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  • Gamification at OOW

    - by erikanollwebb
    Last week was Oracle OpenWorld, and for those of you not in tech or downtown San Francisco, that might not mean a whole lot.  However, if you are familiar with it, Oracle OpenWorld is our premier customer event.  This year, more than 50,000 people attended.  It's not a good week to visit San Francisco on vacation because Oracle customers take over all the hotels in town!  It was crazy, but a lot of fun and it's a great opportunity for the Apps UX group to do customer research with a range of customers.  This year, more than 100+ customers and partners took the time to team up with our UX experts and provide feedback on new designs and ideas. Over three days,  UX teams conducted 8  one-on-one user feedback sessions, 4 focus groups and 7 surveys. In addition, we conducted a voice capture activity and were able to collect close to 70 speech samples at the lab and DEMOgrounds. This was a great opportunity for us to do some testing on some specific gamification concepts with a set of business analysts.  We pulled in 8 folks for a focus group on gamification concepts and whether they thought those would work for their teams. To get ready for this, my designer extraordinaire, Andrea Cantú, flew into town and we spent almost a week locked in a room together brainstorming design ideas.  We killed a few trees trying to get all of our concepts and other examples together in the process, but in the end, we put together a whole series of examples of how you might gamify an Oracle app (in this case, CRM).  Andrea is a genius for this kind of thing and the comps she created looked great.  Here's a picture of her hard at work!  We also had the good fortune to have my boss, Laurie Pattison and my usability contractor, Shobana Subramanian there to note take and observe as well.  Here's a few shots of us, hard at work preparing for the day (or checking out something on Laurie's iPhone...) To start things off, we gave an overview of gamification and I talked about what it's used for.  Then we gave the participants a scenario about our sales person and what we were trying to get her to do. It was a great opportunity to highlight what our business goals might be and why we might want to add game mechanics.  It was also a good way to get them thinking about how that might work for them in their environments and workplaces. There were some surprises for the day.  We asked how many of them were already familiar with the concept of gamification--only two people had heard of it and only one was using game mechanics in his work.  That's in contrast to a survey we just ran internally with folks in a dev org where almost 50% of about 450 respondents had heard of gamification.  As we discussed the ways game mechanics could be used, it became clear that many of the folks had seen some game mechanics in action but didn't know that's what they were.  We also noticed that the folks in this group felt that if they were trying to sell the concept in their orgs, they wouldn't call it gamification.  That's not a huge surprise to me--they said what we've heard in the past, that gamification does not seem like a serious term for enterprise software.  They said they'd sell it with the goals--as a means to increase behaviors by rewarding users for activities.  It's a funny problem.  The word puts some folks off, but at the same time, I haven't seen another one word description that quite captures the range of things that "gamification" can cover.  My guess is that the more mainstream the term becomes, the more desensitized we'll become to the idea the it's trivializing enterprise software in some way.  Still, it was interesting to note that this group still felt that they would not take this concept to their bosses or teams and call it "gamification".  They focused on the goals, and how we could incentivize desired behaviors with game mechanics.  As I have already stated in other posts, I feel like my org is more receptive to discussing how this is just a more transparent type of usability and user experience methods than talking about gamification.  That's the argument they said they would use. All in all, it was a good session.  I love getting to talk to customers, present ideas and concepts, and get their feedback and input.  It's the type of thing that really helps drive our designs and keeps us grounded in what our customers need/want.  We're already planning where to get more feedback opportunities in the coming months. 

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  • How to Build Your Own Siri App In a Browser

    - by ultan o'broin
    This post from Applications User Experience team co-worker Mark Vilrokx (@mvilrokx) about building your own Siri-style voice app in a browser using Rails, Chrome, and WolframAlpha is so just good you've now got it thrice! I love these kind of How To posts. They not only show off innovation but inspire others to try it out too. Love the sharing of the code snippets too. Hat tip to Jake at the AppsLab (and now on board with the Applications UX team too) for picking up the original All Things Rails blog post. Oracle Voice & Nuance demo on the Oracle Applications User Experience Usable Apps YouTube Channel Mark recently presented on Oracle Voice at the Oracle Usability Advisory Board on Oracle Voice and Oracle Fusion Applications and opened customers and partners eyes to how this technology can work for their users in the workplace and what's coming down the line! Great job, Mark.

