Playing With Hoops, or Every Step You Take

I do not often pay full attention to Giles Bowkett. That is the flip side of being the provocateur that he is, some people will occasionally tune out. However, when anyone plays the Steve Krug card, I am compelled to take a look.

Yesterday, Giles posted a dead-on point about user registration, called "I Don't Care About Your Hoops". When you compare the success of simplicity, as in the Google and Apple examples, to what we all tend to fall into, I hope you are as embarrassed as I was. Time for some self-examination.

I was ready to hack down the user signup process to size. Here are my new rules:

• 4 or more registration steps = FAIL


• 3 registration steps = A long shot, but you might make it


• 2 registration steps = At the top of the key, worth taking a shot, but no sure thing


• 1 registration step = A free throw, you should easily sink it


• 0 registration steps = Slamdunk ala Michael Jordan. Ain't no stopping us now.

Modern Web Design

This one pie chart says it all...

From ChangeTheThought.com

April Is For AOL

Last night was the always fun Los Angeles web application developer Meetup, this time at AOL in Beverly Hills. After navigating a veritable maze of cubes, we found ourselves in a fairly large screening room chock full of AV equipment, accompanied by a large pile of pizza boxes. A few moments later, the throng of LA-based developers shuffled in, ready for the latest and greatest. The prerequisites fulfilled, we got down to some serious techno-babble.

First up was Omer Singer from DigiTrust, talking about Web Application Firewalls. Although it strayed a little closely to a sales pitch, Omer was able to tie it together with his definition of "defense in depth", which is simply enough having multiple layers of overlapping protection. One good point that he raised which is often overlooked is the cost of "brand-damage" in the marketplace from a web application being hacked. There were several good security related question asked afterwards, so yes the crown was paying close attention.

Next, was Mitch Hashimoto recent hire at CitrusByte, with a brief overview of the newly beta released Google App Engine. Mitch took us on a brief tour of the main capabilities of the Python-based system, like a Datastore API (based on BigTable), and the Users API (based on the Goog's own account authentication database). If you like Python, and don't mind doing everything the Google Way and no other, then the App Engine might be for you.

After Mitch, I did a presentation about Frankie, my newly released Ruby gem for easy development of Facebook applications. If you don't yet know, Frankie uses the Sinatra web server and the Facebooker gem to allow you to create a basic Facebook application with only 10 lines of Ruby. I also did a brief demo of a new, super-secret web thing that I have been working on for a little while... more will be revealed soon!

Last up was programming chum and Ruby expert Ari Lerner, talking about Amazon's EC2 service, and showing a little of another upcoming pet project of ours called "Pool Party", which makes it easy to deploy an auto-scaling application to the EC2 cloud.

It was a really great meetup, and the turnout was really good. Thanks to the persistent efforts of organizer Will Jessup, the community in LA is really thriving, and we were even able to keep the annoyance of non-technical recruiter sales pitches away. Great job, everyone!

Getting To Usable

I read a great posting last night from Matt Rogers, founder of startup Aroxo, on a strategy for usability testing. Suddenly, I was flashing back a few years to the early salad days of web usability...

When I first read Steve Krug's tiny masterwork "Don't Make Me Think", I was very excited; at last, a nice practical approach! After the pedantic and overly academic work of guys like Jakob Neilson, Krug's book hit me like Dr. Seuss taking out Dick, Jane, and Spot.

Somehow, Rogers' post reminded me of that sudden flash of clarity in the fog. Yes, we can DO this! Gentlemen and ladies, start your testing...

I Want My API

I just ran into a really great resource for open source API documentation. Called gotAPI, it links in a delightfully searchable way all of the APIs we love, but turn out to not actually know. Well, we know them, just not well enough to have their numbers setup for speed dial on our cell phones. Or our code able to call them directly without looking up a reference first.

Here is a small sample of ones I will actually use regularly:

• HTML


• CSS


• JavaScript


• Prototype


• jQuery


• Ruby Standard Library


• Ruby on Rails


• Erlang


• MySQL


• PostgreSQL


• Selenium

Plus gotAPI is a domain name I can probably remember. That should keep me from several pointless button mashing Google searches per hour just to end up back on the same sites that gotAPI is already linking to.

The Eyes Have It

Software usability has really benefited from the latest and greatest digital technology for eye tracking. If you are not familiar with eye tracking, it is exactly what it sounds like: a camera watching where the user's eyes are focused, and matching that to the screen to identify what the user is REALLY looking at, for how long, and in what order.

