8 tablets.

Even more significant is that the ARM build of Windows 8, called Windows RT, is only available with new hardware. This means it will not be generally available at all until the hardware appears in October.

azure, cloud computing, microsoft, professional, sql, windows

Moving a database from on-premise SQL Server to SQL Azure: some hassle

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I am impressed with the new Windows Azure platform, but when I moved a simple app from my local machine to Azure I had some hassle copying the SQL Server database.

The good news is that you can connect to SQL Azure using SQL Server Management studio. You need to do two things. First, check the server location and username. You should already know the password which you set when the database was created. You can get this information by going to the Azure portal, selecting the database, and clicking Show connection strings on the dashboard.

Second, open the SQL firewall for the IP number of your client. There is a link for this in the same connection string dialog.

Now you can connect in SQL Server Management Studio. However, you have limited access compared to what you get as an admin on your local SQL Server.

Here is the Tasks menu for an on-premise SQL Server database:

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and here it is for a SQL Server Azure database:

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Still, you can start Export Data or Copy Database from your on-premise connection and enter the Azure connection as the target. However, you should create the destination table first, since the Export Data wizard will not recreate indexes. In fact, SQL Azure will reject data imported into a table without at least one clustered index.

I tried to script a table definition and then run it against the SQL Azure database. You can generate the script from the Script Table as menu.

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However even the simplest table will fail. I got:

Msg 40514, Level 16, State 1, Line 2
‘Filegroup reference and partitioning scheme’ is not supported in this version of SQL Server.

when attempting to run the script on SQL Azure.

The explanation is here.

Windows Azure SQL Database supports a subset of the Transact-SQL language. You must modify the generated script to only include supported Transact-SQL statements before you deploy the database to SQL Database.

Fortunately there is an easier way. Right-click the table and choose Generate Scripts. In the wizard, click the Advanced button for Set Scripting Options.

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Find Script for the database engine type, and choose SQL Azure:

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You may want to change some of the other options too. This generates a SQL script that works with SQL Azure. Then I was able to use the Export Data wizard using the new table as the target.  If you use Identity columns, don’t forget Enable identity insert in Edit Mappings.

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exchange, microsoft, sharepoint, virtualization, windows

Farewell to Microsoft Small Business Server

Microsoft has announced pricing and licensing for Windows Server 2012. A dry topic perhaps; but one which confirms the end of a product with which I am perhaps too familiar: Small Business Server. It is spelt out in the FAQ:

Q33. Will there be a next version of Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard?

No. Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard, which includes Exchange Server and Windows server component products, will be the final such Windows Server offering. This change is in response to small business market trends and behavior. The small business computing trends are moving in the direction of cloud computing for applications and services such as email, online back-up and line-of-business tools.

The next question confirms that there will not be a new edition of Small Business Server 2011 Premium either. The official replacement is Windows Server 2012 Essentials, which is in effect the next version of Small Business Server Essentials. This handles local Active Directory, file sharing, local applications, and a connector to Office 365. However there is a 25 user account limit, whereas SBS standard supported up to 75 users, so there will be some businesses who are now forced to choose between moving to Windows Server Standard, or ditching the local server completely (which is often impractical).

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Microsoft is pinning the reason on cloud computing, which makes some sense. Now and again I am asked by small businesses what sort of technology they should adopt; and my answer in general is to point them at either Microsoft Office 365 or Google Apps.

It is not quite clear-cut. A Small Business Server can theoretically work out cheaper, if you presume that it will not require any external maintenance. That is rarely the case though, and for most people the cloud-hosted option will be both cheaper and less troublesome.

What if you do need on-premise Active Directory, Exchange and SharePoint, which are the core components of SBS? Technically, there are in my opinion better ways to do this than with SBS. While SBS has always been excellent value for money, it is over-complex because it crams onto one box applications which are designed to run on separate boxes. It does work, but if anything goes wrong it is actually harder to troubleshoot than when you have separate servers. I prefer to see one Hyper-V box with separate Virtual Machines (VMs) for each major function, than SBS running on bare metal. VMs are also more flexible, and easier to restore if the hardware breaks.

