Steve Jobs Biography

For Christmas I received Steve Jobs biography. My family knows that I work in high tech and that I design user interfaces and applications and fell in love with my recent MacBook Pro, my first "Apple" product.

This is the first book that I've read cover to cover in quite a while. Most of my reading is technical articles, blogs, online books, etc. where I only have a few minutes to figure something out, learn a new technology or get an answer to a technical question.

As I went through the book, it became very nostalgic. I started my career in the early 80's at Digital...saw the first PC they made, saw a "color" screen appear and this thing called a mouse too. I look back now and feel so lucky that I was part of the user interface group, designing applications using DECWindows (and later Motif) and working with the User Interface lab, observing users and learning how someone interacts with a device. The whole interaction and experience is what has differentiated Apple from the beginning and was driven by Steve Jobs. Sure, they came up with great devices that did wonderful things and were so cool, but so did others, it was just that theirs were so elegant, simple and user friendly.

I look at the user interfaces I have designed and that I continue to design and I now have a more critical view of them. When a user lands on my screen, do they know what to do? Does it make sense? If they do the wrong thing, is it clear why that operation didn't work and what they should do instead? Do they need to read a manual to figure it out?

It is fascinating to me that since 1980 to now, 2012, UI design really hasn't changed at all. Buttons, menus, scrollbars, trees, tables, etc. are still the same. Just like an artist with a canvas and paint, it's the combination of colors, layout, textures that make his painting into art. Those who can take a complex set of data and a complex task and make into the most simple, logical, and easy operation end up with the most usable products.

I judge my applications by my users. How quickly are they doing productive work with it? Can I get them to the right screen with 1 click or 1 touch or 1 operation? Is my Product Manager out demoing and using the application without asking me anything about it? No one reads the manuals these days. The application has to "just work."

So today I work on user interfaces developed with GWT. I also design products for the Android interface. Any feature or layout or function I can imagine can be done with the GWT widget set. Any look or color or size or shape can be done with CSS. For Android, a smaller/touch screen presents a different set of challenges, but really forces me to think even simpler, more straightforward and work towards an elegant solution.

Steve Jobs was very demanding, knew what he wanted and would not be happy until he saw it and reading his biography has certainly left a mark on me. Steve thought something was total crap, horrible, unusable until one final tweak made it "perfect." So strive for quality - prototype - adjust - rework - open your eyes to the environment around you - and shape your work into something elegant. You are one tweak away from perfection.

Welcome to GWT

After spending many years doing GUI development (starting with XWindows, DECwindows, then on to Motif and Java Swing) I was recently given the opportunity to move away from the application space and into the web space. "Build the same application you did with Swing, but make it web based" were the marching orders.

Now, I have to say that UI development seems to have not changed in 25 years. Yes, we got color, a mouse, animation, nicer fonts, etc. but we still create and manage widgets, think object oriented always, and need to put together layouts that adapt to screen sizes. Without even cracking a manual (actually a Google search now!) one can sit in Eclipse and pretty much guess what the method might be for doing something to a widget or for setting up a callback.

...Back to building my Swing app for the web. I was to use a technology called ADF (Oracle's Application Development Framework) with the end product deployed using Weblogic. Being a new Oracle employee, I had no prior knowledge of this technology and found not a lot in the internet about "how to" do things with it, so I decided why not share my findings as I went. My ADF blog was born. In very little time, I was able to start a new complete UI from scratch, taking advantage of templates, css styles, and a lot of code sharing. The complexity came in when trying to model and display data that was stored in our backend database that was "not" a typical RDB conforming data store, but that is a different story for a different day. Let's just say that where many web apps (and non-web apps) fall down is in building a multi-user, concurrent, auto refreshing application where all users coexist in harmony and life is good.

So now I've moved on to a very exciting new startup and was given free rain to "pick" the UI technologies that will be used. Slick, fast, usable, state of the art were the marching orders. After evaluating and comparing Swing, GWT and Flash, GWT was the winner. This blog will follow my adventure into GWT for the first time.

I knew nothing of XWindows/DECwindows and built DECplan, aka Microsoft Project before there was a Microsoft. Then on to Motif based NETarchitect integrated with an ObjectStore backend and is still the "fastest" performing application I have ever worked on. Next came a Swing based networking Control Center and a Virtualization Manager. Last was the ADF based Virtualization Manager and now a GWT set of applications.

I guess starting from drawing lines with X and building menu bars by hand has helped lead me on the path of making UI design and implementation "natural". I'm just wondering what will lead us into a new paradigm and really change the way Gui's are done. Maybe next lifetime.