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February 19, 2007
The value of "pretty"
The value of "pretty": It would have been rare to hear such endorsements of richer interface elements even just two years ago: "The health-care UI needs to present complex information in an intuitive manner to busy doctors and clinical staff, who don't have time to sit through a week of training to learn how to use it. [It] allows interactivity of the user interface so that when you do things, there's subtle animation and graphical effects that kind of guide you in the right direction, and that's the sort of thing that's hard to explain, it's a lot easier to show,' says Hollis." Even medical applications benefit from animation and richer media -- that's the bottomline. The technology here is Vista's presentation layer, and I suspect the article was commissioned by Microsoft, but look at the cost and effort they're going through to persuade decision-makers of the value of richer presentation layers. Whatever you may think of the Microsoft approach, they're definitely helping to increase institutional acceptance of the types of web work that platform-neutral designers and developers have been doing the last five years. This will increase adoption further -- it's a plus.
Posted by JohnDowdell at February 19, 2007 08:52 PM
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Some of the other quotes are funny (if a bit galling) in their not-invented-herefulness:
"The whole look and feel of our application wouldn't have been possible without WPF," says Dmitry Mikhailov, president and CEO of Flowfinity. "This is one area where WPF excels far beyond all previous technologies. Attempting to create a similar look-and-feel, and rich UI interaction with any previous technology, whether .NET or native code, would have been cost-prohibitive both for initial implementation and ongoing maintenance." [emphasis added]
Apple helped set the aesthetic level, but didn't have an accessible platform, or offer universal audience. Now even straight MS shops are being urged to come on board and accept such interfaces. Some of them will realize they can't afford an all-Microsoft environment, but now everyone agrees that pretty stuff has value. Big change.
Posted by: John Dowdell at February 19, 2007 09:28 PM