Bhooshan Pandya | Interface & Usability Analyst

AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is Adobe’s cross-operating system runtime environment that allows developers to leverage the current technologies like Flash, AJAX, Flex, HTML and JavaScript, and enable the deployment of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to the desktop. Prior to it’s release AIR was codenamed Apollo.

Applications developed using AIR provide a delightful way of presenting live data and one does not need to be connected to the internet all the time. From the visual standpoint, AIR technology offers the power to change the interface design thus bringing a coherence between function and looks. This also greatly enhances the UX of the product and supplements any deficiencies in the original structure. It seems unlikely that the increasing reach of AIR would make the internet browser applications redundant since a majority of the internet population still relies on the software for surfing pages. However as a reminder, the developers and designers must begin earnestly to move towards web standards and help to bring about a consistency in the way content and design is demonstrated online. Till such time get addicted to AIR like me.

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In what I consider to be a breakthrough feat, Mozilla has released the Persona extension that should revolutionize the skinning of browsers in the coming days. The extension uses the JSON feed to dynamically load the URLs remotely to skin the Firefox browser. Moreover, besides making the browser lightweight it does not require a restart anymore to see the theme in action. For all Firefox fans.

The official Google Blog carried the announcement of their new project called Knol. The aim is to encourage writers to contribute articles of significant importance and share it with the internet community, in what seems to be a head-on challenge to Wikipedia.

I had promised to keep you guys posted from Hyderabad but some things did not work out as I had planned. The data card didn’t work and I was left (fuming) without an internet connection. To make my matters worse, my camera stopped working and I could not take pictures from the event.

Back to the story. The conference was being held in the spacious environs of the Indian School of Business (ISB) in the Khemka Auditorium. The scheduled start was 8:30 am but it got delayed and finally kicked-off nearly 2 hours later. When we reached the place early morning, the banners were not yet displayed and we were completely lost. The chief guest for the event was Ravi Pooviah, my long time idol and a professor from IDC-IIT. This year UMO (Usability Matters.org) was exploring the theme of health innovation and therefore the guests from medical to software industry were offered an opportunity to showcase their work in that field. Amongst the presentations Parmeshwar Raju’s lecture on Designing through a grid layout and Anirudha Joshi’s slides on devising User-experience metrics were found to be most interesting. I also enjoyed Shruti Agarwal’s discussion on SMOKEDOTE, which is an interactive game for smokers. The design of her slides was very creative indeed. Shruti’s a senior Visual Communications student at IDC-IIT.

The action for the next 2 days shifted to the Abridge Solutions’ training center where the Track I and II workshops were to be held. I had opted for Track I and Ravi Pooviah’s class on Information Visualization. It was the most fabulous experience for me and we were given in depth information on the basics of design and evolving concepts through the mind mapping exercise. On the sidelines, I had a long discussions with Ravi on the future of design and the education system in India which prevents raw talent to be recognized and instead considers the marks system to be the final judging factor. It’s a topic for another article from me so I will stop here. Overall, the experience of attending this event was good and looking forward to applying the knowledge at my work place soon.

Through my daily routine of sifting through the articles on blogosphere, I came across some nice links which I would like to share with you. The first one is written by Eric Kintz (VP Global Marketing Strategy & Excellence for Hewlett-Packard) — he writes about the frequency of blogging and why it should be avoided and rubbishes the idea that frequent posting is a formula for generating traffic and further goes to say that it drives poor quality content. Here’s an interesting fact that he serves in his article – “25 million readers visit Wikipedia every month, but the number of people who actually contribute content to Wikipedia is about 1-2 percent of total site visitors”. Read the entire article here. And no…I am not posting this link to increase my site traffic.

The second article is by Seth Godin and he outlines 10 principles (or should I say the Ten Commandments!) for creating a “great website”. I liked the very first point that he makes – “Fire the committee. No great website in history has been conceived of by more than three people. Not one. This is a dealbreaker”. I second those thoughts completely. Check the article here.