Report from CHI 2007
I was part of a session at CHI 2007 on Thursday titled “User Interface Description Languages: XUL & XAML.” The session covered some of the benefits of declarative UIs, especially with respect to the designer/developer iterative process. Scott Stanfield and myself demonstrated building UIs in XAML and XUL, respectively. We tried to show how easy it was to create and modify UI prototypes. Also, how the prototype markup could be used by developers to create the production UI, even while designers tweaked pieces along the way.
I was a little nervous coding up a prototype UI in front of the filled room, but everyone did a great job of helping me with my spelling errors and missing end tags. Someone referred to it as “pair programming on a massive scale.” It was fun and I’d be glad to do it again.
Thanks to Scooter Morris for putting it together. Here’s a link to my slideshow and prototype XUL UI (requires Firefox 3 alpha or XULRunner 1.9 alpha for the new timepicker and slider controls).
Paul said,
May 5, 2007 @ 10:26 am
I’m used to do a such experience during my own conference. We have a little app that let us write “live” XUL code:
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/161/377436835_df5641e91f.jpg?v=0
(a little browser in 17 lines)
It’s a dangerous experience but really impressive
Ryan Stewart said,
May 9, 2007 @ 1:24 pm
Hey Mark, was there a recording of the session at all? Did you guys cover other XML technologies like MXML or LZX? Sounds very cool.
Alex Faaborg - » CHI 2007 said,
May 10, 2007 @ 3:17 am
[...] Mark Finkle presented in this session. Mark has a post about the session up on his blog which includes his slides and the prototype XUL interface he coded live during the [...]
Leslie W. said,
May 11, 2007 @ 11:31 pm
Hey Mark,
Missed your session of CHI, but looks like it went well.
~L