TBNL

In software development projects, paying proper attention to usability aspects, can greatly help ‘getting the message functionality across’. Usability is a field of expertise on its own and involves techniques like wireframes, prototyping and card sorting. Not every project is the same and (sadly) lack of time or budget can prevent specialized interaction designers to be involved in the project. This means that making the application ‘usable’ becomes the responsibility of graphic designers or developers (or it is neglected altogether). Not an easy combination of tasks…
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Today I stumbled across an interesting new Firefox extension: FireScope. It’s developed by Sitepoint, a site I visit regularly. I was aware of their reference material on html, css and javascript and now they use that content to feed this extension. FireScope is an extension to Firebug, assumably known and installed by anyone interested in FireScope. On the official firefox add-ons page it has the status ‘experimental’ and hence requires logging in. On the FireScope page it can be installed after selecting ‘allow’ on the Firefox warning. It looks like Firefox for developers got even better…

A couple of days ago I attended a presentation titled ‘WPF in LOB applications’. Without the abbreviations that would be ‘Windows Presentation Foundation in Line Of Business applications’. It was just an overview but some interesting points were mentioned.

First of all, it was explained that Microsoft Silverlight is a web-based subset of WPF. Now that places things in perspective for the web-minded. Then there was some coverage on XAML, a markup language used to develop interfaces, thereby separating business from logic. I’m not sure how that is handled in WinForms applications but I got the impression that that separation was something new.

Proceeding on that subject the term ‘devigner’ was mentioned, a devigner being a combintion of a developer and a designer. I hadn’t heard that before but then again, it’s just another industry term. The WPF architecture would allow ‘devigners’ to have a larger role in a project. There’s a bit of paradox there as the increasing separation between logic and presentation seems more likely to push designers and developers back in their respective corners. But if you look upon it as ‘getting the hardcore logic out of the interface development’ it makes a lot more sense.

Anyway, it raises a lot of questions: What is a devigner? Do devigners exist? (sure, depends on the definition) Am I a devigner? (probably, depends on the definition) Are you a devigner? Do they appear ‘out in the open’? If so, how can you recognize them? Is the emphasis on design or develop? Can designers be good developers and vice versa?

Regarding that last question: Just because someone is a proficient soccer player doesn’t mean he can’t be good at chess, right?

Interesting, interesting…