Kathy Sierra, of the Creating Passionate Users blog, posted about using an equalizer metaphor for product planning and brainstorming. She included some images for her readers to play around with for their own equalizer-planning projects. I took those, apply the Gimp to them, mixed with Bob Ippolito’s uber-cool MochiKit, and release to you:  Read →

I’ve been fooling around with 3D lately. First off, my third article as guest-writer for David Mertz’s XML Matters column, The Web ain’t just for 2D anymore went live on IBM’s developerWorks site today. It’s about X3D (3D in XML), successor to VRML, and the possibility of it being relevant today. I have moderate hope for it, now that SVG is starting to be a player. The funny thing is, I think X3D is probably less complicated to implement than SVG is. The real coolness starts when you can combine them, but that is still a ways off.  Read →

I recently tried out the beta of Macromedia Flex Builder 2, and was quite impressed. I normally avoid Flash on principle, but it has some pretty powerful tools built in. It feels more limited than Apple’s Interface Builder, but it has one feature that I’ve been dying to see in IB: You can flip between visual drag-and-drop widget mode, and editing the layout as XML. Interface Builder so needs this ability. It would help for folks writing about developing for OS X (sometimes 100 words is better than half a dozen pictures, and trying to show CTRL-dragging in a still picture is an exercise in futility), and it would help when you come to a new project (or one you haven’t worked on in awhile) and want to get a feel for what methods and event handlers are hooked in to various widgets. Heck, it would help with automated tools, with testing, with grep. Just do it, Apple, or hire me to do it.  Read →