I have seen a number of different drivers for development endeavours:. Data driven, model driven and user interface driven. I believe that for the purposes of end user development, the interface driven development method is most appropriate. In fact, I think it is the most appropriate not only for end users but for the average application programmer as well.
Continue reading What drives development?
Building Houses
This is a common analogy to building software, I thought I would use it to draw a distinction between programmers, software architects, user interface designers and graphic designers.
These four groups of people represent four distinct skill sets. Let’s see how they do building a house.
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Meta models
As a programmer, I constantly hear the siren’s cry of meta modelling. Programming is all about building abstractions to represent reality. By inference, being able to abstract these abstractions results in an “application generator” (or meta application) which can be used for any purpose. Some may call this the holy grail of programming.
At least that’s the theory.
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Towards a taxonomy of end user applications
The more I think about it, the more I believe that what I am trying to do is address a gap I see in current end user development research. In particular, I think a certain kind of application (I call it a “data-centric application” but “transaction processing system” is appropriate too) has been left out of much end user development research.
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PHD Seed – End User Database Development
This document explains the thought processes that led me to decide on this potential PhD topic. Please comment 🙂
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Stamen, J. P. (1993). Structuring Databases for Analysis. IEEE Spectrum, 55-58
I found this article by Stamen when searching for information about end user computing.
Continue reading Stamen, J. P. (1993). Structuring Databases for Analysis. IEEE Spectrum, 55-58
Lieberman, H. (Ed.). (2001). Your Wish Is My Command: Programming by Example. San Francisco: Morgan-Kaufmann.
I got this very interesting book out from the library and was amazed to see that research in programming by demonstration has not come an awful long way since the heady days of the first PBD systems.
Continue reading Lieberman, H. (Ed.). (2001). Your Wish Is My Command: Programming by Example. San Francisco: Morgan-Kaufmann.
Potential PhD
So, I have been thinking more seriously about my research lately and I came across a special issue on “End User Development” in the Communications of the ACM this month (see references at the end of this post):
Continue reading Potential PhD
Via Singapore
This post documents the beginning of my journey to Switzerland to present at the EdMedia conference in 2004.
Strangely, I wasn’t feeling particularly excited while waiting to board, perhaps it had something to do with the fact that it was 8:17am and I hadn’t had much sleep that night. It was a windy, overcast day, what a fitting way for Auckland to see me off! At about 8:30 I found myself in my seat (32H) the seat next to me (I) was unoccupied but some skank sat down in J.
I had the smallest breakfast sausages I have ever seen. The guy in J ordered 5 whiskeys on the rocks in quick succession then had a red wine with his meal (he may not have been counting, but I certainly was). So, after checking that the grog was free, I got myself a vodka and lemonade. It turns out that Singapore Airlines often get confused between their vodka and their engine fuel so I only drank aboout a quarter of it an exchanged it for a sprite. It was approximately 3000km to Singapore.
Flowers
I enjoy taking photos of flowers. Here are just some of them. Mouse over the smaller images to see them in more detail.
Red Rose
