Making better products

Wow! this is quite some news. Never imagined something like this to happen.

Microsoft Silverlight, the cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering next-generation media experiences and rich interactive applications will now be available for S60 on Symbian OS, the world’s leading smartphone software, as well as for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets.  Adding support for Silverlight will extend opportunities for developers to create rich, interactive applications that run on multiple platforms in a consistent and reliable way. This move will enable S60 application developers to use a wider range of dev environments.

Here’s the offiicial press release from Nokia.

This is BIG for Microsoft and Silverlight, as the collaboration with Nokia will enable taking the Silverlight experience to millions of users on devices which will be used everyday by end users. This will also be a lithmus test for Silverlight for ensuring it’s cross platform compatibility.

I think that is a great move, which will enable mobile users to see their applications move to the next level of user experience and usability.  I am personally looking forward to seeing some great mobile apps built on Silverlight. Some demos are expected at the MIX.

I am all excited about attending the Expression around the clock - Global designer event at Bangalore.

The event will cover a range of User Experience (UX) technologies that will enable designers and developers to build next generation desktop and web applications. I am particular excited in seeing new demos on Silverlight and WPF and new features which are to be added to Expression studio.

This space of Rich Internet applications with Microsoft introducing Silverligt and Adobes traction on Flex is very exciting and the next few months will tell us who the real pioneer will be.

If you are going to be at the event, leave me a comment and we can network there.

For over quite some time now, there has been a great interest in using Web 2.0 concepts withing the enterprise. The whole concept of Web 2.0 has been evolving and has gained iconic status in business and technical worlds alike.

Web 2.0 has many concepts associated with it - blogs, wikis, mashups, social networking, RSS, content tagging and many more. Most of these concepts are based on an user centric approach where the user is the focal point of action/attention. Enterprises are hence realizing that it makes a lot of sense to replicate these concepts within their organization to improve collaboration and communication and hence improve productivity.

However using Web 2.0 concepts within an enterprise requires a drastic mind shift within people. Information is now openly available, and people can easily express their views on the same. This will need to go hand in hand with a good change management and user education process.

Below is a diagram that I find very intuitive about Enterprise 2.0, courtesy Dion Hinchcliffe from ZDNET

The idea here is look at enterprise 2.0 from two prespectives - Internal facing and extrernal facing. Here’s my take on the most important faces of Enterprise 2.0

1. Collaboration 2.0 - An unoffical term for the collaboration strategies within the enterpise, this seems to be gaining a lot of traction within enterprises. The ability for multiple people to work on a document and then have preset workflows which get kicked in, are very useful and can play a key role in improving efficiency and productivity. SharePoint (or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) is a product which I think holds a lot of promise in this space and clearly there is a lot of traction around using MOSS 2007 within large enterprises and ISVs.
   Other collaboration tools which are popularly used within enterprises include Wikis, which hold a lot of promise for easy information sharing and editing.
2. Syndication/RSS feeds - This would enable everyone to keep in touch with items most important to them through notifications, feeds etc
3. Informal modes of communication  - This has led to the use og instant messaging services, SMS, etc for communication with the enterprise.
4. Rich User Experience (UX) - This is becoming ever so important in the Enterprise 2.0 era. The ability to engage users and have them get their work done easily is of primary importance. Some examples include Rich Internet applications built on AJAX, Flex, Flash, and Silverlight. Other concepts such as Office Business Applications (OBA) enable pulling in data from Line of business systems and surface them up in portals with a rich user experience.
5. Employee blogs - Blogs are an ideal channel for employees to showcase their ideas and also put up their questions, opinions etc. Blogs are also being used as marketing tools where companies primarily use their blogs/ employee blogs as showcase pieces or even to break some important news about product releases etc to the world.
6. Software as a Service (SaaS) - Desktop software is becoming passe` in the web 2.0 world and running softwares on the network (or cloud) is potentially one of the best software models which has a lot of potential.

Microsoft has finally officially announced the release of Silverlight 1.0 with Linux support. Silverlight is Microsoft’s direct reply to Flash and is expected to play a big role in the future of Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

Microsoft’s Silverlight will be supporting Moonlight, the Linux implementation as part of the their partnership with Novell, which was signed earlier this year. They have some really cool partners including Entertainment Weekly and the WWE.

According to Miguel de Icaza, vice president of Developer Platforms and leader of the Mono project at Novell. “Novell is excited to work with Microsoft to extend Silverlight beyond Windows^® and Macintosh to Linux with Moonlight, so Linux users everywhere can enhance their rich media and interactive experiences on the Web.”

Most RIA enthusiasts are however looking for the release of Silverlight 1.1 which will support the Common Language Runtime (CLR) in .NET and make writing applications for the web much easier.

However this is going to be a very interesting period, with Microsoft penetrating into the Linux user base and enhancing their experience and with Adobe working on various improvements to flash at the same time.

Tafiti is a mashup that uses the resources of Windows Live Search driven by a Silverlight user interface. The result is a search engine with a totally new experience.

Tafiti (which is the Swahili word for “do research”) uses a desktop metaphor to search across media types and even filter your data result set multiple times.  So here’s my take on Tahiti

The good

1. Provides a stack view of my search results – Ability to drag multiple search results on to the right pane and to label a stack of results.

2.  You can email items of a stack to people, which is pretty useful.

3.  Ability to blog about a stack you have created on your Live Space account.

4. Ability to pivot the search results by RSS feeds, books, news items, images. I found this to be very useful . It does not stop here, you can in fact view contextual information on a book. (This feature however doesn’t seem to be working currently)

5. Here is one cool feature, though it took me some time to figure out how to get to this – On your web search results, there is a tree icon and clicking on which provides a real tree view visualization of your search results. You can choose to view how many results you wish to see and hovering over a result provides a brief description of the same. Very cool, but doubt if people will find value.   

The bad

1. A somewhat jerky experience throughout, not as smooth as WPF desktop applications.

2. There are some issues with resolution, does not run perfectly on lower resolutions.

3. No pagination for search results – there’s only a more link which is not great usability.

4. There’s a text box for filtering the search results – where you can actually type and I figured that it does a text comparison with the search results and pivots them. Not a common standard for filters - users might be expecting a drop down etc.

5. Try right clicking on the site and you will notice only one option called ‘Silverlight configuration’ clicking on which provides a note about silverlight. I am really hoping that this is customizable ?

6. It opens up all the search results in a new IE window, which is not great usability.

Overall, it’s worth a shot, though I am sure that Microsoft realizes that no one is going to use this as a search engine, it’s more of an effort to showcase the power of silverlight and maybe the future of rich internet applications.

  Here are some screenshots

 Popfly is a fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications.  They have a tool called the popfly creator which can be used to seamlessly build webpages, applications and gadgets. The interesting part is that they also have a plug in tool for Visual Studio which will enable developers and advanced to tweak the HTML and also enable them to play the role of designers.I think this is a really interesting space and I can realize why Microsoft is spending so much effort and time into building this, as most customers I meet these days want a rich user interface and experience. This is acceptable considering the growth of the RIA space and the need for a page to be engaging and enthralling. Check the links below for more information. Note that this is currently in private alpha and is open by invitation only.

http://www.popfly.ms/Overview/ 

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=91175 

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=381

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=308460

Following are some screenshots.