Social plugins brought Facebook Connect features to everyone with hardly any effort. A new slimmer, easier to use, more open, and more documented JavaScript SDK arrived. The new Open Graph API and oAuth 2.0 support simplified getting to any Facebook data without relying on a specific back-end SDK that had to be updated whenever Facebook adds functionality. And the new Open Graph Protocol turned any page on Internet into an entity on Facebook that could be interacted with.

That was April 21st. Where are we now – 5 months later?

Connecting your website to Facebook is easier than ever, but Facebook’s Application development has turned into a great divide of old and new. It turns out the new Open Graph API and JavaScript SDK are too simple. The new Open Graph API can read, but it can’t write. The new JavaScript SDK is lightweight and fast, but it can’t do much more than login and logout of Facebook Connect. The JavaScript SDK project hasn’t seen any updates since June 15th.

Application Developers have no choice but to keep using the old REST API and JavaScript SDK. However, the old JavaScript SDK is still as slow as ever and Facebook has removed its documentation over time (who knows why). Meanwhile, many important features such as Feed Publishing, Invites, Requests, and XFBML rendering can only be implemented with JavaScript when many Facebook Applications are all Flash clients.

Hey Facebook: where’s the follow-through? We, the Application Developers, are in limbo.

On June 3, 2010 it was announced that my employer – Challenge Games – was acquired by Zynga Game Network.

Zynga is considered the “Google of Games” – with massive amounts of funding, revenue, and users.

I have been transitioning over as a Zynga employee.

Unfortunately, Zynga is a very private company so there’s not much I can say about it publicly. I will try to work on some code in my free time so that I can freely talk about something I’m doing.

Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do to customize these one-line-of-code plugins for look and feel. The defined dimensions are static and the colors are unchangeable.

I’ll write more later about Facebook’s f8 conference that I attended today.

Engine88: Portfolio: Living.com

I hadn’t seen the old website in a long time. It was quite a treat. Thanks to Susan Presnell for preserving this in her Portfolio. I’ll have to go dig around my old portfolio and see if I have anything like it there. I want a screenshot of the search and browse pages I worked so hard and iterated so much on.

Speaking of the biggest event of the year, I’m now working on the World Duels Championship. I built and ran the WDC last year and it was one of the most stressful things I’ve ever done. Practically zero prep on a large competition event with cash prizes up in the air. I pulled it off mostly by writing quick and dirty code with the assumption of re-writing it in the next 12 months before the next WDC. Guess what? Time’s up. Since we’re running on a new version of CakePHP I didn’t even want to bother trying to get the hacked legacy code to work. So I completely scrapped it and now I’m writing the new code while the event is already happening. Not quite as stressed as last year, but if I don’t hurry I will be soon.

What’s next? There’s a lot of Facebook integration work to do. Luckily, there’s help for it. Early June will see a new face to Duels. I’m not 100% behind the new look, but I’m tired of fighting to improve it. I want something new. I’ve been kicking around thoughts of building my own game. But at the same time I feel like I should cut back on the time spent working and spend time defining my future. There’s still a lot of things I want personally that I can’t get from behind a laptop.

In two months I’ll reach a major life milestone and see the tenth year in my career. Hopefully that will give me some perspective.

At work I’ve been busy redesigning the front and back of Duels.com. It’s been almost a year and nine months since Duels.com launched and we’ve been meaning to refresh the user interface (while keeping the same look and feel) and upgrade the PHP framework we run on (CakePHP). Refreshing the UI is meant to attract a wider audience and upgrading CakePHP will allow Duels.com to reuse features from the other games which are written on the newer version. Unfortunately, we decided to do these two things at the same time to cut down on the amount of testing needed. Why change everything, test everything, and then do it again shortly after?

The front end redesign is actually something I’ve been looking forward to. My passion is for design and I had to hold back on changing the “legacy” design for quite some time. However, progress has been slow since I’ve been swamped playing whack-a-mole with the CakePHP upgrade.

I’ve used many frameworks in different languages. I’m used to plenty of knowledge transfer and upgrading. I have to say that this upgrade has been the most painful one yet. I expected the few custom changes we made to version 1.1 to require work, but it’s nothing compared to the sweeping incompatibility of core functionality. This has required lots of search and replace and global modifications that are constantly destabilizing the code base. This requires lots of regression testing which isn’t readily available when your QA team is just a few volunteer players.

In CakePHP 1.2 I really expected more backwards compatibility with deprecation. This would help with things like the new Form helper which generates the HTML for form elements and automatically juggles form input and object data. This was previously done in the Html helper and there’s no reason why the new Html helper couldn’t have backward compatible form methods that just used the methods in the new Form helper to do the work. It’s essentially what I’ve had to do myself.

