MenCo

I want to be able to multitouch, use my voice, my mind and do sign language to control my computer appliances and communication devices.  Why are we still using a keyboard to type when we can speak?  If we can not speak, we can think of what we want to put on printed words. We can use multitouch or just visual tracking as a “mouse pointer”.  We can move our arms and hands for the camera and interact.

Just had to say it…

Creating a drop-down menu is becoming a nightmare.  After decrypting a 1500 lines CSS, with hundreds of different elements and classes, I finally managed to apply a jQuery dropdown menu to my workplace website.  I had to deal with some positioning issues (why floating DIVs when your design is as static as a Rock?) but the simple CSS solution seemed to work.

I decided to apply a jQuery plugin library based on Suckerfish called Superfish.  Fine tuned CSS and tested with local Styles, everything worked great on the Mac.  Both Safari and Firefox worked fine.  Even Opera (!!).  So I turned to my PC (I work with both Mac and PC) and opened IE 7.  Of course, when I looked at the website using the most popular browser, the drop-down menus are showing behind the main content.  Not unexpected at all, but I was hoping for a little luck after two days of working 9 to 7.  So tweaking begins… tried playing with z-index, zoom and all of those IE things.

To try to fix the problem, I installed another plug-in library explicitly created for this (Bgiframe).  It didn’t work either, and I am ready to take a break and start thinking about Mobile CSS (my next fun project).

I always hated those tv ads where the slim, young and hip guy (mac user) makes fun of the geeky, chubby and old guy (pc user). But right now I wish I could have a word or two with the geeks that decided that IE should be deaf to users and compatibility issues.

Thanks Microsoft.

This is part of a conversation happening on

http://wiki.museummobile.info/archives/445

1. Carl @ 2009-08-20 23:51

   After years of resisting outsourcing, I finally figured it out – have your tech lead / architect in-house, and outsource the bulk of the engineering (app, db, qa). You will get the same or better quality as with an in-house approach, at a tiny fraction of the cost and with much better scalability (both up and down) in your tech team. The catch? Well, figure on six months and multiple trips to your outsource vendor before you can be completely productive. But even with that cost — I’m totally sold on this approach. The ‘other’ catch? Sometimes you don’t find the right vendor on the first pass.

   But stick with it — there are definitely vendors out there who can do anything an in-house team can do — with proper supervision and guidance.

Carl,

I think your approach  is ideal as long as the person guiding the outsource team can speak their language, the communication channels are fast and effective and the outsource team is not a big company (with lots of bureaucracy).  I think the freelance model rather than a big company can work better.  Work in stages (so you can replace less than ideal freelancers) and keep dynamic goals (beta releases, small upgrades, scalabilty instead of trying to come up with a big development at once, that is going to be obsolete by the time you finish).

Developing for mobile is becoming less and less a platform challenge (dealing with linux vs. windows / flash vs java) but more a customization challenge (same content, presented in different ways).  The new windows servers supporting PHP and the open source applets reaching out to both platforms (like wordpress) are examples of this, so much that I think of iPhone apps as a simple interface change.

Many flash free websites like ours (americanart.si.edu) run fine from Safari, so probably our mobile challenge is on Blackberries.  There is no way that we can have a team for each platform, but we can not outsource for each platform either.  Users determine platforms this days, not the opposite. And that is a good thing.

1. Perian @ 2009-08-26 11:20

   Speaking from the small museum perspective, I’m with others on the outsourcing vote. Unless you have a large IT and tech staff, it’s highly unlikely you’ll have the information and knowledge necessary to plan for all types of new platforms and with all new technologies. Have a visionary on staff, who can guide the project and do the quality control, but leave the grunt work to the experts.

Perian, I like “visionary”… in our case, it is going to require a real “technology evangelist”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_evangelist

thanks everyone

The project I have been working for a long time is ready to see the light.  It is a flash application.  First release, lots of things to fix, I bet.  Hope people get interested and that more things can develop from this.

http://americanart.si.edu/picturing_the_1930s

I created a facebook page for comments and other things.

www.facebook.com/picturing1930s

And a flick group:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/picturing_the_1930s/

Twitter account:

www.twitter.com/picturing_1930s

Hope you like it!