Adobe has announced that they stopped Flash Player development on mobiles. I’ve been hearing so much noise around this that I think it needs some explanation.

Adobe has stopped Flash Player on mobiles. That’s all. Nothing more. It means that Flash Player won’t be updated for mobile plateforms but let’s face it: Nobody developed Flash Websites for mobiles…

On the contrary, Adobe bought phoneGap last month and clearly turned its strategy to focus on mobile apps (phoneGap AND Air) rather than Flash-based websites for mobiles.

However, this doesn’t mean that they have killed Flash for desktops!  Flash is going to turn into a “shockwave like” technology, more dedicated to 3D than to simple animations.

Mobile development is split in two different parts: Apps and Web.

• Applications are built either with native or hybrid technologies. Applications are very popular because they are fast, can be used offline. Pure HTML5 for example isn’t robust enough to handle the work for the time being.
• Web on mobile is built with HTML/javascript.  Again, HTML5 is the future but just can’t handle as many features as Flash or apps for the moment.

So what kind of technology choices do we have for mobile?

Firstly, we have agnostic technologies. By “agnostic”, I mean one source code for several mobile OS. Adobe Air is one of these technologies (just like SUP, Unity, etc), and a good one if you know how to work with it. And… Adobe Air is just a container for Flash/Flex!

Secondly there are hybrid apps, which are typically developed using HTML5/JQuery, with native extensions provided, for example, by Adobe’s phoneGap. Hybrid apps have been recommended by Forrester over native developments (see next point).

Thirdly we have native apps, which in my opinion kill the ability to make applications that work across devices and therefore are not great for the consumer.  It could be justified on rare occasions, for example when you need to use a feature that exists on the hardware, like NFC.

So Flash is dead on mobiles (and TVs), but long live Flash for mobile apps.

PS: You want to use your Flex/Flash talents to develop mobile? Hey, you know what? Adobe has an app for that!

Gartner has listed tablets and mobile-centric applications as the top two technology trends for 2012, stating that “The implications for IT is that the era of PC dominance with Windows as the single platform will be replaced with a post-PC era where Windows is one of a variety of environments IT will need to support.”

CIO magazine says: “Mobile applications must be as effective as their desktop and notebook counterparts. “Getting mobile right requires a broad range of device support, a central point of control, a wide security net that ensures corporate data is never compromised, and the ability to shield end users from integration complexities.”

The term “mobile” now encompasses such a broad range of facets that it has become a subject related to the underlying IT architecture of a company, thus representing challenges for both IT and business, who need to work together to maximise efficiency, adoption and return.

The following are three common and basic challenges explained in simple terms:

• The choice of mobile devices for employees
• The management of the mobile fleet
• The choice of application development tools

1.      Choice of mobile devices – data security

Implementing a coherent policy for mobile phones and tablets is a major concern, as the choice has a direct impact on data security.

Should employees be allowed access to systems using their personal smartphones? Should the company provide separate smartphones to its employees for business purposes? If so, can we and should we allow employees to use these smartphones for personal use as well, without compromising data security?

Several factors need to be analysed in order to make such decisions, such as:

What type of smartphones/platforms can the IT department manage? iOS? Android?  Windows Phone? Blackberry? Even though other mobile platforms exist, the trend leans clearly to these market leaders. Even if Microsoft is a little behind at the moment, the teams in Richmond are working hard to catch up.

What kind of devices are your employees using already? Adoption is a key factor. The mobile trend is completely driven by consumer behaviour.

The choice of a mobile fleet management tool also has a huge impact on the choice of devices. I’ve gone into more details in the next point..

2.      Mobile Device Management

Commonly known as MDM, this is the corner stone of a corporate mobile policy. It’s through this solution that we can manage users, access to application, configuration, loss, theft, etc.

How to make the choice?

