XML Tools: User Interface Design

Working on CoherentWeb has provided me with some useful experience on User Interface Design issues in the context of XML IDEs. What follows is a random list of miscellaneous thoughts on this subject.

Icon Design:
There is now a trend to minimise the cluttered appearance by minimising the complexity and colour-set of the icons used. Hopefully this reduces distraction and will allow the user to concentrate more on the data they're analysing or modifying rather that the aesthetics of the host IDE itself.

Intellisense:
Most IDEs provid a single column popup intellisense list. Unfortunately there are often too many entry options in a specific context for this to be really useful (for example, when providing auto-completion for XPath expressions).

An alternative approach that is being experimented with for CoherentWeb is to use multi-column intellisense that is also categorised so that, for example, function names are not randomly mixed within a list of node names.

Window Pane Management:
Managing multiple viewing panes within an IDE poses a number of challenges for the designer. By allowing the user to hide, collapse or re-orientate any pane, you quick reach a pretty enormous number of possible permutations for rendering these panes together.

The solution here appears to be to offer a number of preset IDE pane configurations, perhaps aimed towards specific tasks and then let the user fine-tune things from there - more work on this is required.

Screen resolution, aspect ratio and multi-monitor setups:
More LCD monitors with a 'widescreen' 16:9 aspect ratio are now being used, placing one or more montiors alongside the main monitor dramatically increases this ratio.

Aspect ratio therefore becomes quite an issue. The approach so far for CoherentWeb is to adopt a 'TweetDeck' approach where multiple vertical panes are used in most cases rather than the classic IDE look with the window split into both vertically and horizontally.

The IPhone Influence:
UI designers can't help but look at how the IPhone designers tackled usability issues for the smartphone. There are some useful tips to pick up here, designing applications for use with touch screens is another facet to consider. I currently use a Wacom tablet to test CoherentWeb usability, but this will need to advance if touch-screens become more popular.

Why do many IDEs look so much the same?
If you look at popular IDEs they all seem to share a family resemblance. Why is this? Visual Studio, Eclipse, Oxygen, XmlSpy, Stylus Studio...the list goes on.

Does this mean that we've reached the peak in evolution of UI design for an IDE? I hope not. In fact, new products like Expression Blend and Expression Web for example do have a new take on the IDE appearance which is quite refreshing, but have they gone far enough? Microsoft introduced the Ribbon for Office 2007/2010, but this doesn't appear to have been adopted yet for developers.

Ambitions

What would you like to do with your life?

This is hopefully the question we ask ourselves each day, consciously or otherwise. Well, for me I've decided to listen to the answer that has been screaming at me for quite a while, and so its time to act, I'm starting my own business.

Now, I realise this is going to be tough, very tough, but, I need to give this a chance. I'm going to be busy of course, there's a few issues to resolve like creating the company, organising accounts and sorting out legal support (just in case).

The intention is to arrange things so I spend a minimal amount of time on business support, to allow me to maximise my time on what I enjoy most, designing and writing software applications for others.

More details in following blogs.

In Print?

I've just come across this:

http://www.ptpress.com.cn/Book.aspx?id=12089

ISBN】 978-7-115-19834-1

I think this is the first published book on XML in which SketchPath gets a mention.

The thing is, this is a Chinese language book, and as my linguistic skills are limited, I don't quite know what the website says about it.

Anyway, thanks to the author who mentioned SketchPath, Google translator tells me that 使用SketchPath调试XPath means 'Common XPath Debugger'.

Some time ago I got some really useful comments on SketchPath, especially about non UTF-8 encoding such as GB2312, this was from a Chinese-Language technical author. So many thanks to him for his contribution, and perhaps its his book at this website?

SketchPath Word 2007 Addin

A quick taster screencast of the SketchPath Word 2007 Addin. Works extremely well for analysing large XML files:

XMLPrague 2009 Presentations

If you follow XML trends then you need to check out XMLPrague 2009 if you haven't already.

There are some really interesting, thought provoking video presentations here, my favourites:

1. XML Schema 1.1 Update by Michael Kay
2. High-Performance XML (Using Frozen Streams) by Alex Brown
3. Exploring XProc by Norman Walsh

There are many more excellent presentations, kind of makes me wish I was there.

XSLT 2.0 Upgrade: Success?

The rather tricky question of where XSLT 2.0 has got to, comes up every now and again.

Well, given the incredible benefits that XSLT 2.0 brings over 1.0, the more recent version seems to have severely underperformed, in terms of takeup.

In my experience there has indeed been very good 2.0 adoption with XSLT-based custom solutions in the enterprise. This however is more than countered by the painfully slow adoption in the more popular and visible parts of the IT/Web industry, in areas such as javascript libraries, MSXML, Web Browsers, .NET Framework, Java/JEE, non-XML IDEs such as Eclipse, Netbeans, Visual Studio... the list goes on.

What caused this?

My own theory is that the failure of Microsoft to embrace XSLT 2.0 had a severe impact on adoption, both by its partners, but also by its competitors.

What's going to fix this?

Well, perhaps we just need a 'killer' application, one that would really pale XSLT 1.0, fine language as it is, into insignificance. The chances are it already exists on some dusty website with a small but enthusiastic following and a lowly page ranking, all that's needed is for one key industry player with enough imagination to find it and go for it...so come on!

SketchPath Word 2007 Addin Update

While very pleased with the technical outcome of branching SketchPath to be a Word 2007 Addin, there has been a very low takeup on this product, less the 1% of the 200+ downloads per week for the SketchPath product.

Until I see any further public interest in this, I'll be concentrating on the standalone SketchPath version. Though I might first try a bit of additional 'marketing' for the Addin, one post to the XSL-List is hardly exhaustive and is probably the wrong demographic anyway.