O’Reilly: Inside RIA

“Quality Function Deployment,” or “QFD,” is a way of modeling business processes for good customer experiences. Sound like a lot of business jargon? Maybe it is, but it’s also very similar to something we in the interactive space are reinventing and rediscovering as “User Experience Design.” QFD was developed in the ’70’s and ’80s and continues to be refined today. In this entry we'll focus on requirements, and how QFD justifies the role of UX professionals in finding ways to wow users.

You've been looking into the world of Rich Internet Applications for a while now but how do you make the jump? Whether you're a developer working in Java or C++ looking to get on the web or a designer working in an art department wanting to do more interactive, the RIA world is a fast-growing and exciting field many people are looking to transition to. Unless you're lucky enough to have some personal connections into an RIA firm, the decision to move requires hitting the pavement and convincing an RIA company that you're worth hiring. This article comes from my experiences as both a former interviewee and current interviewer at a mid-sized RIA company.

Yesterday IBM announced the release of ILOG Elixir 2.5 - the first Elixir release since ILOG was acquired by IBM back in January.

Adobe Wave is an all-purpose aggregator designed to let you keep up to date on a variety of different media streams. The application is a simple AIR app that connects to a variety of different services and displays a small alert when new content is available. In this entry we'll walk through how Wave works, some of it's uses, how it differs from other similar services (Twitter), and what it needs to do to survive.

A few weeks ago I gave a talk with Andy McIntosh at Adobe Camp Denver on some of the new features in Flex 4. The conference was fantastic. I've embedded the slides and links to our examples in this entry. Enjoy!

Tibco PageBus is a free event framework for JavaScript. In this entry I discuss the merits of PageBus, how to implement it, and show a quick example demo I built integrating some HTML, PageBus, and a very simple Flash component.

Distraction is a problem commonly diagnosed in our internet-driven careers in an internet-driven society. The media encourages the conversation, alternately providing tips and tricks on how to increase your productivity while blaming Google for destroying culture or discussing the impossibility of classical genius in a modern time frame. Wading through this frenzy is Sam Anderson, who's recent article "In Defense of Distraction" in New York magazine is one of the most thoughtful approaches to the subject I've read to date. Alternately factual and philosophical, Anderson elevates the dialogue around this conversation into a higher place where something really productive is possible. Merlin Mann and the Dali Lama make guest appearances (though not together.)

Earlier this month Smashing Magazine posted a broad review of Flash and Silverlight. The review covers the way the two products handle things like animation, publishing to the desktop, scripting, small file sizes, socket connections, capturing web-cam content, etc.

The New York Times released a special reader application built in Adobe AIR this past weekend. It's a pretty slick application, and an example of AIR done right.

Vidoop is a User Experience company focused on web security. They offer a set of products and services to provide security to web users and developers, but they take a unique approach to security that provides a much better experience to end users than normal password or captcha systems. Vidoop provides three main services, all of which are based on the same underlying technology and methodology. The services are: Vidoop Secure - an all around security portal for your web-based applications myVidoop - a password manager for individual web users Vidoop Captcha - a captcha system Vidoop advertises as being bot-proof, but not human proof. I started using myVidoop for my own browsing / password needs about a month ago after seeing some of the team demo their service. I started off somewhat skeptical of the whole thing - do we really need another password management system? After about five minutes my skepticism died in the fiery glory of fan-boy fanaticism, and it hasn't died down since then. This service makes sense, and it actually works.