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  • What should I use Ubuntu for? [closed]

    - by Sean francis Ballais
    I need some of your precious advice co-Ubuntu users. I have been a full Ubuntu user for a few months now and our old 2005 model PC just broke down and so my parents gave me a new PC (notebook). I have installed Windows 7 Ultimate for some reason. Now, my problem is that, since I am a amateur graphic designer, website developer, software developer and other professions a normal teenager won't try and I am using Adobe Creative Suite CS6 Master Collection for my multimedia creation and web development needs, what could I use Ubuntu Linux for? Software development? Website Usability Testing? Other Multimedia stuff? Etc.? Need real help because my mind is getting confused in what should I use Ubuntu for... Any help will be welcomed with appreciation. :D P.S. Don't suggest to me any games because I'm no gamer.

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  • Should Site Title be Before or After Page Title?

    - by NickAldwin
    Apologies if this is a dupe. I tried searching, but didn't find anything specifically addressing this concern. When creating a large(ish) site, page titles usually reference both the site name and the current page name. However, it seems there are two main conventions: Bob's Awesome Site - Contact Page and Contact Page - Bob's Awesome Site I've looked around, and pages usually use one of the two variants above. Is there any reason to use one over the other? SEO/readability/usability/etc? I've thought about it, and have only come up with: Page first - Differentiates the tab when the browser is crowded with lots of tabs Site first - Immediately see the "parent" site, so to speak; more cohesive experience

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  • On Reflector Pricing

    - by Nick Harrison
    I have heard a lot of outrage over Red Gate's decision to charge for Reflector. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a fan of Red Gate. I have worked with them on several usability tests. They also sponsor Simple Talk where I publish articles. They are a good company. I am also a BIG fan of Reflector. I have used it since Lutz originally released it. I have written my own add-ins. I have written code to host reflector and use its object model in my own code. Reflector is a beautiful tool. The care that Lutz took to incorporate extensibility is amazing. I have never had difficulty convincing my fellow developers that it is a wonderful tool. Almost always, once anyone sees it in action, it becomes their favorite tool. This wide spread adoption and usability has made it an icon and pivotal pillar in the DotNet community. Even folks with the attitude that if it did not come out of Redmond then it must not be any good, still love it. It is ironic to hear everyone clamoring for it to be released as open source. Reflector was never open source, it was free, but you never were able to peruse the source code and contribute your own changes. You could not even use Reflector to view the source code. From the very beginning, it was never anyone's intention for just anyone to examine the source code and make their own contributions aside from the add-in model. Lutz chose to hand over the reins to Red Gate because he believed that they would be able to build on his original vision and keep the product viable and effective. He did not choose to make it open source, hoping that the community would be up to the challenge. The simplicity and elegance may well have been lost with the "design by committee" nature of open source. Despite being a wonderful and beloved tool, Reflector cannot be an easy tool to maintain. Maybe because it is so wonderful and beloved, it is even more difficult to maintain. At any rate, we have high expectations. Reflector must continue to be able to reasonably disassemble every language construct that the framework and core languages dream up. We want it to be fast, and we also want it to continue to be simple to use. No small order. Red Gate tried to keep the core product free. Sadly there was not enough interest in the Pro version to subsidize the rest of the expenses. $35 is a reasonable cost, more than reasonable. I have read the blog posts and forum posts complaining about the time associated with getting the expense approved. I have heard people complain about the cost being unreasonable if you are a developer from certain countries. Let's do the math. How much of a productivity boost is Reflector? How many hours do you think it saves you in a typical project? The next question is a little easier if you are a contractor or a consultant, but what is your hourly rate? If you are not a contractor, you can probably figure out an hourly rate. How long does it take to get a return on your investment? The value added proposition is not a difficult one to make. I have read people clamoring that Red Gate sucks and is evil. They complain about broken promises and conflicts of interest. Relax! Red Gate is not evil. The world is not coming to an end. The sun will come up tomorrow. I am sure that Red Gate will come up with options for volume licensing or site licensing for companies that want to get a licensed copy for their entire team. Don't panic, and I am sure that many great improvements are on the horizon. Switching the UI to WPF and including a tabbed interface opens up lots of possibilities.

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  • Easiest, most fun way to program 2D games? Flash? XNA? Some other engine?