Here is a really great summary called "Scientific Web Design: 23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies" that collects information from several different studies, and packages it up into something pretty, dare I say it, usable.

It is really worth it to read the whole thing, and it is pretty short. Here are a few highlights that got my attention:

• Text attracts attention before graphics


• Fancy formatting and fonts are ignored


• Type size influences viewing behavior


• One-column formats perform better in eye-fixation than multi-column formats


• Lists hold reader attention longer


• Navigation tools work better when placed at the top of the page

There is so much more to UI than drawing a pretty picture. Applying some science to the art of user interface design can result in something truly beautiful.

Sinatra, a Ruby web framework, and Why It Matters

As followers of this blog know, I am very interested in the Ruby language itself, not just web development. But it is undeniable that Ruby has become popular largely due to web development powered by Ruby on Rails. However amazing Rails is, however, it is not the final web framework to be developed in Ruby.

When Ari Lerner first told me of the Sinatra project, I was interested to see where he was going with it. Now that I have seen it, I totally get it, and I am more interested than ever. Let's compare it to Rails, Camping, and Merb, to better understand where Sinatra fits in, and why Ruby programmers should take a look at it.

Unlike Ruby on Rails, Sinatra is not a Model-View-Controller (MVC) based framework for creating websites. If you want helper functions that help you create forms, connect to databases, or any of the other myriad of functions that Rails provides, you will not find them. Instead, Sinatra is a very simple, yet powerful, Domain Specific Language (DSL) for defining RESTful HTTP actions, and then defining how the application is going to respond to them.

Rails requires a separate routes file to define how the web application is going to respond to requests, which hooks up to the appropriate controllers/models. Sinatra defines the simplest thing that could possibly work. When you declare a new "get" or "post" action, Sinatra will automatically add the route, and simply start responding to requests that match.

Here is a simple example of a Sinatra application:

require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'

get '/' do
   "Hello world"
end

As you can see, a Sinatra application's code is tiny, similar to Camping in that you can easily create an entire web application deployed as a single file. Unlike Camping, Sinatra does not have such a "crazy meta magic" feel to it... why's coding style is not for the faint of heart.

Like Merb, Sinatra is implemented as a Mongrel handler. Also, like Merb it is both thread-safe and has better performance than Rails. However, where Merb tries to be a "Rails-lite" for devs who are already familiar with Rails, but want a more bare-metal approach, Sinatra unabashedly takes an entirely different direction with its very minimal DSL-syntax.

Not to say that you cannot use ActiveRecord or whatever other Ruby gems you want to create your application. But unlike Rails, Sinatra's base core is incrediby minimal, and it puts the onus on the developer to decide what to include, instead of adding a bunch of things that may not be appropriate for the type of application that Sinatra would be good for.

So what would it be good for? API implmentations, quick minimal applications, and web development that does not want or need things that are included in Rails, like ActiveRecord. Control panel mini-applications, or perhaps widgets. I am looking forward to really getting into some fun with Sinatra... check back soon here for more.

Yesterday, the Ruby Inside blog mentioned Sinatra, and some of us have been digging it for the last few days. Take a look, and you will enjoy the appeal of a simplicity and elegance in development you haven't felt from Ruby for a long time... a very long time.

More Developer Fun In Los Angeles

Last night was the always entertaining Los Angeles Application Developer Meetup. L.A. is not known for the same massive quantity of developers as the bay area, for example, but having joined forces with the LA Ruby on Rails Meetup crew some time back, the monthly event is still growing.

This month's was held at the impressive new digs of YellowPages.com, who have been busy building out a huge Ruby on Rails based local search replacement for their venerable 100K+ lines of Java code. Thanks for the great sandwiches, boys... next time, buy beer!

Anyhow, four presentations took place on various fun topics of technical interest. First, Jeff Yamada and his associate (sorry I didn't catch your name) showed AIR. I then did a short presentation on Continuous Integration and CruiseControl.rb. Olmo Maldonado talked about his impressive JavaScript library MooTools, and then Ari Lerner showed his just-relased Ruby web development framework, Sinatra.

AIR
Long, long ago, I used to work with Flash and ActionScript. Most of us more "serious" programmers were always very frustrated with the language, the programming environment, pretty much everything except for the final product. Since then Adobe has introduced technologies like Flex and AIR to try to address the shortcomings of using Flash as a "real" development tool. Yamada and friend are the authors of the upcoming book "AIR Bible". AIR nee Apollo is designed to provide a way to create native OS applications, while using the toolset that Flash/Flex developers are used to. If you are into Flash/Flex already, then this is probably great for you, but I am not overly in love with so many angle brackets mixed in my code... let's just say that "it ain't Ruby". One small thing I will suggest to the boys: please try to find some relevant application to show for a demo a of a new technology. Between this, and what all of the Microsofties were show a few months back for Silverlight, no one is going to take this new desktop app paradigm seriously!

