May
20
09

I won the Adobe Student RIA contest!

Tags: adobe, flex, posty, ria

I am glad to announce that Posty won an award! You might know I am an Adobe student rep for Rich Internet Applications. A while ago I submitted Posty to the RIA application contest. Now I received the notification that … I won!
Here is a screenshot from the Education Developer Center.

Award Winner

Thanks Adobe!

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May
14
09

Air vs Titanium (shallow comparison)

Air is Adobe’s proposal to build Rich Internet Applications by means of Html/Js, Flex or Flash. There are alternatives and one caught my attention since a while: Titanium. It is still in a preview release stage but it showcases good features and possibilities. For example the clone of Tweetie built on Titanium is a stunning demo.
Since I suspect that memory consumption will be a problem for every ria SDK which aims at being crossplatform, I had a look at the Tweetanium application in the demo section. Downloaded, installed and loaded three timelines: home, friends and replies. I did the same with Posty.
Below is a screenshot comparing memory consumption.
Posty and Tweetanium memory usage

I am aware it is a shallow approach, but Tweetanium is much more hungry than Posty, in spite the fact that Tweetanium supports just one service (Twitter) whereas Posty includes Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr, Friendfeed and Identi.ca. That said I list few items which can help to contextualize the comparison:

  • Disclosure: I am the author of Posty, though I think the comparison is pretty fair. Anyway I am open to criticism.
  • Titanium is a prerelease version. It can improve.
  • The Air framework is a bit ‘older’ than Titanium, probably more time has been spent to improve memory consumption
  • Posty’s memory usage has been optimized, whereas Titanium (I think) has been built to show how easy is to build a Twitter client with the SDK, so probably not much effort has been put in optimizing memory consumption.
  • Air’s is made by Adobe, a company. Probably this means more money and time invested in a project (though I am clearly aware that more money does not mean a better product)
  • The comparison regards only memory consumption. I am sure there are many other aspects that can be put on the table before saying “this is better than that”.

This is why I think this post has just to provoke a discussion. I will be glad to hear your opinion.

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May
11
09

Spotted on SixRevisions

A while ago I posted a comment on SixRevisions, which is a great source for web developers and designers. Everyday they publish inspiring articles and tutorials. The internet is full of posts on Twitter, but SixRevision published a really interesting one,
10 Features That Will Make Twitter Better, the one I commented.
The guys behind SixRevisions decided to select the most interesting comments and asked authors to elaborate on them. And my comment was selected. Here is the result, 11 Excellent Twitter Improvement Ideas and my contribution is the 9th.

Thanks Jacob and colleagues for the opportunity!

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Apr
29
09

I do User Experience design. What?

Tags: design, ux

Yep, it is not easy to explain to your parents/wife/friends how you spend your days.
I re-stumbled upon an old post I read immediately after it was published.
(Clarification: ‘old’ means ‘2 year old’, but nowadays that age is like a century :)

I was re-impressed by the graph used in that post, which represents the many sides of user experience design.

User Experience Design

Now I realize why I am so tired when I go to bed. Because it’s like I am doing six jobs, which are:

  • Information Architecture
  • Human Computer Interaction
  • Interaction design
  • User Interface Design
  • Human Factors Engineering
  • Usability

Should revise my hourly rate :)

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