Obama from a 9 year old!

Being a French man living in Israel, we have 3 languages at home: English, French and Hebrew.
And many of my friends around here have this trilingual environment.
Last week the 9 year old son of one of them told him:
- Dad, Obama is talking Hebrew?
- No, Why do you ask?
- Because he keep saying: Yes Oui Ken!

Note: "Yes We Can" sounds like Yes, Oui (yes in French), Ken (yes in Hebrew).

Amazing no?
I found out that it was already used in Obama's campaign.

Anyway, international triple yes from an Israeli 9 year old kid...

Lists and Contextual Menus, MMI nightmare!

I'm more of a "server side" kind of developer.
When I see too much HTML, CSS and Javascript, I need pills!
Still, I like to challenge the MVC architecture of UI frameworks. I even wrote my own web framework for fun (but some poor developers, in India I think, are now suffering from it), and played with Swing developing Stellarium4Java.

So, UI is not my cup of Tea. Now, for the latest release of Artifactory, I needed to managed the communication between the UI Designer and the Web developers. I learned a lot from this interesting experience.
During this process I encountered a really basic UI design issue. It was so basic I got worried I missed something!
The point is: The way we are used to manage lists, selections, actions and contextual menus is totally incoherent.

In real UI applications (fat client and Ajax), you get a list of elements and then you can act on them. Usually, you select a line, then some Action (Buttons, Menus) become enabled and you can activate them. But to minimize the amount of clicks and mouse gestures there are also contextual menus. This is where it gets weird...
You select one line, and then can actually "right click" on another one. That way, the list of Actions on the contextual menus does not match the one in buttons and menus.
You can force select the line where you right click, but few Applications are doing it!

The other issue is that contextual menus are really not that great (i.e. I hate them!):

• They are not Web Browser friendly.
• They don't actually save much in terms of clicks and gestures (right click, move, left click).
• They get in the middle of reading the lists of elements.
• They never disappear when you want them to, and always disappear before you find the menu item you want to click on.
• To remove them go away you need to click elsewhere, crossing your finger you did not actually click on "buy in one click" button.

One solution on the Web (and on the iPhone/iPod, where there is no right click :), is to add action buttons directly in the list itself as columns. That works and can be nice looking (with good icons) but this technique get very heavy (bunch of garbage icons all over). Anyway, it is not scalable: 5 icons it's already too much.

So, the UI designer came with the really cool idea: A hovering toolbox appearing on the side of the list when rollover the line element.
At first, I thought:

• It may work but we'd be going against a big UI muscle memory about how to use a list.
• People will hate it!
• The toolbox is too far from where my mouse is, and going there will be very annoying.
• We are not here to reinvent UI and Men Machine Interaction!

But, anyway I took the chance and we implemented it. To see it, you can go to Artifactory live demo, do a quick search on "log" for example, and hover above the list. It's still a beta version and the previous select/link actions are not removed, so it may be confusing. As anonymous user your action list is limited, but you can still get the feel of it.

I'm using this feature for 2 weeks now and frankly: I love it!
I hover on the list in the left side of it, I can read the line I'm on, and then activate the action with one click. Just natural moves and ONLY ONE click.

May be I'm under the influence (it's our application at the end :), and that's why I'm anxiously waiting for the feedback!
What do you think?

IT opportunities in the current financial crisis?

I'm not optimistic, but here is a fact: For more than 20 years (since the 1987 crash) or in some cases since the usage of computers in companies, the IT budgets of financial institutions (banks, insurance companies, stock markets etc.) ALWAYS go up.
In the meantime, technologies went from Mainframe, to Client/Server, to Web 1.0, to Web 2.0, to SOA, to Virtualization and now Cloud Computing. But in spite of all the technological advances, IT budgets ALWAYS go up. I've given consulting services to many banks and insurance companies, and one thing got increasingly clear: If you're trying to sell a software that will reduce their IT budget... Forget it!

Of course, the financial institutions' needs from IT increased in the last 20 years. They want to setup new services and products (online banking, new policies, new mortgages :) faster than their competitors. But the increase in end user demands is an order of magnitude lower than the technological advances in hardware and software. IT budgets should have gone down, and insurance premiums and bank fees also. But no - IT budgets ALWAYS go up.

I think the main reason is Wall Street. If you are Bank of America, and someone finds out you're reducing your IT budget... Your stock will go down immediately!

A month ago after 20 years of IT budget increases all the CIO and IT department in financial companies have a huge amount of cash fat.
Where the fat goes?

• Buying hard to install and unmaintainable software (you need to keep all these engineers) from BIG vendors.
• Buying low performance hardware for incredible amounts of money.
• Of course, a big team of developers and system engineers to oil down the cranky machines.

And now, for the first time all the CIOs have only one goal: Reduce your IT budget!
IT department in financial companies will never be the same!

From my knowledge, and experience with theses companies their IT budget is about 3 to 5 times bigger than it should be. I don't think they will go all the way and slash 80% of the IT department, but what's for sure, they'll slash the vendors, and contractors.

I think one big software/hardware company will suffer big time from this change because it's living and breathing of this fat. The saying was that a CIO choosing IBM will never get fired for his choice (even he wasted time and money on a failed project). Today that thinking changed.

So, where are the opportunities?
Well, now you can really sell and prove the advantages of modern technological advances to financial CIO. They will be sensitive to TCO, developer productivity, software quality and maintenance.

The issue is that no CIO will start a costly migration project now! So the current state of IT will be frozen for some time. But, some companies will really analyze what's going on and make a decision to go with open source, agile and distributed all the way.

Things will change in banks and insurance companies IT departments, let's hope WebsFear does not blackmail their customers again...

Originally posted on dzone