    - by Maxi
    Hi, this is a post detailing my search for the most enjoyable way for a hobbyist game programmer to sweeten his free time with making a game. My requirements: I looked at Flash first, I made a couple of small games but I'm doubtful of the performance. I would like to make a fairly large strategy game, with several hundred units fighting simultaneously, explosions and animations included. Also zoomable maps. I saw that Adobe has a new 3D API for Flash, but I don't know if that improves 2D performance aswell, I couldn't find anything related to that question on their MAX10 sessions. Would you say that Flash is a good technology for making large 2D games easily? I really like Actionscript, and I love how easy everything is in Flash. There are several engines available which make it even easier. I just do this for fun, and it would be even better if there were proper animation/particle editors available and if the engine I were to use, would be available for multiple platforms. (so more people can play my game once finished). I'd like to have it available on many mobile platforms aswell. (because I love touch input for some reason) I do know the XNA framework pretty well, but there are no good engines available for it, and it will only run on Windows, which is a huge turn off. Even bigger is, that you need to install the XNA redistributable each time you want to give the game to someone. If I use XNA, I would have to make all the tools myself, and I'd probably have to make them with WPF. (I'd love to make tools with Adobe AIR, but unfortunately the API's for image manipulation etc. are far worse in Flash, than they are in XNA/WPF.) Now, I'm aware that I could make my own engine that supports each of those platforms, but quite frankly, that would be too much work plowing through APIs. After all, I want to make a game, not an engine. So the question becomes: Is there maybe a cross platform (free or free to develop?) engine available that I could use for 2D development? I prefer: C#, Actionscript. I don't mind using c++ if the toolset is above average, but I highly doubt that there is something out there like that. Please prove me wrong :) So summary: I'd like to use Flash, but I don't know if it scales well enough. I'm not a scripter, I want some real APIs that I can work with inside a proper IDE. Just for information, I looked at several alternatives, I'm actually looking for a long time already. You'd help me a lot to make a decision finally. Feature-wise the Flatredball engine would be ideal. But I tried their tools, and quite frankly, they are horrible. Absolutely unusable, I'd need to make my own for sure. I didn't look at their API, but if their tools are so bad, I'm not inclined to look further. Unity3D. This one is quite nice, but I really don't need 3D, and it is quite ...a lot of work to learn. I also don't like that it is so expensive to use for different platforms and that I can only code for it through scripting. You have to buy each platform separately. The editor usability is average, the product overall is good enough for most purposes, but learning it myself would be overkill. Shiva 3D. It looks good enough, but again: I don't really need 3D. The editor usability is a little worse than Unity3D in my opinion and it wasn't clear to me how to start programming. I think it requires C++ for coding, so that's a negative too. I want to have fun, and c# is fun ;) SDL. Quite frankly, I'd still need to port to all those different SDL implementations. And I don't like OpenGL style programming, it's just plain ugly. And it needs c++, I know that there might be some wrappers available, but I don't like to use wrappers, because... Irrlicht. A lot of features, but support seems to be low and it is aimed at enthusiasts. C# bindings get dropped repeatedly. I'm not an engine enthusiast, I just want to make a game. I don't see this happening with Irrlicht. Ogre3D. Way too much work, it's just a graphics engine. Also no multiple platform support and c++. Torque2D. Costs something to use, and I didn't hear a lot of good things about support and documentation. Also costs extra for each platform.

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  • Nucleus Research: Oracle Fusion CRM is a CRM Leader

    - by Richard Lefebvre
    Nucleus Research published their updated CRM Technology Value Matrix – Second Half 2012.  The Value Matrix evaluates CRM vendors on functionality and usability which they consider the core indicators in an application’s ability to deliver initial ROI and value over time.  Oracle Fusion CRM is in the “Leader” quadrant.  CRM On Demand enters the “Leader” quadrant with the release of version 20 delivering continued investment in Oracle CRM On Demand.   Oracle Siebel CRM is in the “Expert” quadrant.  RightNow continues to be placed in the “Facilitator” quadrant.  The full report is available in the CRM section of the Industry Analyst Reports page on Oracle.com  -  Industry Analyst Relations Web site.

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  • How would you design an application with many target platforms and devices?

    - by Pierre 303
    I'm in a very beginning of the design phase of an application that will have to run in the following platforms/devices: Desktop: Windows, Linux & Mac Mobile: Android, iPhone/iPad & Windows Phone 7 Web: Silverlight I will use C# on Mono and I want to maximize code re-usability. Except for the desktop (I'll use WinForms/GTK#), my concern is related to many different GUI that I will face. What would be your approach? Obviously, the views will be different, but what about the controllers, data access, utility classes, etc. Is it really acceptable to share everything but the views?

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  • Does anyone know of any work being done on EEE transformer?

    - by Matthew
    I recently got a (few) nexus 7's to install and enjoy ubuntu on. Which is great and all, but from what I've read online and the issues I have experienced myself the Nexus 7 has way to many serious defects. Such as: Audio jack not working Screen lifting Screen ghosting out (The very first one) Instant drop in battery life (happened to one of mine) Internal memory malfunctions (The latest issue I've had, the internal memory went completely bad) If you need to read other horror stories you can simply check out XDA developers forum, lots of people are having issues. I'd really like to enjoy ubuntu on a different device, I think the Transformer prime would make way more sense (usability and stability wise). Have there been any hacks/mods to get it running on this device?

