What drives development?

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.
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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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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.

Via Singapore

This post documents the beginning of my journey to Switzerland to present at the EdMedia conference in 2004.

Grey Morning
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.

Breakfast
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.

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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


Red RoseAfrican VioletPassion FruitOrchidYellow RoseIrisHibiscus
PansyFejioaAppleAgapanthusSunflowerGrapefruitOrchidOrchid