Farewell then to SBS. I will remember it with some affection though. Think back to the nineties, when most email was POP3, and most internet was dial-up. People had problems like losing emails, because they had been downloaded to a desktop PC and they were out and about with a laptop. Moving to Microsoft Exchange, for which Outlook is the client, was bliss by comparison. Email synchronised itself to all your PCs, you could work offline, and Outlook for all its faults became a one-stop application for calendar, contacts and messages.

The beauty of SBS was that you could get Exchange along with the benefits of a Windows domain – one central directory of users and the ability to assign permissions to file shares – at a price that was more than reasonable.

I also think of SBS as a reliable product, when correctly installed. When it does go wrong it is often due to users trying to do stuff that does not quite work, or other applications which get installed on the same box, or hardware faults which users have attempted to fix by messing around with Windows, or anti-virus software misbehaving (Sophos! Confess!).

Microsoft is doing the right thing though. The SBS bundle makes little sense today, and if you do still need it, you can stick with the 2011 edition for a few years yet.

c++, delphi, professional, software development, windows

Embarcadero adopts open source Clang for future C++ versions

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A couple of months ago Embarcadero’s John Ray Thomas published a roadmap for the company’s C++ tools. Coming soon: not only a long-awaited 64-bit compiler for Windows, but also native iOS and Android support. On top of that, there are plans for “the very best in C++11 and C99 language and library compliance in the industry.”

Sounds good; but this forthcoming upgrade is not quite what it seems. I spoke to technical evangelist David Intersimone about the changes. The company is adopting Clang, an open source project which creates a C/C++/Objective C front-end for the LLVM compiler. “We’re integrating all that into our IDE,” said Intersimone. “We’re also going to be using that same toolchain world with our Delphi compiler as well.”

“We have analysed what to do about C++. Our compilers both for Delphi and C++ have been around for a lot of years, and over time it just got harder and harder to add new capabilities to make programming simpler and also to add power and richness to the languages. In C++ in particular the language continues to be updated, with now C++ 11. So we made the decision to use Clang and LLVM on the C++ side, for the 64-bit compiler. We’re going to keep our existing compiler for 32-bit Windows for now, and then eventually replace that.

“For Delphi we’re still using our existing compiler to do some of the work, but we’ve been working on a next-generation compiler for Delphi and that is still in the works. For a while we’ll have two compilers, the existing architecture compilers, and then new compilers.”

Embarcadero has its own C++ extensions to support component development, and is working on adding them to Clang. “We’re leveraging and extending the Clang compiler with the property-method-event extensions that we added to our own C++ compiler.”

It is a sad moment in some ways, bearing in mind the long history of what was once the Borland C++ compiler. Equally, it is a sensible move. Intersimone said that the work of keeping up with the evolving C++ specification was disproportionate to the benefits. “It’s a monster language, with a lot of power and a lot of complexity. It made perfect sense to fit our extensions [to Clang] versus building a compiler from scratch and having to continue to track the language into the future.”

Embarcadero can focus instead on its IDE and tools, and on the frameworks for Windows and for cross-platform.

Look out for a more detailed interview with David Intersimone in a future article for Hardcopy.

cloud computing, microsoft, virtualization, windows, windows 7, xbox, yahoo

aQuantive may be Microsoft’s biggest acquisition failure. Have there been good ones? A look back.

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Today’s news that Microsoft  is writing off $6.2 billion from the useless acquisition of aQuantive in August 2007 gives me pause for thought.

How bad is this company at acquisitions? Particularly those under CEO Steve Ballmer’s watch. He became CEO in January 2000.

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Microsoft acquired Danger in February 2008 for $500M. Small relative to the aQuantive acquisition, but how much further money did the company burn transforming Danger from an excellent cloud and mobile company to the group that came up with Kin, the phone withdrawn from the market after just two months on sale? Not to mention the downtime and threatened loss of data suffered by Danger’s online service under Microsoft’s stewardship.

Microsoft attempted to buy Yahoo for $44.6bn in 2008. Yahoo’s executives declined, a move that was (very) bad for Yahoo shareholders but quite possibly right in a business sense; it would not have been a good fit.

