Colin's Notes for the May 7, 2008 Monthly Teleconference

Fluid Infusion 0.3 Release Status

• We released a beta of Infusion 0.3 in time for the JA-SIG conference last week. Thanks to the whole team for their hard work in getting this preview out the door in such a polished form.
• We're holding the final release until the end of May in order to complete two main tasks:
  1. Based on the advice of Gary Thompson and the design team, we're implementing the Layout Preview style of drag and drop for the Layout Reorderer.
  2. We're polishing the Upload component by adding:
  • More robust support for multiple instances
  • ARIA and keyboard accessibility
  • Improvements from recent user testing and design review
• Infusion 0.3 is going to be a really solid release, with components that can be easily used in all major browsers, in a variety of contexts, and with many applications. We've had a lot of interest from the Sakai, uPortal, OpenCollection, Kuali Student, and Fedora teams in using the components found in 0.3.
• This delay will affect our future release schedule a bit, so we're expecting Infusion 0.4 to focus on some of the components we've already got in progress; likely the Pager, List Builder, and Inline Edit components.

JA-SIG Conference

• This was the best JA-SIG conference I've been to yet; lots of excitement about the uPortal 3 release and enthusiasm for integrating Fluid components into the next uPortal release and in several portlets. Fluid was a real hit at the conference.
• The Fearless JavaScript workshop was really well attended and a real success; Eli and I will be presenting a similar workshop at the Sakai Paris conference, and intend to produce comprehensive workshop notes and eventually a podcast.
• It was great to see so many people out for our uCamp, especially so many of the Kuali Student team.
• I enjoyed the opportunity to meet with and do some pair programming with the team at Cambridge on their MySakai widgets. We're looking forward to a fruitful collaboration on component development, widget accessibility, and more.

Open Source Design Patterns Library

• We've got a preview release of our community patterns library available at http://uipatterns.org. Please check it out and let us know what you think.
• Thanks to Allison, Jonathan, Kathy, Justin and the team for their really hard work in getting this out so quickly! Allison really pulled this preview release out of her hat, and it was a real hit at the conference.

Sakai UX Initiative

• Nathan's designs are coming together nicely, and we're hoping to lend a hand with the implementation work. Jess and I will meet soon to talk about how Fluid can best offer our assistance, but at the moment it looks like we'll help to identify and build some Fluid components within Nathan's designs. We'll also help with UX Walkthroughs (both usability and accessibility) of the larger context of these designs.

Open Collection Community Workshop #2

• The second OpenCollection community workshop in NYC will have a strong emphasis on user experience issues.
• Thanks to Erin and Angela for putting together an excellent agenda. With such a large group of archivists and museum collection managers in attendance, we're using this workshops as an opportunity to learn as much as we can about the needs of our users.
• Topics will include accessibility, heuristic evaluations, user interface idioms, work environments, and community source models. Check out the agenda for more details.
• This is a great opportunity to apply Fluid's "talking to users" approach to user research in a more community-oriented environment.