Go through a proper analysis phase. There are a few major players in this domain, as well as some very interesting niche solutions (refer to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant). In seeing the numbers of big players who are racing to offer these solutions, there is no doubt that the future of MDM is looking bright, and choices will open up even more.

 3.      Developing Applications

The move to mobile in the enterprise will be boosted by the use of tablets,  and users will want an increasing number of business applications to run on these devices. Will you develop web applications or native applications?

How will you develop a corporate strategy that dictates the choice of development tools?

From my perspective, companies should be pragmatic:

• What kind of resources do you have internally to manage the development life-cycle? How will you train them?
• How do you choose suppliers who have mastered this domain?
• How to deal with the pro/perso concern?

  In conclusion, defining a mobile policy should be taken seriously, as it will have a real daily impact on life within your company. Enterprise mobility is the biggest single trend across tech industry investment and innovation, even outpacing the cloud computing trend, states the Forrester report entitled, “Another Year of Outperformance for the Tech Industry — Forrester’s 2011 Tech Industry Predictions.” Analysts predict that by 2014, the primary method of accessing the internet will be through mobile devices, which will increasingly replace the traditional desktop.

The risk of not having a solid corporate strategy could be costly:

• Disruption of business processes: The functional failure of  IT systems—of which mobile apps are now solidly included.
• High cost: An ad hoc approach to building out the mobile application architecture will eventually result in time-consuming, manual intervention to maintain.
• Lack of business agility: A poorly planned mobile architecture that cannot support dynamic business strategy shifts can hold the entire business back.

Insights for Java developers

In July this year Oracle announced the availability of Java 7. More than 4 years have passed since the previous release, so what sort of improvements can we expect? Programmers will find several kinds of new features, from cosmetic ones to essential development APIs. Discover more here…

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Whilst mobile utility is experiencing a growth of explosive proportions, the platforms which it relies upon aren’t necessarily standardising accordingly. Although certain mobile platforms seem destined to disappear, one cannot completely ignore their input in regards to developing new applications. As publishers and manufacturers battle it out in the war of the formats, simple solutions exist that could homogenise these various platforms.

In the following article, blue-infinity’s Jerôme Lorido discusses the standardisation of applications and the ways in which cross-platform technology could benefit the expanding realm of mobile technology.  

Click here to read the full article (in French).

Recently, I had the chance to attend the Adobe CS5 Master Tour 2010 in Hamburg. Jason Levine, Greg Rewis and Terry White led a very entertaining presentation and gave lively demos. Playing the part of a fictitous agency, they offered a day which focused on multimedia and complete design processes, from conceptual design (creative web design, print and video) to output through all media channels and devices. What they also mentioned, is that the designers and developers in Hamburg were part of the new Adobe Creative Suite 5.

On the contrary to what you might think, Flash and Flex can be fully accessible.
Since Version 6.0 of Flash Player in 2006, Macromedia has thought about accessibility by implementing a screen reader that is compatible with Microsoft Active Accessibility to support playbacks of flash websites.

In 2009, Adobe released version 9.0, the first player to allow rich media to be accessible to people with disabilities. In doing so, they tried to perfect their support for people with any disability (visually impaired, mobility impaired, hearing impaired etc.) and provided numerous accessibility specific components and a guide of best practice.

In the past year, the Adobe team has worked hard with Freedom Scientific in order to make Flex fully compatible with their famous reading software, JAWS. They have also worked with The Paciello Group and SSB BART Group (two consulting companies specializing on web accessibility) to ensure that the new Flex 4 will provide accessible standard controls. Today, the new Flash Builder contains a large selection of accessible components to provide support for users with disabilities.

Making Flash and Flex accessible has not been about a matter of technology, but of wise preliminary planning. Accessibility needs to be a developer’s concern during the early stages of a project, and should be focused on throughout the whole development process rather than postponing it until the end. If you’re interested in finding out more about Adobe and Accessibility, their blog follows their efforts to making rich media more accessible to all.
http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility/

Adobe Flash has been a common target of criticism  for about 10 years now. When it was DHTML’s time, we heard “Flash is dead!”. Then came Ajax, again amid cries of “Flash is dead!”. Now we have HTML5 and guess what? “Flash is dead!”.