Then there’s changing the behavior of the save() method on Models. In CakePHP 1.1 the save() method takes an array of Model data, an optional flag to determine whether to validate the data, and an optional list of fields to save. If the array has an “id” key-value pair it performs an update or an insert if not. The main difference is what it does with the rest of the data. In 1.1 an array of partial data only updates the partial data – similar to specifying the saved fields in the optional parameter. In 1.2 any missing data is modified to table column defaults. I prefer the 1.2 behavior since I think it promotes more usage of the optional saved fields parameter (which I think is important). However, to me this is to big of a change in the same method with the same parameters and I had to write some code to overload the method to reproduce the 1.1 behavior since changing every call to the method would require a lot more than a find and replace.

I’ve ranted enough. Months from now I’ll hopefully be able to look back and be happy I was able to complete such a large task by myself, no matter how frustrating it was to do so.

Well, I’m back. Tonight I upgraded WordPress (which was a pain with my Yahoo hosting), imported all my old posts (RSS import), put up my old customized theme (Hemingway Reloaded), updated my blogroll with the Challenge Games blogs, and added my Email, Twitter, and Duels avatar info to my About page.

I’ve also added a Twitter plugin that’s supposed to tweet my blog posts. I’m curious to see how that turns out. I can also use it to show my tweets in my blog, but my old theme doesn’t have widgets support. I’ll have to look into adding the support myself sometime.

Since my last post about new employment at Challenge Games, I’ve contributed code to 4 games, moved to 3 different offices, and bought a house.

Right now I’m working on a new UI design for Duels.com, finally understanding Twitter (it just replaced my Google Reader), learning new web design tricks (Ajax, HTML 5, Canvas, etc), and doing home projects (restoring a family antique desk, running speaker wire through the attic, landscaping, etc).

Eventually I want to move this blog to some better hosting, start a sandbox for prototype programming, figure out why everyone is talking about Git, and promote myself online a bit.

Here’s to new endeavors!

Last night Duels.com was featured in an article by TechCrunch, a very popular blog that covers what’s new with startups and the internet. Within hours the site was hit by people and the guys were up all night trying to manage the extra load.

By 2am the site reached the top popular bookmarks of del.icio.us. The guys start stripping extraneous database queries and try to optimize every little tiny thing they can to get the site to withstand the beating of traffic.

At 8am a press release hit the wires announcing the availability of the new game. Its hard to measure what kind of impact that will have. When I checked in with the guys before lunch there were 1200+ new account registrations.

At noon the site was featured on the front page of digg.com. Shortly after lunch a user from digg created an entry in Wikipedia for Duels. Needless to say, the servers are possibly going to be unresponsive for the rest of the day.

The great thing is that in the middle of all the frustrated people trying to reach the site, I see a lot of curiosity from their comments. This curiosity should pay off over time when the servers are back to normal because these sites featuring the game are social bookmarking sites. People really do want to know what this thing is about and they’re planning to come back later to see it.

It’s been a year since the acquisition and I’ve learned a lot. IBM is a very stable and profitable place to work, but the trade off is a very unexciting work life. One day I’m sure I’ll beg for that work life, but not while I’m still young. This boredom is why you’re seeing an eight month gap in posts to this blog – I had nothing interesting going on to write about.
I want to take chances, work insane hours on challenging and exciting things, and do it all for an underdog of a company that can fold or get bought up at a day’s notice. What can I say? I practically grew up while working for startups. And I want to keep doing it while I have the youth, energy, and will to do so.

After a little over a month of job searching I’ve signed up with Oxygen Games. The little company has a handful of employees, all of which I’ve worked with in the past and know well. When I was just a kid I always wanted to work on video games. These small web based games aren’t exactly what I had in mind back then, but they lack a lot of the drawbacks that kept me from actively pursuing that dream. The first game is online at Duels.com. Duels has had quite a busy day today, but I’ll keep that story for the next post later on today.

I mentioned that I’ve never used the Yahoo! TV portal. To be honest I wasn’t even aware it existed because I’ve never made it that far into Yahoo’s vast web of information. Now, I have respect for the Yahoo User Experience team. I’ve read a lot of their published papers in the past and I feel like I’ve learned a lot from their work. That said, Yahoo’s pages are often so big and so cluttered they make my head hurt. I’ve heard a lot of people make this statement before, but I’ve never really seen anyone try to explain why. I know exactly why: too many images. I know people hate too much text, but I’m willing to make the claim that too many images can be worse. At least when you’re faced with several paragraphs of text your eyes can easily pan and scan around to find what you’re looking for. I do admit that the new homepage is a vast improvement on the text-to-images ratio. However, that must have been an accident as it wasn’t taken to heart for the rest of Yahoo’s pages.

