Since I decided to blog at least weekly, I’ve been using ecto exclusively for composing posts (version 2.4.1 for Intel Macs). It pretty much rocks. Except for the complete and utter lack of GeoPress support. Now excuse me while I make a feature request in their support forum.

posted on holiday in cold, but not very snowy New Hampshire…

So many good systems have been hurt by bad user interfaces. I would say user interface design is a dying art, but a little research shows that it may have never had much life to begin with.

Think about it. Our basic desktop computing windows-mouse-applications metaphor that we use today was pretty much defined 20 years ago with Macintosh GUI (or if you want to be a real purist, you could go back another decade to Unix X-Windows and the Xerox PARC mouse). Since then, applications have taken a muddled approach to user interface design, with more failures than successes. One thing that has been annoying me recently is the treatment of logout commands in Web apps. They always seem to be buried in site navigation controls, when they really fall into a different category completely. Here’s one example from Bank of America, who at least highlights the command in red, but still, “Sign Off” should be a button, and probably should be placed under “Online Banking.”
The real point of this post is to say that I wish more companies in the geospatial industry would do a better job in this area. I think it could really contribute to more usage and revenue growth. Just look at Google. They have no content (even Earth and Maps use content others could buy if they wanted), but they continually capture customers by being the best-of-breed UI. They’ve been so successful at that they even have Microsoft worried that Google’s awesome apps, like Mail, Reader, Docs and Spreadsheets, could actually replace the desktop OS!

So with that in mind, this Infoworld article on Javascript toolkits really caught my attention. Go check out Prototype, Rico and Dojo. They can really help people who usually focus on server-side work to get closer to building more appealing user interfaces. Toolkits are no substitute for truly understanding UI design, but it’s a step in the right direction.

posted on holiday at the foot of the White Mountains..

I’ve been inspired to start writing more regularly in this blog for two reasons:

1. There’s going to be a lot of interesting mass market, or geoweb-related developments in OGC in 2007.
2. I think a few people might actually read this thing every now and then. I hope to keep it worth reading.

So, on to the purpose of this post. Sean Gillies started an interesting thread in response to Ed Parsons’ report from this week’s OGC meetings. He basically says OGC’s current W*S service stack will not geo-enable the Web.

Well I’m here to say OGC agrees. Yes, the current services are targeted squarely at the mainstream geospatial community. That’s a good thing, and there is a huge community of professionals who need that level of detail, functionality, and therefore complexity. But there’s a much larger Web community out there that we are not serving.

The intent of the mass market working group is to go in to this with no preconceptions. Study the consumer, “hacker”, and even the mainstream corporate IT communities and architect a geo strategy for those markets. That strategy may or may not align perfectly with what OGC has developed in the past, and if it doesn’t, that’s OK. There seems to be general consensus that every standard doesn’t have to fit nicely together on the drawing board. Adoption, or as John Herring said, “ubiquity”, should be the primary goal. (I had better note here that this is my personal opinion, not OGC’s, etc.)

So I’ll end by saying the future is wide open. OGC members are generally excited by this new direction–the support for starting the group was overwhelming. The problem is that most of them have traditional geospatial jobs and problems to solve, so the mass market requirements aren’t going to come, without larger participation.

And finally a note about the name, Mass Market. I’m not in love with the name either. Don’t hire me to name your next product. But what if we had called it the geoweb working group? Would I be getting flamed like Google did over that new geoweb layer in Earth? ;)

posted from the OGC Technical Committee meetings in San Diego, CA…