So why do some  people have such a pessimistic views on Flash when the technology is very much alive?

In my opinion, it’s always interesting to look at an argument from both sides. Critics argue that

“Flash is a commercial product, it’s not a standard”.

Ok. Right. So what? The “standard” idea is at best optimistic, at worst completely hypocritical. Since the creation of the www, every company does freestyle with W3C specifications. I have never, ever, ever seen a web project without compatibility problems between IE, Mozilla etc. If we all followed standards as they were written, we can forget about videos and motion design and say bye bye to YouTube,  small online games  and the most visually exciting websites this last decade. I didn’t go into this business because I like data, I’ve gone into this business because I love to share and live nice moments.

“You need a plugin to see flash content”.

Right. You need a plugin for Java, you need a plugin for pdf, you need a plugin for SVG, you need a plugin for Quicktime and for everything but HTML and Javascript. Can you do the same things with HTML and Javascript? No. That’s why you need a plugin that takes all of 20 seconds to install, what a pain…

“Flash is not accessible”.

Since 2003, Adobe has put a lot of effort into improving accessibility and they’ve pretty much succeeded. My preferred answer to this argument is: “Ok, HTML development can provide accessibility but when is the last time you cared about that in your projects?” Most of the time: never. It’s not a technical problem, it’s a people problem. You wanna make your web projects accessible? So just do it! Whatever your technology is, it’s just not a major concern in 80% of cases, let’s face it. Flash can do the job as well as any other technology now, especially for video accessibility.

Aside from these three major arguments, it’d take hours for me to write down all the things I’ve heard or read on this subject over the years. If you want to hear more, check with your favorite search engine, you’ll have fun, it’s an endless story…

Before we go any further, have a quick look at what Steve thinks of Flash here : http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

So now, since the success of the iPhone and Steve Jobs’ very audible attacks on Flash, the critics are out yet again, hailing the end of Flash technology. I’ll admit that I’m not as smart as Steve, but I will try to answer his comments, point by point.

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In a context where relationships with banks rely heavily on trust,  the control of their administrative activities is key, whether related to customer relationship (eg account opening) or related to compliance rules (interaction with the back office and legal aspects in particular).

How to maximize all banking processes and reduce the risk of human error? That’s the real question behind the major projects underway that could change the competitive positioning of banks.

The following article, published in Market.ch magazine in february 2010, explains how integrated custom software solutions can help banks to formalize, manage, archive and manage all their business processes.

Article in market.ch (french)

There has been lots of discussion in the UX community about the compatibility or not of  Agile development and the principles of user centered design. The fact that developers are aiming to produce something fast in small iterations can have a scary note to it – best captured in Alan Cooper’s book  The Inmates are running the Asylum.

In my experience, rapid development is not a bad thing at all – if it comes embedded in a well-managed project with well-defined strategy and scope.

I first came across “Agile” when I worked for a software company in California (Niku, now part of Computer Associates). After the burst of the bubble and a couple of rounds of lay-offs, the CEO went around distributing copies of Extreme Programming. This happened in an organisation that had had a PMO (gone), Product Managers (gone), Marketing (almost gone), and a full-blown web development team with producers, usability engineers, designers and front-end developers (only 3 remained).

The result was quite astonishing: development was streamlined with automated nightly builds (no more: “but it worked on my machine”), usability issues where addressed on the fly and tested with whoever happened to walk down the hallway, and most importantly, customer requests were prioritized and features added or dropped based on their needs. As a result, we were able to get a number of releases out in record time while working in very tight collaboration amongst ourselves and with our clients.

