Wednesday, June 22nd, 2005, 3:36 am
Interactive Design
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here is a great deal of talk about AJAX recently. It is the new branch of development which makes real-time interaction possible. To take examples from Google, GMaps allow movement around the map without the reloading of a page; Google Suggest fetches possible completions from the server in real-time; GMail is another AJAX-rich Web application. The main advantage of this technology is that it one does not need to refresh entire pages, but just modify little bits whenever required.
There are simple ways of indicating change and increasing usability. The lastest release of the Horde project, for example, has plenty of subtle feedback for interaction. A few instances: the pointer changes to a finger when unfolding menus, “+” changes to a “-” and vice versa; Hovering will result in different background colours to indicate severity.
There are some very nice demos in the Open Source library named Rico. I was impressed at first, but I soon spotted a major drawback. The pages devour signals so mouse gestures, for instance, begin to misbehave. Also, browser compatibility is limited, which makes pages like that a bad choice for practical purposes. Another example of flexible designs shows the great powers of modern browsers.
