Andre’s Blog

Dave put together this cool little demo for the talk I gave at GeoWeb last Thursday.

We wanted to show closer integration of the desktop and the browser environments.  So we used a list of addresses (actually lat/long coordinates) in Excel, copied and pasted the list into the nitobi grid which was mashed-up with up with Google Maps.  It was pretty slick, I’m not sure if I emphasized in my talk how important this type of workflow is going to be in the future.  Users should have to make a cognitive switch between the desktop and web environment (IMO).  If you I can see the data let me get copy it, paste it, drag it, drop it or move through it with the keyboard.  Come on!  I want arrow keys, tabbing, I want to send email by hitting ctrl+enter like I can on the desktop, these are not hard to implement they just take some thought and care from the application designer.

Click here for the screencast.

Dave will have a more technical follow up post to this soon.  Likely he’ll include geo-coding for addresses and such too, since most people probably don’t think in lat/long coordinates or have lists of those kicking around;-)  This coming from the usability evangelist that I am…

Technorati Tags: ajax, gis, map, geoweb, mashup, nitobit, nitobigird, googlemap, ux, ui, usability

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This entry was posted on Sunday, July 30th, 2006 at 12:07 pm and is filed under Technology, Software Development, AJAX, Web 2.0, Usability - HCI. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.