mercredi 24 novembre 2004

Visit to Q42 Also last week, I had a chance to drop by and see Lon, Kars, Laurens, and all the other fine folks at Q42 in The Hague. Each time I talk with those guys, I get a nice boost in my outlook on things. You don't run across people as talented as them that also have incredibly fresh perspectives on user interface. Visiting them was like a trip to the candy factory. Lon and Laurens showed a demo of the work they are doing for Oracle's next generation of the portal server product. They have some in-place editing working in Safari. They also have some very nifty visual cues in the user interface. As well as all the client-side dynamicism many of us have come to expect from them. They also showed me a webstat visualization tool that is a combination of wildly-innovative and utterly-evil. [wink] I then talked with Kars for some time about XML, both XML databases and XML templating. He has done a few deployments with Oracle's XML database facility. He also says that the web design firms they work with are all starting to pick up XSLT knowledge, which was a nice surprise. He described his evolution in thinking regarding pipelines. He and I both seemed to arrive at the same switch from "inside-out" (programmer-focused) to "outside-in" (designer-focused). However, he arrived there much earlier than me, so I have some catching up to do. If you're looking for big gains in dynamic user interfaces, drop Q42 a line or go visit them. 4:32:53 PM   comment []