BenCrowder.net

Sorry for not posting in a while. I'll post again later today with more details, but rest assured that work has not halted. :) I'm still in the design stage, but this week I plan to finalize the first designs and start running them by people for usability ...

I've been reading Designing from Both Sides of the Screen, which is really good. I'm leaving for Mexico tomorrow morning and won't have Internet access, but by the time I get back I expect to have first drafts of the task flow diagrams and hopefully much of the UI ...

The PAF guys up at the Family History Department in Salt Lake are sending me the paperwork necessary to get the sample source code for working with the PAF database (file format). Hopefully it'll include specs for the older versions; if not, I'll lobby for them until I get ...

I checked out several books on usability from the library, including Joel Spolsky's User Interface Design for Programmers, which I read last night, and Designing from Both Sides of the Screen (Ellen Isaacs and Alan Walendowski), which I'm reading right now. Good stuff. My primary goal for Beyond, ...

I'm reading stuff on user interface design. Anti-Mac is quite interesting... Wow, this is a short post. :)

Spent some time exploring PAF today, to see all the features it has. There are more than I realized. :) But I did come across some design shortcomings that I as a user found frustrating: 1. Navigating through my tree was bothersome. It was clunky, basically, and didn't ...

This coming week I'll be doing more research for the program, in the following general areas: 1. Usability. The goal is to make Beyond as user-friendly as possible. So, what goes into making an application user-friendly? How can I ensure that users' needs are met? Part will ...

Finished the new banner today. I'm satisfied enough with it that I can start coding. :) (I'm the sort of person who has to have a beautiful banner under which to code, otherwise it just doesn't go as well.) I'm also corresponding with the Family History Department of the ...

This blog is about the development of Beyond, a genealogy program for the Mac. More to come in the very near future...