How To Get Your Code Together and Keep It That Way
Then I did a presentation myself, called "How To Get Your Code Together and Keep It That Way". It was really an exhortation to use the best practice of Continuous Integration, while showing how easy it is to get started with the ultra-cool CI tool CruiseControl.rb. If you are a Rails dev, and you are not using CruiseControl.rb yet, you should be. If you have a development project with greater than zero developers, it is worth it to setup a CI system, even just to keep yourself in check. You can get a copy of my presentation here. But don't just believe me, it is in yesterday's O'Reilly Radar too.

As I was demoing the CC.rb project page, where they are doing CI builds of both CruiseControl.rb itself and the Ruby on Rails project, I noticed that the Rails build has had failing unit tests since Oct. 3. What is up with that? Let's get on it boys!

MooTools
Next up was Olmo Maldonado, once of the authors of MooTools. MooTools is a JavaScript framework for web development along the lines of Prototype or jQuery. I had been hearing about MooTools, but hadn't really checked it out. Naturally, since both of those other JS frameworks already exist, and with Prototype really having dominated in the acceptance wars, MooTools does have a different approach on several levels to justify its existence.

Heavily optimized for speed, according to Maldonado, Moo performs much faster than either Prototype or jQuery on the slickspeed benchmark test at performing DOM selects, which is the core convenience provided by any JS framework.

Another difference is that MooTools libs are completely orthogonal. As such, the developer only needs to incorporate the specific libs that contain the functionality that is required for that application, unlike both Prototype and jQuery which require downloading the entire framework to use any part of it.

MooTools seems to have a more serious emphasis on good software devlopment practices than the othe JS framework projects. One example of this is that MooTools was developed using JSSpec, which is a Behavior Driven Development framework for JavaScript.

Already up to version 1.2, MooTools has been adopted in some very interesting places. The three demos that Maldonado showed were the iPhone version of the Pop-Cap game Bejeweled, the Ubuntu.com website, and then most curious of all, the Microsoft Expression website! What, M$ couldn't use Silverlight? Oh yeah, everyone already has Javascript... no additional download required. Whatever happened to that famous dogfooding?

MooTools is realy designed for the developer who wants to work in pure JavaScript. Most Rails devs like to use the Ruby on Rails Prototype helpers to do nice AJAX-y things like edit in-place and auto-complete functionality. MooTools does all that, plus has a bunch of UI gadgetry too, but having no inline functions, is not really compatible with the way the Rails helpers work. Perhaps someone will create a Rails plug-in that can collect up all of the MooTools Javascript, kida like what the Unobtrusive Javascript plugin does... for those Rails people who want to take advanatge of the DSL-like syntax, instead of dropping all the way into JavaScript.

Sinatra
Speaking of DSLs, the final presentation of the evening was by Ari Lerner, showing his incredibly cool new little Ruby web framework called Sinatra. In fact, I was so impressed by Sinatra, that I decided to give it its own posting. I suggest you go check it out right now!

Fun At Yahoo! In Los Angeles

Last Tuesday night was July's Los Angeles Web Application Developer Meetup. This event is starting to get really good. Not only were there lots of people who came out, but our hosts Yahoo! actually bought us beer too. Hint to future hosts of the meetup... be cool like Yahoo! and provide BOTH a projection screen and beer.

There were two especially fun presentations, at least to me. Jim Bumgardner of Yahoo showed off some of his really interesting web gadgetry. Now I didn't know Jim when I walked into the meetup, but I have seen his work. The man has done some innovative stuff over the years, that is for sure. Also, he has to have one of the best gigs I have seen for a while, getting paid to build really fun things.

He showed several different ways to choose one item from a group of items, without resorting to any of the usual tired UI metaphors. My personal favorite was the Wheel of Lunch.

The other extra fun presentation was Richard Herrera showing Pickleview, an iPhone application created to track real-time baseball scores. Now if they were soccer scores, I would have had to run out and get an iPhone... actually, I may just end up doing that anyhow. But I digress.

Developed in PHP (but we won't hold that against them, will you, dear reader?), Pickleview combines an XML feed of Major League Baseball scores, and mashes it up with Twitter. A pretty cool little application, I would have to say.

Now I am getting interested in whipping up something for the iPhone myself... stay tuned.