Microsoft acquired Groove Networks complete with Notes inventor Ray Ozzie in March 2005. I put this in the disaster category. Groove went nowhere at Microsoft. Ozzie became Chief Software Architect and talked of internet vision but did not deliver. The wretched SharePoint Workspace is apparently based on Groove.

What about the good ones? My view is that Microsoft paid too much for Skype at $8.5 billion but at least it acquired a large number of users and has some chance of enhancing its mobile offerings with Skype integration.

Microsoft acquired Bungie in 2000 and given the success of Halo (without which, maybe, the whole Xbox project might have faltered) we have to count that a success, even though Bungie was spun off back to independence in 2007.

Other notables include Great Plains in December 2000 (now morphed into Dynamics ERP); Connectix in February 2003 which got Microsoft started in virtualization; and Opalis in December 2009 whose software now plays a key role in Microsoft’s System Center 2012 private cloud software.

Winternals in July 2006 was a great acquisition. Microsoft acquired some indispensable Windows troubleshooting tools, and also Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogwell, able people who I suspect contributed to the transformation of Windows Vista into Windows 7, and in the case of Russinovich, to the technology in Windows Azure which now seems reborn as an excellent cloud platform.

You can see all Microsoft’s completed acquisitions here.

(If the company would like to acquire itwriting.com for a few billion I am willing to talk.)

development, open source, professional, software, software development

Updating the world’s most widely deployed SQL database engine: welcome to SQLite 4

A new version of SQLite is in preparation. If you are not a developer, you might not have heard of SQLite, but you have almost certainly used it. It is built into Mac OS X and numerous web browsers, used by many applications which run on Adobe’s Flash runtime, and is the obvious choice if you want a small, fast and reliable database engine to embed into an application. It is open source and as free as you can get:

Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or distribute the original SQLite code, either in source code form or as a compiled binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any means.

SQLite3 is the current version; but now there is an update to version 4:

SQLite4 is an alternative, not a replacement, for SQLite3. SQLite3 is not going away. SQLite3 and SQLite4 will be supported in parallel. The SQLite3 legacy will not be abandoned. SQLite3 will continue to be maintained and improved. But designers of new systems will now have the option to select SQLite4 instead of SQLite3 if desired.

The reason for the new version is that some issues in version 3 could not be fixed without breaking compatibility.

So what is new? On a quick read, these seem to be the highlights:

  • A global configuration object (sqlite4_env) which eliminates all use of global and static variables.
  • A new key/value storage engine which has a “greatly simplified” interface and which is pluggable, so you can use a different one if required. The default storage engine is described as a “log-structured merge database”. A B-Tree engine may also be offered later.
  • Primary keys are now real primary keys, as opposed to unique constraints. This speeds up primary key searches.
  • Decimal maths. “All numeric values are represented internally as an 18-digit decimal number with a 3-digit base-10 exponent.” This is advantageous for currency calculations and for cross-platform consistency.
  • Foreign key constraints and recursive triggers on by default
  • Covering support in indexes (when required), to increase the number of queries that can be resolved by querying the indexes alone, at the expense of greater duplication of data

When will SQLite 4 be ready? Code is available but Author D Richard Hipp says:

Everything is still pretty makefile-touchy. Remember, this is like pre-alpha code. It works, but just barely. And things are changing rapidly.

Porting an application from SQLite3 to SQLite4 should be straightforward, according to the author. “An hour or two search-and-replace.”

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microsoft

MySQL on Windows Azure is expensive and provided by a third-party, spoils web site offer

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I have been impressed by the changes in the June release of Windows Azure, available through a sparkling new HTML-based portal that lets you create new virtual machines and web sites with a few clicks or taps. One of the new features is multi-tenant web sites, starting from free and scaling up to multiple load-balanced instances. I even wondered about moving this blog, which is on WordPress, to run on an Azure web site.

