Yesterday DevX.com published my article Crash Course in Next-Gen RIA: AIR, Silverlight, and JavaFX. It provides a quick introduction to these technologies by showing how to build a simple stopwatch gadget with each if them (see the screenshot below).

This is my first experience writing for a magazine (right, it’s online only but still a very different genre from blogging) and overall I think it was the great exercise. I learned JavaFX basics while working on it, and built JavaFX version of the bubblemark consequently.

I wrote on language barrier few times but today’s post is different.

I’m happy to announce that now we have a part of what could be the solution to this very big and very sophisticated problem. We have been working together with Brian McConnell on it for the last 4 months and today you can see the result. The system we built is up and running at www.worldwidelexicon.org.

Here is what you can do.

First go to downloads page and install Firelex — the Firefox plug-in, which enables human translations in your browser. It’s alpha but it’s pretty cool already. Normally you wouldn’t notice it.

The plug-in displays a tiny WWL icon in your status bar. That’s all. Until you hit the page, for which WWL has a translation. When you do you’ll see a list of languages available and can open the translation in the new tab with one click.

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Last December I wrote a post where shared some of mysterious New Year greetings cards I received. One of them was from FortRoss (which I lamely mixed up with RUSSOFT). But that’s not the point. Here is what I wrote then:

This one is from FortRoss — the Russian Software Developers association. The footprints leading through the FortRoss logo to the frozen forest and the title “See you next year”… Hmm, what did they mean? I assume this is the allegory to the well known Ivan Susanin story.

Now the fun part. We have been looking for a friendly company to share our gigantic office space for some time and finally found the one. This week FortRoss is moving in to our offices.

Welcome aboard guys, now I know what you meant in that e-card!

Mac user interface looks fantastic.

Even if you’re not Mac addict, you’d agree, that it has something beyond the look — it feels good too. How did Apple do it? Can you do the same with your application?

These concepts will help you to accomplish that.

1. Continuity

Mac OS X plays the continuity game nicely in its windows manager and it makes a huge difference to user experience. In the real world, things don’t appear from nowhere. They don’t vanish suddenly either. Alice felt uncomfortable, when Cheshire Cat was suddenly appearing and disappearing, so do the users.

Continuity could be very hard to implement but it worth the effort. Ideally the screen should transform between different states seamlessly yet fast. iPhone user interface is a great example of how much you can do despite the lack of computational power. You have the power of a desktop, WPF, Silverlight, Flex and JavaFX — sure you can do better!
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