A couple of things played in favor of  such an agile development effort:

• Small teams
• Senior and experienced people
• A general roadmap and strategy in place
• UI patterns well defined and documented

However, in order to have a  roadmap and strategy in place as well as a well-defined concept, the mantra of “doing your homework first” is more valid than ever:

• Research user needs and context
• Evaluate competitive landscape
• Assess business goals and objectives and
• Create an overall concept in form of sitemap, process flows, wireframes, etc..

As with building a house, you want to get the foundations right – or any extension done later on will look like the picture above!

Until I looked at this Google wave podcast, I have to confess that, in my mind, Google was no more than a cool web application editor, adding innovation to existing concepts. But with regards to Google Wave technology, I definitely changed my mind and I now think Google is imagining the next generation of applications (and not only web applications).

Google Wave concept is to federate in a single application features of several domains such as email, chat, syndication, blog, collaboration and much more.

To describe Wave in a few words, I would say that Wave is a “real time” communication application, where collaboration is the core concept. You can use Wave like email, as the waves are persistent do not need on-line participants, but you can also use it like a chat, concurrently editing a wave with other participants. But that is only the tip of the iceberg, as Google tried to federate the best-of-breed of (Google) web applications.

But the reason why I think that Wave is the definite revolution in communication and collaboration is that it is more than just an application. Wave is built on an open protocol, really similar to the main concept of email protocols, allowing Wave servers to communicate with each other. Wave is open source, and you can have your own wave server, opened or not onto the internet, and I think this is a key feature for companies that want to host all of their IT resources or use Wave only in their Intranet with securtiy and confidentiality concerns.
And finally, like Google Maps, Google Waves provides a Wave API allowing you to embed Wave components in web applications  to implement, customize and extend Wave client and server. Actually Wave as been built as an integration platform around a collaboration platform.

The only drawback I see  is that as a user, you need to change your way of communicating and collaborating. This may take some time, but not always, if the concept is really good and matches with the ways users actually think and act (just think of Apple with the iPhone …) .

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Having worked on various web projects, I often encounter a very well known problem : finding an effective regular expression (regexp) to check the validity of user submitted email addresses.

In his blog, Fighting for a lost cause, Ian Dunn has compiled various regular expressions which try to address this problem. The editor’s idea is great: using a set of valid/invalid emails and a simple unit test, he can provide a good comparison of some of the most used regexps.

His philosophy is simple : “It’s better to accept a few invalid addresses than reject any valid ones, so I’m looking for 0 false-positives and as few false-negatives as possible.”
But I’ve noticed 2 problems :

1. His “best” regexp doesn’t work in JavaScript (JS doesn’t support advanced features like negative lookbehind …)
2. The method used to validate IP addresses is not correct (doesn’t take care of 0-255 range)

So i’ve decided to improve another existing regex, created by Warren Gaebel and already enhanced by Guillaume Arluison, by adding another test criteria : also check the “real” validity of the IP address.

Here is my solution :
/^[-a-z0-9~!$%^&*_=+}{\'?]+(\.[-a-z0-9~!$%^&*_=+}{\'?]+)*@([a-z0-9]([-a-z0-9_]?[a-z0-9])*(\.[-a-z0-9_]+)*\.(aero|arpa|biz|com|coop|edu|gov|info|int|mil|museum|name|net|org|pro|travel|mobi|[a-z]{2})|([1]?\d{1,2}|2[0-4]{1}\d{1}|25[0-5]{1})(\.([1]?\d{1,2}|2[0-4]{1}\d{1}|25[0-5]{1})){3})(:[0-9]{1,5})?$/i

This one works very well (found 18/18 valid mails + deep IP address check, and found 19/20 invalid mails – there is a problem checking global length)

There’s just a small problem, each time a new TLD > 2 chars will be added, you’ll need to append it to the list in the regex, if you want a more generic solution, you can use this variant (note that this version will not check if the TLD really exists) :

