That was a line in the first song we sang at church today.
The idea intrigued me.
Life is beautiful. I agree.
But… how about MY life?
Is my life beautiful?
What would make one's life beautiful?
AOL recently unveiled its new home page (in beta).
As covered in Techcrunch, it’s a very close copy to Yahoo!’s portal.
The conversation that’s been going on basically either say “AOL sucks, here’s the proof” or “Yahoo copied AOL first!”.
I think copying is one thing, but copying midlessly is another. Let’s face it, there’s almost nothing original anymore.
Why try to reinvent the wheel when you can build on top of someone else’s success?
That’s the key: Don’t just clone someone else’s solution, learn from it, and improve it. That’s the difference between making a progress and being a follower.
The comboBox component in Flex has a property called "editable". If that property is set to "true", user can click on the comboBox label to rename it.
Sounds like a good idea that's easy to implement, but to make it work, it's not that easy.
If that's all you do, your user will be pissed offfor few reasons:
1. He might have a problem getting out of the edit mode since the comboBox control still keeps the focus even if user clicks outside the comboBox or hit the "enter" button.
2. The change that he did won't be recorded. As soon as he open the dropdown, it disappears.
Annoying…
Excerpt from Functioning Form: Web 2.0 Expo: Embracing the Chaos:
Voting is not the best way to decide which features need to go into your product. Voting is good for highlighting interest and popularity. But the features you ship need to align with real user needs.
It shouldn't take long for any designer to realize that his role in any project is to make something looks pretty.
Designers are communicator and influencer. What we create affect the lives of our audience. We change their behavior, their perception or even their ideology.
Those are great things that I, as a naive young design student, thought I would do for the rest of my life…then reality hit me: design always has a purpose and that purpose often times is defined by the business side of it.
Over the years I started to try to do great and grandeous things less and less. Why bother? It'll never come to life since those dumb business people cannot see my vision.
Is it really their fault though?
If I can't convince them of the great ideas that I have, there are few possibilities:
It's always easier to blame others when things don't go our way, but blame game is never productive.
I need to do my part of keep on dreaming, believe in my dreams, develop them and present them well. If after all these, the business people still don't buy it, at least I'll know that it's not my fault.
Recently, the major theme that keeps coming up in my professional life is the need/importance of having unified vision in every project.
I used to think that imparting the vision for a project is the job of the team leader or project manager who runs the show, but what if the person who is in charge of the project lacks vision?
In the past, when this happens, I take on the defensive position of doing what I should and have evidence for it so I can have my ass covered when things don't go so well, and most of the times in this kind of situation, things don't go very well because everyone just tries to go after his/her own goal.
More and more I start to think that perhaps I could leverage my skill and ability as a visual ommunicator to help the team to see a unified vision and work as one.
Since flex DataGrid can only take in a simple ArrayCollection object, we need to use labelFunction to fetch data from a nested XML file and dump it into an ArrayCollection object that DataGrid can handle.
Here's a sample code from cflex.net: Using XML dataProvider with DataGrid: labelFunction
Here's a good tutorial on adding a pop-up window to your flex app that takes in user input and pass it on to the main application: Passing data to and from a pop-up window