MikePadgett.com

Microsoft’s Office Sharepoint Server 2007 clears up some problems with cosmetic improvements, but delivers enough new ones out-of-the-box to remain beyond the reach of assistive technology users. Significant development will be necessary to ensure a basic level of accessibility.
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I’ve been working on several .NET Smart Clients recently.

A Smart Client is a hybrid application in that the user runs it from the desktop, but its data is provided by a Web Service.

I tend to avoid the dull marketing speak that Microsoft churns out. This kind of output is often a gloopy porridge with just enough acronyms and cool phrases sprinkled on top to hook management.

If I were to indulge in a bit of mimicry of that style, the gist of the Smart Client buzz will be that the Smart Client “leverages the best of both worlds: the power and flexibility of the desktop application with the currency of web data”. Even the Smart Client itself is downloaded from the Web to “consign rollouts to relic status”.

I know. I won’t give up my day job just yet.

Smart Client applications provide an ill-founded excuse to drag in some web designer resource on the grounds that the UI might have some vague relationship to the Web. In reality, however, Smart Clients are usually dressed in the same regulation grey apparel of any other traditional Windows Forms clients. So I find myself in a whole different realm of UI design. To be honest, I feel a bit of a tourist in an ancient land.

The .NET 2.0 controls are interesting, though. Rather than being unique inventions in their own right, most of them are supercharged versions of standard controls, with bafflingly huge numbers of properties. Several are like junk robots: existing controls welded together to create a new (presumably improved) one. A datagrid with comboboxes, listboxes whose options also have checkboxes, that sort of thing.

I’m mindful of the period when Flash MX first came out and we started to see some pretty complex custom components written by horribly clever people. Some were totally unusable for even seasoned surfers, of course, but others seriously looked like the beautiful dreams of Xerox PARC bods circa 1982.

The free flights of Flash were subsequently crippled by accessibility constraints and thinly spread expertise and you had Nielsen complaining vociferously about usability until Macromedia silenced him with a nice bit of consultancy. But the damage was done.

I naively used to believe that the creative multiplicity of user controls was a healthy thing - the cream would get to sit on top, ideas would come from freethinking, positive change would be effected and all ex-Soviet republics would thrive on democracy.

I enjoyed twiddling with Flash knobs. I worked on a few bits myself, a couple of bells and the odd whistle. But eventually I sobered up to the fact that, in the main, users didn’t want to be intimidated by bizarre navigation and, hey, forms are forms.

On the web, we’re still feeding on a diet of select menus, radio groups and textareas. Avalon (now known as the “Windows Presentation Foundation” - sounds like a charity) hasn’t been properly cooked yet and XForms is still raw like radish.

So .NET 2.0 controls are different without being, well, revolutionary. And I know what you’re going to say about evolution and revolution. There’s no need. Tell it to those republics instead.

Isn’t it warm right now? I resigned from my job this week. Caught myself wondering whether my next place of work might have air-conditioning!

I’ve been really busy the last few weeks, moving house and getting this new job. The house thing went horribly wrong - the place had been left in a disgusting state. So we managed to find a place to the live for the time being and then eventually a nice flat that is great, not least because it many ways moving in there spells the end of this painful period for J and I.

So I’ve ended up neglecting the blog before it even got started!

It’s funny, but new blogs are like new cars. Once you get one, you can’t help but notice others like it. Blogging is not a new thing for me, though, as I pointed out before. I’ve seen them spring up all over the Net in the last couple of years. The first one I remember seeing was an old friend of mine’s in Korea.

He was writing that blog to document his time there, of course, but he had always had an interest in writing anyway, so that gave him the perfect opportunity to anchor his drifting around Asia and put together some material in note form. The photos were never up to much, though!

http://korea.blogspot.com, it was I think.

Then there were the sparrings between the Macromedia and the MS techies in their blogs. .NET versus Flash, it was. And MS actually fielding open discussions about (their failings on) IE7. Can’t locate the link now for that one, sorry. It was ages ago now (http://dotnetweblogs.com/Jezell/posts/5733.aspx, may be a part of it, but it doesn’t seem like how I remembered the original whinges. Either way he had clearly cooled off by this time: http://weblogs.asp.net/jezell/archive/2005/04/18/403218.aspx )

J tells me, for she likes crime fiction (”the kind that is well-researched and as bloody as possible”), that the writer Tess Gerritsen is feverishly snaking out one now. My current favourites, Palahniuk (Fight Club), Ishiguro (The Unconsoled) and Murakami (Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) have yet to jump on the bandwagon, but they don’t seem the types anyway, do they?

Can you give a blog as a gift? This is what I’ve been wondering - J’s sister is a closet thesp, but by trade she’s a lawyer (what’s the difference, the cynical among you will doubtless be saying!) - and I’ve been thinking that a not-too-pikey gift would be to give the repressed artist in her a means of expression. Easy to set up, watch it grow. Like those little bonzai trees students used to buy from the odd carts that ran down the centre of mega shopping centre aisles. The little trees they buy that die. From a lack of proper tending.

I listen to WFMU.org - a whole Internet radio station with a blog - and you can still hear the beat of the humans behind these machines and their databases. I imagine the DJs - most of whom are clearly vinyl obsessives - must do that whole coffee-book-music triangle after their early morning shows (afternoon here in the UK, of course). After all, a quiet mind comes up with the kind of stuff they post up there.

I wrote a diary every day for five years when I was a teenager. I still have them - tiny writing in small books that looks uncannily like John Doe’s in Se7en - and they never fail to amuse and disturb me! There’s always some dusty story to make you sneeze with the memories.

Some groups use blogs for collaboration and organisation, but I doubt the Chinese have much to worry about yet with a description like “a communist blog - anti-dogmatic, tentative, provisional, timid suggestions and explorations against capitalism and for worldwide human community”.

Still, I think it’s a format with a lot more potential than others on the marketing-filled, best-and-worst-of-humanity Internet. Hence, the public is being done a real service by a blog about blogging.