إندي سعودي Indie Saudi

March 16^th 2009

I was at www.Qaym.com ‘s launch press release yesterday at (nokhbah café), as Jihad, the founder, tried to close the gap between the press media, and new media. Maybe I have been away from Saudi for a while, but it was exciting for me to witness this. I saw some bloggers and some geeks that I should be seeing more than I do. I also saw some familiar faces from the press. The Riyadh news paper and al-igtisadia (the economical) news paper was there too. Jihad launched his site, and then took questions. After those questions, Jihad asked from all the attendees to be in a very constructive discussion; how can new media and press media coexist and help develop one another.

The launch of Qaym was exciting in itself. It’s a web 2.0 adoption of restaurant voting and rating system that depends on the users as the main source of content. I am a stickler for user interfaces and usability, but Qaym impressed me. The graphics were simple enough, the rating system was smart, and most importantly, the registration was easy.  Qaym was able to find the #1 pass time in the Saudi community and really try to improve on the quality of it.

The theme of the site is blue and white, with a hint of a green. That simple design made the rendering of the page quick and smooth as well as eye pleasing.

The rating system was perfect. Vote Like, or don’t like is the perfect schema to approach this. Jihad mentioned first started with a star rating, which I think has a lot of flaws. A star rate mechanism would create a confusing choice to the user. What could be the difference between a 5 and a 4 star rating? All of those similar issues were avoided using a vote up, or a vote down system.

I consider registration to be the worst part of any online service, but Qaym’s was not that bad. 3 fields to fill is as simple as it gets to sign up. The content of the site is viewable by anyone without registration. It’s only necessary when a user would like to participate in the rating. I highly recommend trying out the service.

After the demo and the launch announcement, Jihad asked the question. How can new media reach the press media, and vice versa. A young TV correspondent showed his frustration that pitching ideas to media outlets could lead to intellectual theft. Al-dogaibly from Riyadh newspaper said “Don’t rush to be in the classical media”. “Get you projects and new media outlets to a mature level first”, he added. A member of a tech TV show on al-majd news paper wanted the new media providers and geeks with projects to come to them. “We have a lot of material to choose from always, we need you to help us choose by providing us with something news worthy”. A member of Saudi Geeks asked the classical media members to identify what material is needed for an appearance or a story covering a new media event or a project. The discussion was concluded when evening prayer started, and most people had to leave, including me.

I will be looking forward for more discussions on how classical media and new media can enrich one another and how can the quality of both be improved. Bravo Jihad.

My job as a testing software engineer doesn’t really require me to do much development on my own, and when I get back home, the last thing I want is look at a computer and develop, even though that’s changing, its going slow. I have been trying to take the job of working with web development to satisfy my interest in usability engineering.

I have found that most of the developers have been working with ASP and some Ajax. From what I heard, things could get very messy in ASP and Ajax, especially since my workplace doesn’t really care much for being multi-browser friendly. When I first tried to open one of there websites with firefox, the CSS (or lack of) freaked out the browser and displayed the whole site out of order. I tried fixing it as much as possible, but it was a huge headache. I have successfully done that, but that raised a concern for me. Is there a better way of developing web apps that would better suite our development team?

Since my department is a Microsoft Gold partner, I decided to see what they had to offer. I found Silverlight, and thought I would give it a shot. I had a version of expression Blend SP1, which enables the creation of Silverlight 2 web apps. I started tinkering with it, but I found that it lacked some of the key controls that asp had. After some searching, I found the Silverlight toolkit on codeplex [LINK]. I have used this toolkit to create a not too complicated web app, but soon found a huge bug that made it so that I had to scratch the whole project. The tree view provided reset the chosen item, every time a button was pressed inside another opposite grid. I have very annoyed, and disappointed. At the same time, I felt like it was for the best. I will be alienating people who have linux and moonlight (Silverlight implementation for mono), since moonlight only supports Silverlight 1. I also felt disappointed, because I really liked the development environment of Silverlight. The solution file created from Blend is a Visual Studio 9 (2008) solution. The ability to switch between visual studio and blend to write code behind and then design again is just amazing. The separation of XAML code for the interface and the C# code behind makes it ideal for teams that have a separation between designers and coders. Furthermore, I liked Silverlight because I didn’t have to worry about how the pages are going to get rendered on different browsers, since the Silverlight player is available for almost all browsers, on Windows and Mac.

What made me think about Silverlight and not adobe AIR is the C# code behind. Most of the developers in my organization are C# developers; I didn’t want to take them away from their environment. Plus, I have heard that with AIR, there is no separation between design and code. Correct me if I am wrong.

I later experimented with third party controllers, like Telerik’s RAD controllers, which are beautiful and easy to use [LINK]. I might use these controls in the future. I also experimented with WPF, where I recreated the same Silverlight interface in WPF. WPF is a superset of Silverlight, so it was naturally more powerful, since it uses the same XAML code for design. 3D through managed Direct3D could be used and complex animation can be achieved, and well as the usage of imbedded WinForms components. WPF could also be used in a browser, but to use its full features, enabling some security privileges to the server machine has to be granted. XBAP (XAML Browser App) is what WPF in a browser is called. XBAP is not designed to be massively available as a Web App, since it requires Windows, manual installation of .Net 3.5 SP1 on the local machine, and have Internet explorer 7. I think by the time I write this, a Firefox plug-in might have been developed. For local Application, I highly recommend ditching WinForms and going for WPF from now on.

So, I went back to a basic ASP and Ajax design, but this time, I made sure the design works on all browsers (including IE8).  I am looking forward to working more with ASP and Ajax, even though I would rather work with PHP and Ajax. I hate Microsoft for having such amazing development tools.