Filed under: Architectures

Interface Inheritance

This friend of mine, pings me and asks my something about UML diagrams. Well, i answer his doubts and then i ask him what he was designing. That is when he tells me something i never thought of. What he told me, gave me a new insight to OOP and the fact that more the options you give to our friendly users for whom we are trying to build such brilliant technology, the more they will get confused by trying out and seriously using a gamut of all possible permutations of those options. In this case, the user is us, i.e Developers, Coders the whole class. Speaking of which, my friend told me about the most unique design pattern ever. He told me about a hierarchy of interfaces. "WHOOHA!!! Hold on!", i told my self,

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Name and Address

As a south indian, with my surname coming before my own name, unconventionally, i have always had all the issues in the world trying to fill forms right from my child hood days. My name would figure in ten different manners at ten different places. And quite frankly it is a matter of great importance to any sapient being, his identity i mean. Another such issue is that of ones address. Now, even here i have had a lot of explaining to do every time i had to change SIM cards for Mobile phones, or while getting official documents processed. So, i thought with the on set of the new age information technology, and everything having an eVersion, forms (especially) official ones will not be far behind and they might just resolve some of these issues. But, as luck (or poor efforts) would have it, it has not. Every now and again i still hear people complaining about the issue of mismatched or wrong addresses especially because there is a great diversity in the manner how a Human Being identifies himself. Now, let me clarify, while the instruments of identity are virtually the same across the globe, i.e his Name and the Place where he lives. The issue comes in the manner in which these two entities are conveyed. The diversity comes here. And this is where i feel that as responsible software developers we must ensure that the customer must be given the freedom and flexibility to express and represent his name and address the way he deems fit, not us. And do not tell me that it is not possible.

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Elements of Interface Design 2

The prequel of this post was termed Elements of Design. It was really a feeble attempt at trying to explore the various factors of Usability in any User Interface.  I am going to continue in those lines. I am going to talk about the relation between the back-end or the service layer of any system and the system's final User Interface. In particular i am going to explore the the interdependencies between the two.

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