In this post, Tim O’Reilly talks about Vic Gundotra showing him the mobile device light:

Vic said that he realized in that moment that the era of the PC was over, and that the future belonged to cloud applications accessed via phones…I think about the web as experienced on a PC, and then about mobile as an add on. The tipping point has come; that notion has to flip: if we’re trying to get ahead of the curve, we need to think first about the phone, and then think about the PC browser experience as the add-on.

This paradigm shift has so many important implications it’s hard to know where to start. The first thing that comes to mind for me, working in the geospatial industry, is that the map browsing application as a primary user interface to geo-data and geo-analysis will continue to fade into history.

But conversely, use of geo-data and geo-analysis on servers should increase as applications try to do more to give users the right answer with fewer key strokes and fewer round trips to the server. For example, if you search for restaurants in a mobile app like Yelp, maybe it should take into account not only where you are at the given moment, but how far you travelled in the past to find a good meal. And maybe it should even take into account your current speed to know whether you’re driving or walking. And why not also consider the time of day to determine whether you want lunch or dinner? And whether rush hour traffic will be too bad to go very far?

This kind of mobile optimization combining UI factors, personal location and activity, and server-side smarts is another important implication for the paradigm shift to mobile devices.

So I’m logging into my AT&T Wireless account on the web the other day, and I get this. Login verification “may take a few minutes“??? Depending on my Internet connection speed? I guess all of us web programmers who think users want response times in the 0 to 3 second range are fools. If minutes is good enough for AT&T, it must be good enough for everyone.

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..

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Pretty compelling title, eh? And in this case, it’s all true. I just found the best Mac speed tip ever on Ars Technica.
On page 2 of that article, you find out that Apple has made some
terrific performance enhancements to the graphics rendering code of Mac
OS 10.4 (Tiger), but they are disabled by default! I guess this is
because “…It requires an ATI Radeon 9600 or NVIDIA GeForce FX or
better…”

So check your system profile, and if you’ve got the
equipment, install Apple’s Developer Tools and run this little program
called Quartz Debugger to enable all kinds of graphics acceleration
goodness. I’ve put the program in my startup list and I’ve never been
happier.

Update: OS 10.4.3 disables Quartz 2D Extreme! Apple notes this here. I don’t know why–I haven’t had any problems, but I guess some people must be finding it unstable.