Posted by Richard White
Sun, 26 Feb 2006 21:02:00 GMT
AjaxScaffold has been deprecated in favor of ActiveScaffold
The feedback from the Rails community has been great. Lots of love and kind words on both this blog and on the responses I saw on the RoR mailing list (which admittedly I don’t keep up with as much as I should, is there any way to get it to digest all the messages for 1 day rather than flooding my inbox with 30 emails per).
I did see some murmurs of bugs on unsupported browsers on one of the responses on the mailing list and there is a list of possible features/improvements (bottom of the orginal howto). I’d like to open it up and see what the community in general would like to see done next. Here are my thoughts on future development:
Sortable rows would be my #1 request. I despise pagination, am often skeptical of most “find” features and find that the ability to sort and scroll are all I need to find what I’m looking for. Sortable Rows +Added in 3.0.0- A print stylesheet would be easy and a nice touch in my opinion. Print Stylesheet ++
Ability to send different types of messages to the client, not just error one would be useful and easy to do as well. Support information and warning messages as well as error ones ++Added in 3.0.0- Having it update what other users enter on the screen I think is very important. Otherwise whats the point of it being Ajax if I have to refresh to see other’s changes. But admittedly my current projects don’t have interfaces where there would be multiple people editing the same list so this isn’t as important to me currently. Background list updating +
- I’ll probably get some chastising for these next two but here goes. I don’t find supporting any browsers beyond the existing ones all that important. Something like 4% of the internet uses primarily some unsupported browser. Very edge case to me and a lot more headache than its worth. Supporting more browsers
-
I’m not overly concerned with fallback methods so that it works when javascript isn’t enabled. If javascript isn’t enabled the person is a) not going to be able to use the rest of my application and b) probably isn’t in my core audience anyways. I honestly don’t even know much about fallback methods (tsk tsk I know) since I have no plans on using them (but I should still really learn what they are). Graceful degredation— Added in version 2.2.0
Addendum Thanks to one of our readers for pointing out what should really be my #1 request..
- The generated scaffold should KNOW about and have dropdowns or autocomplete textfields for associations. I know others have ranted about this glaring shortcoming. I think the more scaffolding you generate you kind of resign yourself to the fact that its just not something Rails is going to give you. In fact to make it work I’d have to dig a level deeper than the current AjaxScaffold goes and actually change the base Rails generator. But this really should be a core feature of any interface generator. Anyways I’m putting this on the development stack just under my less ambitious plans for sorting and pagination.
My thoughts are obviously selfish and slanted towards what I need the scaffold for currently, which is exactly the kind of feedback I’d like from everyone out there. So let me have it :)
Posted by Richard White
Thu, 16 Feb 2006 02:06:00 GMT
Anyone looking for a really poor example of how to design a sports portal should look now further than NBC’s dubious NBCOlympics.com.
Forget for a minute the fact that I can’t even watch any of the videos on that site because of their use of Windows Media with DRM (Not just a principle thing the bloody update really won’t work); This site is absolute madness. When it loads up I have no idea where I should be looking, there are about 4 columns that all look the same (save for the left nav), with tons of smaller subsections thrown everywhere.
It doesn’t help that they use the same colors and fonts for just about everything, absolutely no differentiation. It is also the poster child for everything that is wrong with portals like this: absolutely no care for what I, the user, would want to do. They can’t be bothered with that when they are throwing 15 sections of madness and a headline slideshow my way. Clearly the intent is to drive where I go instead of letting me use the site to find what I want.
Granted, pushing user’s in a certain direction is fine as long as you also give them the necessary tools to find their own way.
But what really pissed me off is that it took me 20 minutes to find something as simple as the standings for Men’s Ice Hockey. Try it, go to Ice Hockey. Now what? Well it appears from the left nav link that we are already at Men’s Ice Hockey.
Okay then… well where are the links to the rest of this stuff? Hmmm there are some headlines, nope thats not what I want. Top stories, nope. Upcoming events, nope. These videos on the far side (that I can’t even view), nope.
Let’s scroll down maybe its down further.. Oh good a couple more ads for games, intel viiv, a fan club… sheesh.
I’ll give you a few minutes to try it, come back when you are ready for the shocking conclusion.
You ready? Remember back when we first went to the Ice Hockey page, and it showed that we were already looking at Men’s Ice Hockey via the red link on the side? Well that was a blatant UI lie. Click on the Men’s link under ICE HOCKEY. TADA!
Ugh.
Posted by Richard White
Wed, 15 Feb 2006 02:06:00 GMT
In theory the idea of logging my google talk chats in gmail is probably a decent idea but in practice its been an absolute nightmare. There has been much pain and gnashing of teeth of those of us unlucky enough to click “Log my Google Talk chats in GMail”. Lets review the major plot points of this surprise horror flick:
- Soon after clicking said button I had one of the most painful IM experiences of my life. Ever have one of those conversations where the whole conversation gets out of sync, I reply to something 4 lines ago and then they in return reply thinking I was replying to what was said 2 lines ago… mass confusion. Well that’s basically how this conversation went except on a magnitude I have never quite experienced. The culprit? Google Talk, it was relaying the messages approximately 15-25 minutes after they were sent?
. We finally figured that part out and jumped on to AIM to chat. I still got IMs on google talk about 30 minutes later from that conversation. Needless to say that was the last time I will use Google Talk except as a notifier for when I have GMail. - What is all this shit all over GMail!?. A popup every time I rollover an email asking me to chat with that person? Let me count the number of times I would do that rather than just IMing that person with my IM client of choice. Never mind that the people I email and the people I IM are more mutually exclusive than inclusive. And I love finding popup chat windows in GMail when I’ve already had that conversation on my desktop client.
- GMail has been slow and buggy ever since the roll out. That is understandable for any sort of major roll out like this, but it still sucks.
Never mind I have hardly anyone on my Google Talk list, and I’m sure I’m not alone on that, so even if this was a feature I might want its pretty useless when it doesn’t work with
AIM or
YIM. I understand that this is probably Google’s way of trying to change that, leveraging their large email base to try and give them an easy way to convert to Google Talk, but the incentives just aren’t there yet.
Yes, logging and search would be very nice for an IM client, but I can’t move all my contacts to it and even if I could I wouldn’t want to use GMail as my chat desktop. There are a lot of desktop to web app shifts going on but I think email is a long way off (if ever).
And for pete’s sake give me a conspicuously placed checkbox to opt out of all these bloody popups.
