Steve Wellens

"It works on my machine."

I stepped out the front door and watched my breath turn to ice crystals in the moonlight…the sun hadn't risen yet. As I walked to the garage, my shoes crunched loudly on the packed snow and when I opened the car door, the metal-on-metal shrieking of cold-friction gave my skin goose bumps. The temperature was -13F below zero and it was a Saturday morning. What on this earth would compel a man to leave a warm bed and face such bitter cold on a weekend?

I wanted a cheap, simple visual indicator similar to a progress bar. Note, not the kind of dynamic progress bar used when updating AJAX pages, more of a single-bar graph. It should have been simple task.

Back in the old days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, developers wanting to exchange data between applications used binary formatted data, hard-coded text field lengths, or delimited text files. Much parsing and error checking was involved. It was tedious.

Once upon a time, in the chilly windowless basement of a Fortune 100 company, a young programmer joined our small development team. He brought with him a programmers editor called Brief. Within weeks every developer in the entire company was using this powerful editor. The three compelling features were the ability to select copy and paste columns of text, multiple windows with cut and paste between them and…drum roll please…macros. With macros, enormously tedious tasks can be performed easily in seconds.

Who remembers Object Databases? At one time they were going to dominate the programming world. But, as with a lot of over-hyped technology (Lisp, AI, ADA, Virtual Reality) they were destined to a small niche segment of the market.

Often, it's the little things that matter. In any application, small changes to the user interface can have a major impact on the readability and usability of a form. Fonts, element spacing, order of elements, colors, etc., all come into play. A skillful designer can make a few tweaks to a crappy interface and make it a delight to use. It's easy to be seduced by the siren songs of AJAX, Silverlight, gradient backgrounds, etc., but simply grouping controls logically can be much more effective in providing a good user experience and…it won't make your web application run like a sick dog.

The new free Chart Control from Microsoft is awesome (for download details see my original post here).  But if you can avoid being dazzled by the plethora of charting features, you may realize it can be used for other tasks.