When you create a web site on Azure, you can choose between a free MySQL database or a paid-for SQL Server database. At least, that is what was announced, and it is kind-of true. However, if you choose a MySQL database, a message about agreeing to terms from third-party ClearDB pops up. Even your subscription details will be passed to ClearDB.

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You click the link, and discover that the free MySQL offer is not generous. In fact, it is limited to a tiny 20MB, making is useless for most applications. It also has, according to ClearDB, low performance.

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If your database may grow to more than 1GB you need ClearDB’s Saturn offer, at $49.99 per month.

This has killed my interest in running this blog on Azure, at least via this route. I am not familiar with ClearDB, but for all I know it is a fine company. Nevertheless, if I am betting on Windows Azure, I would rather not have to bet also on an unfamiliar third-party. I also note that many ISPs offer MySQL databases with few restrictions and better terms. Take UK ISP ICUK, for example, which I use on occasion. For £3.00 per month you can get Linux web hosting with up to 10 MySQL databases. They may not have all the features of ClearDB, but as far as I am aware (don’t take my word for it) they are on a fault-tolerant cluster and backed up nightly.

As I understood it, Microsoft’s goal with the multi-tenanted web sites is to provide a quick solution for test and development, that can scale to a serious web site. Maybe enterprises will not blink, but a $49.99 monthly plan for the database takes it out of the realm of quick and cheap test and development from my perspective.

It is also unfortunate that the Azure web site gallery does not provide an option to use SQL Server for some applications in its quick-create Gallery. These include WordPress and Drupal. I agree that these applications probably work best with MySQL, but you can configure them to use SQL Server.

There are other ways to bypass ClearDB. You could set up a plain PHP web site and configure it to run WordPress on SQL Server, for example. You could also use a Linux VM, even a Small Instance, with 1 virtual CPU and 1.75GB RAM, and put MySQL on there. Thanks to Azure’s fabric, it will have some resilience: all storage is, as I understand it, in triplicate.

In the end I guess this is not unexpected. Microsoft is a Windows company and you can understand why it wants to get someone else to manage MySQL; and also why it does not wish to undercut SQL Server with too generous an offer for MySQL.

Even so, the 20MB limit is a disappointment and makes the Azure free web sites less interesting.

.net, development, microsoft

Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie on what has happened to Silverlight

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I spoke to Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie last week, during his trip to the UK for a couple of Windows Azure events in Cambridge and London.

Guthrie is now Corporate VP Windows Azure Application Platform, a job he took up in May 2011. Before that he worked on .NET technologies including Silverlight, and I asked if he had any reflections on the subject. He was scrupulously tactful.

“In terms of looking at our XAML stack right now, if you look at some of the announcements we’ve made in terms of Windows 8, Metro, Surface, tablets and desktops, and Windows Phone, XAML is alive and well and being used for more things than ever.

“Silverlight 5 shipped after I moved on to Azure. We did an update to Silverlight 5 about a month ago. For XAML developers, and developers using Silverlight or WPF XAML technologies, there is a long roadmap ahead.”

He seemed to me to be saying that even if Silverlight is dead (nobody expects a Silverlight 6), XAML lives on.

I observed that in the new (and much improved) Windows Azure admin portal, the Silverlight UI has gone, replaced by an HTML 5 user interface.

“It’s actually HTML, it’s not HTML 5. It works with non HTML 5 browsers as well.“ he said. “That was less of a technology statement, it was more that, historically Azure had 5 or 6 admin tools that were fairly disjoint. One of the decisions we made as part of the new Azure that we’re building was, let’s have a single admin tool framework that connected everything. We decided to do it with HTML, partly because we did want to get reach on tablets like iPads and Android devices.

“It was less a technology statement, it was more that we wanted a single admin tool, and we decided to go with an HTML-based approach. We still use Silverlight for some of our admin experiences like database management tools, and for streaming and other capabilities.”

It is true that Silverlight remains in the Azure database design tool, if you use the portal. It is also used extensively in System Center 2012 – yes, I have actually installed it – and in Windows InTune.

It is as if, back in 2009 and early 2010, the memo went out: use Silverlight for everything. Then, later in 2010, the memo went out: use HTML for everything; but too late for the current generation of server admin products.