The specific TV portal design seems to be a rip of the Apple ITMS. Thankfully there are no Appleish image reflections, something I wish Apple could patent or trademark as a branding scheme so I would quit seeing it everywhere. The rip here is the presentation of items in groups. It’s a great use of progressive disclosure, however I think Yahoo’s designers missed the point. I say this because they literally overfilled the page with this for each category of “collection”. Apple uses this technique to comprise multiple categories in one little compact box on the ITMS homepage which is a great use of space. I will say “bravo” though because this is the first time I’ve seen this technique re-used (that I’ve seen) by anyone outside of Apple.

Another rip of Apple’s design team is the rotating content and video panels at the top of the page. This was certainly not started by Apple, but due to the other blatant rip I assume that’s where it was inspired from. And once again Apple did it much better. On the TV portal there are two rotating panels of different sizes and content that are rotating and transitioning way too fast. In fact, I didn’t even notice the transition animation until just now. And the rotation is too fast to where it’s a negative distraction instead of the gentle nudge to the user’s eyes that it’s meant to be. Apple uses this technique to rotate featured Music, Videos, and Podcasts on the ITMS homepage. Apple uses three panels, but they are all the same size, rotate one at a time, and have just the right speed of rotation and transition.

So far I’ve focused only on design. However, there’s a lot more to a re-design than design and that’s where I think the lot of Yahoo’s users are finding themselves at a loss. Yahoo made a few apparent mistakes here. One of them they’ve done well with in the past which leaves me confused.

For instance, there’s the nature of presenting a beta in addition to an existing live site. I have a hard time even writing the word “beta” in reference to Yahoo’s new TV portal due to the fact that it seems to be the only live version available at the moment. In the past Yahoo has used some great mechanisms to allow users to try out betas by switching back and forth between the old version and the new version. That mechanism doesn’t exist here like it did for the Yahoo homepage or like it still exists for Yahoo Mail. This is extremely important because very few people seem to understand how hard it is for humans to embrace change, especially with technology. New things are shiny and great, but typically we fall back on the old and trusted until we’re ready as individuals to “upgrade”. For example, I still use the old version of Yahoo Mail. I’ve seen and used the new version and even dare say I like it, but I have some old applications that allow me to interact with Yahoo Mail but don’t work with the new version (yet). As a User Experience Professional I find my strength in my profession by being someone who understands the affect of change and the need to regulate it – I know I’m not alone.

Another mistake I see here is the loss of features. It’s hard to analyze this having not experienced the previous version, but I’ve read the comments of people on Yahoo’s blog speaking about the loss of a “Favorite Channels” feature. Apparently people were using this feature and liked it enough to be angry at it being gone. Some even speak of using competitors’ sites instead just for that feature. While features do come and go, someone didn’t do their homework. It sounds like it would have been important to keep this feature and go out of the way to make sure things such as existing data and preferences were seemlessly transferred to the new version. It’s great that Yahoo has employees responding to the comments on their blog with statements about usability testing before the release, but I question who they tested with.

Now I wouldn’t be a person who is biased against Flash if I didn’t question its use at Yahoo TV. I’ve come to embrace Flash in certain implementations, such as the new Yahoo! Maps, but I find its use here to be frivolous and apparently detrimental according to some of the people who’ve openly complained. There are three instances of Flash on the TV home page: the top-center content panel, the top-right video teaser panel, and the advertisement space below the video. I recommend limiting Flash to about one use per page – anything more and it should be used in a way so insubstantial that I ought to not be able to tell I’m seeing Flash. Now, the top-center content panel could be implemented without Flash. It might be more difficult to implement, but it’s still possible and so there’s no utility or Flash “coolness” factor there. The top-right video panel requires Flash to present the video and would probably be what I would reserve its single use for. However, I think a lot of lessons have been learned from YouTube’s success and one of those is that people like very lean and very simple control interfaces for watching video. This is a preference of users and may even help the performance of the page loading (which is currently laggy) with a possible smaller Flash file. The advertisement space uses Flash to jump and grab attention in a way that’s just obtrusive. It’s instances like this one that led to the creation of flashblock – which some of the Yahoo users spoke of using. I find this to be a kind of obuse of a technology that can often lead to its demise.

This is all for now. They say “there’s no such thing as bad press”, but I wish the circumstances were different since I’m so passionate about the subject of complaint. I do believe however that Yahoo’s awesome User Experience team will rectify the situation and hopefully take away from the experience something positive in learning from their mistakes.