Yoodlecorp Blogs. Lets talk about technology.

Today, again I got into argument of forms vs function. What is important? form or function. Well answer will differ based on the personnel prefernce. If you ask designers, I can tell you it will be 100% forms. Well this is what they do, so they have to justify it. If you ask developers, function will shine. Again, its all based on what they are most intrested in. To me, its compromise between form and function. Neither will look good if other does not work and look good. Would you like to have really pretty site with all broken functionality OR you would prefer a site that does outstanding job of providing funcationality but hard to navigate and ugly to look at. There may be compromise based in tool of the trade you are using like all CMS has some limitations. At the end we need to balance form and functionality to achieve the best outcome.

Here are a couple of neat little Blackberry tips that might come in handy. I learnt these the hard way and thought I would pass them along.

Ever wondered how to dial a phone word on a Blackberry? By the way, a Phone Word is simply the alphanumeric translation of a phone number. For example, when you dial the phone word 1 888 8YOODLE, you are actually dialing the phone number 1 888 8966353It's simple.

You simply spell out the phone word on the screen using the 'SHIFT' key. When you hit the 'CALL' button, the BlackBerry automatically converts the phone word into the phone number and connects the call.

Ever wondered how to select a block of text for copying and pasting?
It’s simple. Hold the ‘SHIFT’ key and roll the trackwheel or the trackball (in the case of the Blackberry Curve). Voila. Now, you can copy entire blocks of text or select multiple email messages to delete them all at once.

Looks like people are still in 1999 debating if .NET is capable of managing enterprise level website or not. Lot of Java fanatics think that only JAVA is the answer to create any enterprise level application. Either they are totally ignorant of the platform or are biased toward the JAVA platform. Some of today’s development managers are yesterday’s Java programmers. MS.NET came in late 90’s when JAVA was the darling of programmers and the DOT COM bubble was at its peak. Most of the website was coded in JAVA. It was free and could run on free web servers like Apache/Tomcat and above all it did decent job of creating scalable and enterprise level website.

Technology trends has shown that it gets created by corporations for public use and moves back to business environment. Heavy use of email started with Yahoo and Hotmail and now it’s essential business tool. Instant messaging popularized by AOL, MS Messenger and ICQ ended up in corporate world and now instant messaging is heavily used in bigger corporate setup.

Social Networking is at present in public domain and site like Face book and MySpace is fulfilling that need. It will eventually end as tool in corporate setting. The newer trend, social networking platform for corporate INTRANET is catching up. In next couple of year most of the bigger corporation will have social platform included in their Intranet, promoting better corporation between teams scattered over geographical distances.

The question is what is next wave after Social Networking? As mobile computing gets cheaper, most the innovations will shift to mobile platform and dream of 24/7 connectivity across continent will not be a dream anymore.

Mashups are an exciting genre of interactive Web applications that draw upon content retrieved from external data sources to create entirely new and innovative services. They are a hallmark of the second generation of Web applications informally known as Web 2.0.

Taken directly from the IBM website,

A good insight as to what makes a mashup is to look at the etymology of the term: it was borrowed from the pop music scene, where a mashup is a new song that is mixed from the vocal and instrumental tracks from two different source songs (usually belonging to different genres). Like these "bastard pop" songs, a mashup is an unusual or innovative composition of content (often from unrelated data sources), made for human (rather than computerized) consumption.

Of all the different kinds of Mashups out there, the one that I seem to get is the Mapping mashup. There are several different easy applications for this kind of mashup. Obviously the most famous one is the chicagocrime.org which maps crime data with google maps to create a visual representation of crime hotspots in the city.

Another business application to something like this would be to display home locations of willing employees on the corporate Intranet. This would make social networking in a corporate setting more achievable and more personal. This can tie directly into my other post on this blog that talks about the socialization of the corporate Intranet.

If we dont want to be radical enough to show where people live in a corporate setting, we can at least show ion their office location on an interactive google map. Take a look at this sort of mashup application. http://www.laudontech.com/officeplans/test5.php5

In closing, I would like to say, the new Web 2.0 is going to revolutionize the way we aggregate and present data.

Corporate Intranets for as long as I can remember have been boring and just a huge file share for documents. Sure enough there was a search to find a needle in a haystack. The expected ROI for the millions of dollars that went into building a custom Intranet solution was that the employees would go to there first, search for the HR or policy information rather than picking up the phone and calling 50 different people. The reality has been that it has been the secondary or even tertiary source of information, let alone collaboration. In my opinion, not finding stuff could be either attributed to an ineffective search system or an ineffective tagging mechanism.