/^[-a-z0-9~!$%^&*_=+}{\'?]+(\.[-a-z0-9~!$%^&*_=+}{\'?]+)*@([a-z0-9]([-a-z0-9_]?[a-z0-9])*(\.[-a-z0-9_]+)*\.([a-z]{2,6})|([1]?\d{1,2}|2[0-4]{1}\d{1}|25[0-5]{1})(\.([1]?\d{1,2}|2[0-4]{1}\d{1}|25[0-5]{1})){3})(:[0-9]{1,5})?$/i

Those 2 solutions should be usable in all languages providing PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions), on server & client side (such as Javascript, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby etc…)

Have you ever  subscribed to receive thematic news  on topics such as stock exchange, technology or updates of a friend’s blog? These feeds are what we call Syndication, and their format is standardized by the W3C and called RSS or more recently Atom.

But beyond this feature of propagating news through the Internet, syndication can be a really good feature within your applications, leveraging the user experience by proposing to interact  with the application in a non intrusive, lightweight “push”-like way.

This sounds good, no? I use Syndication for in my application. At first glance I can see two main feed audience.

First you can provide feeds for application monitoring. This aims mainly at technical users such as administrators or project leaders. The objective is not to replace reports from products such as Nagios, but rather to provide a higher level view on the application behaviour. For instance you can provide a feed giving an aggregate view on the application logs and alerts in order to follow its health over time.

But personally, I feel that the real added value  is the business feed. Imagine the impact on you client when you will tell him that he will be able to access targeted business data from his brand new smartPhone, using his usual RSS reader, getting only the valuable pieces of information without bothering with the application. Your boss may need the application to provide feeds such as statistics digged from the database or audit trails. The marketing guy may want to have feeds back on final users navigation habits while the infrastructure manager would need performance and volume data. The head of finance would want to know the quantities sold of each product during the last week.

Very often, applications will  offers such pieces of data, but you usually need to connect to the application, navigate to the proper statistics or dashboard page. This is not always easy and efficient, especially from a mobile device, and worse if you cannot connect to the application! One of the benefits of such a solution is that most of the feed readers provide you a way to access feeds off-line, keeping the information available at any time.

My point of view is that this approach can be really valuable. Syndication can be a way to provide a multi-channel access to these data: the feeds can be integrated within the application using web technologies such as Ajax (jQuery, JFeed) but can also be accessed directly using feed readers.

Behind the scene, implementing such a functionality is easier and easier, as frameworks such as CXF, Abdera and others provide solutions to implement syndication services.

Resources:
RSS News feed: http://www.w3.org/2001/10/glance/doc/howto
Atom syndication format: http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom
RFC 4287 – IETF Atom Syndication Format: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt
RFC 5023 – IETF Atom Publishing Protocol: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5023.txt
Jquery Jfeed plugin: http://sourceforge.net/projects/jfeed/
Apache CXF – JAX-RS: http://cwiki.apache.org/CXF20DOC/jax-rs.html
Apache Abdera project: http://abdera.apache.org/

At the Adobe MAX 2009, it was interesting to improve my knowledge in the Test-Driven Development (TDD) and see the new features of Flash Builder 4 in action.

The Unit Test Agents of Flash Builder 4 are simplifying most of the work for you. They can be extended to higher levels just like the old FlexUnit would do, but on top everything now is included in the SDK, well integrated and well documented. TDD is very important for us when working on major or critical applications, since it  allows us to reduce errors and bugs. Even though you might increase  development time in the beginning by finding errors, incomplete or even missing functionalities, you will  end up with less problems to solve gain the time that would be spent debugging the app.

TDD is a great way to deliver with agility an almost bug-free solution in this very competitive business environment.

Adobe Flex technology is getting more and more popular, and  we have started to build even quite complicated applications using Flex. However, the UI behaviour in Flex  is generally more complex than in HTML/JS/CSS and we quickly realized that we needed a testing tool which could record and replay user actions sequences to help us detect UI issues.

