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Getting Real

Thanksgiving weekend has been pretty cold in Washington, so I took advantage of my lazy holiday and grabbed a copy of “Getting Real”, 37Signal’s book on agile web development. The book actually blew me away with its simplistic, yet effective approach to summarize many of the lessons I learned the hard way. I didn’t put the book down until I was done with it, and it was a true holiday treat!

37Signales is a small group of web wizards producing the best set of simple, yet effective, project management tools I have ever worked with. The beauty of these products emerges from their ability to be perfectly minimalistic and task centered. Every product is a self contained set of basic functionalities that solves one problem. Whether it’s business chat, to-do list or collaborative writing, the creators of these power applets are strong believers in empowering users to do more by giving them less features. And they are right! Despite the availability of hundreds of note taking applications and PIMs, my favorite application is notepad, because it provides a free-form canvas for me to define my own layout, keywords, etc… and worry only about the contents of the file and where I am saving it. What enabled notepad to be this powerful to me is the freedom that it gives me to dump my thoughts without worrying about fonts, bullets, colors… My second favorite note taking application is OneNote, and it comes second to notepad since it’s got too many features that I don’t usually use. You can think of 37Signals products as one giant product with a pay-per-feature option.

The book strongly advocates the concept of “less is more”, by working it through both the development process (less rules, less routine, less meetings, and less specs), as well as the final product (less options and less features). While I strongly believe that this approach works perfectly in small teams and startups, it would have been interesting for Jason Fried to talk more about what large companies should do to “Get Real”.

Cheers,

Amir

Links:

• Getting Real, the book (They have a free online version!)
• 37Signals
• Signal vs. Noise, 37Signal’s blog
• Video of Jason Fried’s talk at CTC’06

Preview of DockBar and FisheyeGrid (No Avalon installation needed)

I received a couple of requests from people who want to preview the samples without installing Avalon.
Here are a couple of animated GIFs for previewing purposes:
DockBar (2.32 MB animated GIF)
FisheyeGrid (1 MB animaged GIF)
Please be patient until all the frames of the image download. You can right click and use Save as to save the image and view it inside your favorite browser once it fully downloads

Playing around with Avalon’s grid

I was looking lately at Avalon’s Grid layout container, when I noticed one of the coolest features anyone ever had in a layout manager: Specifying a relative size of the grid row/column with the Star (*) unit. In Avalon, if you specify a grid column width in star units instead of pixel units, this tells the grid how much this column’s share of the total available space will be. 

Since I am a fan of Fisheye visualizations, I figured that this simple idea in the grid may be a great candidate to implement Fisheye distortion: Items occupty a sapce relative to each other based on a degree of interest function (Typically the distance to the mouse cursor). Apple’s popular launch bar uses Fisheye distortion to magnify the icons as the user moves the cursor.

Given what the grid provides, how hard would it be to quickly prototype an effect similar to what OSX’s toolbar? Believe it or not, the effect can be implemented in Avalon with a simple grid and 8 lines of C# code. While the effect is very basic, and not as good as what Apple is providing, it’s a strong proof of concept of what Avalon is providing.

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Snapshot

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How to create Fisheye effect in Avalon: (You may do it declaratively or procedurally)

(I am assuming the reader is already familiar

• Start by creating a scene of size 500×100
• Create a grid with 9 columns and 1 row. Set its name to “DockGrid” and set its background brush to white and the opacity of the brush to Zero. This will help the mouse events to be handled from the Grid as you move the mouse over it.
• Set the width of all columns to 1*:  <ColumnDefinition Width=“*“/>
• For each grid cell, insert a png (preferably with some transparency), and set its four margins to be 0.
• Add an event handler to catch the MouseMove for the DockGrid.
• In the event handler, call the following function:

• void ChangeGridSize(UIElement e, int size){

  Point mousePos = Mouse.GetPosition(DockGrid);

  double mousePercent = mousePos.X / DockGrid.ActualWidth;

  double variance = .25; //how narrow or wide the function is

  for (int i = 0; i < DockGrid.ColumnDefinitions.Count; ++i){

  double positionPercent = (double)i / DockGrid.ColumnDefinitions.Count;

  double power = (-Math.Pow(((mousePercent - positionPercent)), 2)) / (2 * variance * variance);

  double newSize = 1 + size * Math.Pow(Math.E, power);

  DockGrid.ColumnDefinitions[i].Width = new GridLength(newSize, GridUnitType.Star);

  }

  }

• You may add another event handler for MouseLeave that restores the sizes to 1*:

• foreach (ColumnDefinition cd in DockGrid.ColumnDefinitions)

cd.Width = new GridLength(1, GridUnitType.Star);

Voila! Enjoy.

 

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Download:

 Click here to run the Express application (Requires Internet Explorer, .Net 2.0 and Avalon Beta1 ) or here to download the source (965 KB)

Feel free to post your comments, or email me if you have any questions!

Many thanks to Peter Blois for providing the Gaussian function.

Comments are on again

Based on few requests, I re-enabled the comments so that visitors can post their own views and opinions.
So post your comment, share your ideas and make your voice heard. I am always open for comments and critiques Enjoy!

A picture is worth a thousand words

For the cool stuff out there, I will just limit my postings to pictures and links unless there is a personal opinion I want to convey. That will take less of my time and yours as well

And the award for worst performance goes to…

If I had a dream once of attending the Acadmy Awards ceremony, it’s now all destroyed by the performance of Beyonce delivering “vois sur ton chemin” from the amazing movie: Les choristes (the chorus)
I own the soundtrack and love listening to it for the amazing performance of each singer and player in it. Beyonce, YOU RUINED THIS PLEASURE FOR ME!
All I can say that not only the words were mipronounced all the way through the song, but her style in delivering the performance sounded like a failing attempt to “Whitney Houston meets Mireille Mathieu”.
Academy Awards organizers: if you want a French song, hire a French singer. And Beyonce: please stick with English, you are much better at it
By the way, if you haven’t seen this movie yet, go see it!

Vois sur ton chemin Gamins oubliés égarés Donne leur la main Pour les mener Vers d’autres lendemains Sens au coeur de la nuit L’onde d’espoir Ardeur de la vie Sentier de gloire Bonheurs enfantins Trop vite oubliés effacés Une lumière dorée brille sans fin Tout au bout du chemin Sens au coeur de la nuit L’onde d’espoir Ardeur de la vie Sentier de la gloire

See on your way Stray forgotten kids Give the their hand To carry out them Towards their following days Feel in the heart of the night The wave of hope Heat of the life Path of glory Childish happinesses Too much quickly forgotten unobtrusive A gilded light shines without end All at the end of the road Feel in the heart of the night The wave of hope Heat of the life Path of glory