Microsoft has announced that Visual Studio LightSwitch, which generates Silverlight applications, is being revised to offer HTML applications as well. I expect this process of Silverlight removal and de-emphasis to continue over the next couple of years. Note that Microsoft’s own Windows RT does not support Silverlight (as far as I am aware), nor does Windows 8 on the Metro side.

.net, microsoft, mobile, windows

Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8: nearly converged

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Microsoft has shared details of the forthcoming Windows Phone 8 operating system, which is set to be available on devices before the end of 2012.

The improvements are fundamental, and it seems that Microsoft has finally created a mobile platform that has what it takes, technically, to compete in the modern smartphone market. Winning share from competitors is another thing of course; Nokia’s hoped-for third ecosystem is still tiny relative to Apple iOS or Google Android.

It starts with a change in the core operating system, from Windows CE to Windows 8. The two now share the same kernel, and APIs including Graphics, Audio, Media, File System, Networking, Input, Commerce, Base Types and Sensors. The .NET Framework is also the same. The browser will be Internet Explorer 10.

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Silverlight was not mentioned, nor was XNA, though we were told that Windows Phone 7.x apps will run on Windows Phone 8.

The change does enable multi-core support at last. Screen resolution can now go up to 1280 x 768, ready for high-definition displays. There is also support for MicroSD storage, a feature which should have been in the first release.

What about Windows RT, the runtime for Metro-style apps in Windows 8? Here is the significant slide from yesterday’s presentation:

devchoices

This looks similar to Windows RT, which also supports three development models: XAML and .NET, native C/C++ code, and HTML5. It is not quite the same though. One thing I did not hear mentioned was contracts, the communication and file sharing system built into Windows 8, though we were promised “sharing under user control”. Nor did we hear about language “projections”, the layer that lets different languages in Windows 8 call the same Windows Runtime APIs. My guess at the moment is that Windows Phone 8 does not include the Windows Runtime, though it does have much in common with it. The further guess is that the full Windows Runtime will come in Windows Phone 9.

In other words, it seems that Windows Phone 8 will not run apps coded for Windows 8, though we were told that if you code to the XAML and .NET model for apps, and the native code model for games, few changes will be needed. XNA developers should consider a change of direction.

Support for C/C++ is a key feature and one that in my view should have been in the first Windows Phone release. One of the things it enables is official support for SQLite, the cross-platform database engine also found in Mac OS X and numerous other platforms. A good day for SQLite, which pleases me as I am a fan.

There will also be C/C++ gaming libraries coming to Windows Phone 8, including Havoc:

havoc

What else is new? Users will like the new Start screen, which unlike the whole of Windows Phone 8 is also coming to existing devices, which will get a half-way upgrade called Windows Phone 7.8 (7 and 8, geddit?). The innovation in the new Start screen is that any tile can be sized by the user to any of the supported sizes. The smallest size allows four tiles across, so you can make your Windows Phone look more like Android or iOS if you so choose.

newstart2

What else? Microsoft is not announcing “end-user features” yet, but did promise Nokia offline maps plus turn by turn directions; digital wallet which can be paired with a secure SIM for NFC (near field communications) payment, and deep support for Skype and VOIP so they “feel like any other call”. Apparently operators will love the way the wallet is implemented, because unlike Android it is hooked to the SIM, but I doubt they will be so keen on Skype.

There is an improved speech engine which duly failed to recognise speech input correctly in the first demo, though it worked after that.

Finally, Microsoft is now talking Enterprise for Windows Phone. There will be bitlocker encryption and enterprise app deployment without Windows store, as well as device management. Think full System Center 2012 integration.

Conclusion? There is disappointment that existing Windows Phone 7 devices are not fully upgradeable, but this is hardly surprising given the changed core. As a platform it is greatly improved, though I would like to see full WinRT included. Despite its poor start, you cannot dismiss this mobile OS as Microsoft continues to use its financial muscle to try and try again.

If it succeeds, will it be too late for Nokia? Maybe, though my hunch is that Microsoft will do what it takes to keep its key mobile partner alive.