Looking around for testing tools, we came across some open source frameworks  such as FlexMonkey and SeleniumFlex. We also tested the following commercial tools :

• HP QTP
• IBM Rational Functional Tester
• Borland SilkTest
• RIATest
• TestComplete

Unfortunately, most of the time, we were quite disappointed with those products because of poor documentation and insufficient user actions record/replay support:  During  one of our tests, we discovered that certain user actions, such as contextual menu selection or drap & drop actions, were not correctly detected or, even worse, were not working anymore.

One of the issues with these tools is probably that they use common techniques and/or underlying frameworks to automate Flex applications, such as External Interface, Microsoft Active Accessibility or Flex Automation … moreover, you should note that using Flex Automation SWCs files requires a Flex Builder license.

Enter Ranorex (http://www.ranorex.com), which, since its lastest version, can also automate Flex applications. Ranorex provides its own automation framework and therefore does not rely on Flex Automation.

We were able to quickly use it to record everything from from simple to complex testcases,  fine-tune and run them. Components are identified by an Xpath like dialect (RanorexXpath), which is automatically written for you when recording or when using the Ranorex Spy tool : this makes writing test script a lot easier. There are also interesting features such as imaging comparison, user friendly test reports or test script debugging and much more.

Scripts tests are actually .Net executables writtent in C# or VB.Net and Ranorex Studio IDE is based on SharpDevelop, a open source .Net IDE . It means using this tool requires some basic knowledge of .Net, which can discourage some people. On the other side, writing script tests on a .Net architecture makes it  possible to use specific .Net features or 3rd party libraries to integrate with NUnit or Microsoft Products like Visual Studio or Excel.

MAX 2009 started with THE announcement : if Apple doesn’t allow the Flash Player to be on the iPhone then… it’s the Flash Player who will go for it.

With Flash Player 10.1,  announced to be released in the first half of 2010, Adobe will give a new compiling option in the Flash professional  interface : compile for iPhone! The trick is to transform the Flash content into a compliant iPhone application. Cleaver…

Just forget those painfull days searching for iPhone developers or spending budget to create a web version AND an iPhone version –  now you can have both in an easy way. And the good news isn’t finished yet… the same Flash Player 10.1 will be able to deal with multi-touch capabilities, be it  for your iPhone or all your others multi-touch devices. If we also add P2P support, then it seems we’ve got some great solutions in our hands to offer innovative and highly user-friendly products.

Multi-touch features

There are several ways to build multi-touch devices. More and more companies like HP are releasing multi-touch products and it’s clearly a rising technology since 2007, with the release of the iPhone and the public annoucement of Microsoft Surface. So, we’ve got more and more multiple devices, all the brand new OSs (like Windows Seven) will be natively multi-touch – but what about the APIs to develop for these devices ?

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Model-driven development is a new feature of LiveCycle Data Services which allows us to build and maintain data-driven Flex applications with an unprecedented level of productivity and flexibility.

At Adobe MAX 2009  in Los Angeles, it was amazing to see how easy it now is to create and keep your application in sync.

Simply by dragging and dropping tables directly from the new RSS Data Explorer you attach data to grids and generate forms automatically. As easy as 1 2 3 I’m looking forward to get my hands on it. The downside is that LiveCycle is not free.

More about this to come.

Current technologies give the possibility to develop more and more complex internet applications. Those applications called Rich Internet Applications are now used in the industry for backoffice applications because of an easier deployment while the functionnalities are the same than old fashioned desktop applications in SWING Style. Different types of solutions are available through RIA development on the Java platform and we mainly work with AJAX (GWT, JQuery, Dojo, Prototype) and Flash based technologies such as Flex or OpenLaszlo.

Rich Internet Applications Technologies

Ajax and GWT

GWT is a framework developed by Google that aims to compensate classic problems related to Javascripting (browser compatibility issues, maintenance and debug difficulties, …).Based on the principle Java-to-JavaScript compiler, the GWT framework solves many problems associated with the use of Ajax and gives the possibility to use the same methodologies and working tools that are commonly used in the context of a standard Java development (using Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, JUnit, …).

GWT provides a library of graphical components and integrates comonly used JavaScript frameworks such as scriptaculous.

Although GWT is a very new technology, its level of maturity is very good and its stability make the implementation of complex projects possible even in high level technical environments. Well suited to the Java world, GWT spreads easily on the J2EE standard and its architecture is well suited. GWT provides us with a promising technology that continues to evolve (GWT 1.6 is now also available).

Flex

Flex is a development technology based on interactive Flash and originally created by Macromedia in 2004. It was originally designed to provide a development model and a set of components more suited to the creation of business applications while keeping the foundation provided by Flash technology which has highly popular and widespread among Internet users.

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A "napkin scetch"

Wireframes are the backbone of any successful web or software project. Information architects create wireframes to provide a visual schema on how pages are put and linked together without specifying a visual identity. Similar to the architectural blueprints for a building, wireframes constitute the common understanding between the client, business analyst, designers and developers.

Seeing is believing

During the concept phase, wireframes help to visualize ideas and get everybody involved. Tools such as Visio allow information architects to quickly create click-through scenarios to simulate possible interactions with the future application.

Stakeholders are busy people. They will not read lengthy functional specifications and are unlikely to page through detailed presentations. But they will look at screen mockups and storyboards. The use of wireframes is a time-saver. Instead of waiting for months before seeing actual screens, stakeholders get a sneak preview almost immediately. A client once told me after a three-day intensive workshop: “This is amazing! Prior to working with you, we waited for six months to see actual pages, and when we finally did, they were not at all what we had asked for.”

Reducing time = saving money

Wireframes can save you very costly rework at a much later stage in the development process. Making fundamental changes during the development phase may cost a lot, with an outcome that is often uncertain. Paper, on the other hand, is patient – and cheap. Changes are easily made. In fact, good user experience design relies on an iterative process involving different team members as well as feedback from the end users.

Wireframe in visio

Getting the team on one page

Early paper prototyping also helps with internal communication and productivity.

• Designers are able to quickly mock-up the visual identity and enhance the user experience without wasting time thinking about data, page flow, and business scenarios.
• Content providers can easily visualize the placement and space for their copy.
• Developers may use the prototype to give more accurate estimates for development time and to raise potential flags in terms of feasibility or performance.

During the development phase, the wireframes serve as a quick reference and reduce the chances of misinterpreting functional requirements.

Last but not least, wireframes facilitate early usability testing, which will reveal potential issues with page flow, layout, nomenclature, or functionality. As discussed previously on Agile Usability Testing, this can be done very quickly at low cost and will provide valuable insight into the users’ minds.

Social networking tools are here to stay, and grow. According to Forrester Research, enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013, with social networking, mashups, and RSS capturing the greatest share.

Forrester Research Forecast on enterprise 2.0 spending

What makes these new tools so attractive to the corporate world? Is everybody starting to get sucked into the virtual world, building avatars, blogging, twitting and exposing themselves in one form or another? The truth is probably much more pragmatic.

Functional Specs in a wiki

Take an exemple from the software development world: functional specifications. You could write a heavy duty word document of a couple of 100 pages, insert screen captures made in visio to illustrate the screens and process flows, send out new version update alerts so that everybody is kept on the same page (so to speak)

…or: you use a wiki. Cross-references are made easily, and components are only explained once. Different people can collaborate together on the specifications at the same time, since it’s just one page and not the whole document that gets locked. Issues can be discussed and resolved in the context of the screen or schema. The whole structure can evolve over time and everybody can be sure to be looking at the latest version. It also helps tremendiously when you have a team that works remotely. Having experienced both worlds, there is no doubt for me that the wiki rules!