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  • My Oracle Support 6.3 - Knowledge Highlights

    - by JanSyss
    My Oracle Support 6.3 was released over the weekend (13-Oct-2012), and with that we released 30+ enhancements and 60+ bug fixes. Most important changes Search Suggestions are auto-correcting spelling errors, more suggestions for 'how to' type questions, enhanced usability to see the suggested additional terms. Improved Knowledge Base region on the My Oracle Support dashboard: recent searches from this region now retain the search attributions (e.g. pre-selected products or release). Search Tip: if the Knowledge Base region doesn't show up as the first region in the right column on the My Oracle Support dashboard, consider personalizing your dashboard to put it first, so that you right there for searching. Specifying the product you are researching an issue for, with optionally version and task as well, makes searches in the majority of the cases more precise. for more information, see my comments in my previous blog on the topic: https://blogs.oracle.com/supportportal/entry/mos_6_2_release Better support for searches on ORA-600 & ORA-700: no longer a difference in results between searching on 'ORA-600 [Arg1]' and 'Ora-00600: Internal Error Code, Arguments: [Arg1]'.

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  • Harmful temptations in programming

    - by gaearon
    Just curious, what kinds of temptations in programming turned out to be really harmful in your projects? Like when you really feel the urge to do something and you believe it's going to benefit the project or else you just trick yourself into believing it is, and after a week you realize you haven't solved any real problems but instead created new ones or, in the best case, pleased your inner beast with no visible impact. Personally, I find it very hard to not refactor bad code. I work with a lot of bad legacy code, and it takes some deep breaths to not touch it when I have no tests to prove my refactoring doesn't not break anything. Another demon for me in user interface, I can literally spend hours changing UI layout just because I enjoy doing it. Sometimes I tell myself I'm working on usability, but the truth is just I love moving buttons around. What are your programming demons, and how do you avoid them?

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  • Case convention- Why the variation between languages?

    - by Jason
    Coming from a Java background, I'm very used to camelCase. When writing C, using the underscore wasn't a big adjustment, since it was only used sparingly when writing simple Unix apps. In the meantime, I stuck with camelCase as my style, as did most of the class. However, now that I'm teaching myself C# in preparation for my upcoming Usability Design class in the fall, the PascalCase convention of the language is really tripping me up and I'm having to rely on intellisense a great deal in order to make sure the correct API method is being used. To be honest, switching to the PascalCase layout hasn't quite sunk in the muscle memory just yet, and that is frustrating from my point of view. Since C# and Java are considered to be brother languages, as both are descended from C++, why the variation in the language conventions? Was it a personal decision by the creators based on their comfort level, or was it just to play mindgames with new introductees to the language?

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  • OpenJDK In The News: Oracle Outlines Roadmap for Java SE and JavaFX at JavaOne 2012

    - by $utils.escapeXML($entry.author)
    The OpenJDK Community continues to host the development of the reference implementation of Java SE 8. Weekly developer preview builds of JDK 8 continue to be available from jdk8.java.net.OpenJDK continues to thrive with contributions from Oracle, as well as other companies, researchers and individuals.The OpenJDK Web Site Terms of Use was recently updated to allow work on Java Specification Requests (JSRs) for Java SE to take place in the OpenJDK Community, alongside their corresponding reference implementations, so that specification leads can satisfy the new transparency requirements of the Java Community Process (JCP 2.8).“The recent decision by the Java SE 8 Expert Group to defer modularity to Java SE 9 will allow us to focus on the highly-anticipated Project Lambda, the Nashorn JavaScript engine, the new Date/Time API, and Type Annotations, along with numerous other performance, simplification, and usability enhancements,” said Georges Saab, vice president, Software Development, Java Platform Group at Oracle. “We are continuing to increase our communication and transparency by developing the reference implementation and the Oracle-led JSRs in the OpenJDK community.”Quotes taken from the 14th press release from Oracle mentioning OpenJDK, titled "Oracle Outlines Roadmap for Java SE and JavaFX at JavaOne 2012".

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  • Oracle Launches Mobile User Experiences Design Patterns

    - by asantaga
    Mobile design requires a different way of thinking. Use Oracle’s mobile design patterns to design iPhone, Android, or browser-based smartphone applications.  We are sharing our mobile design patterns and their baked-in, scientifically proven usability to enable Oracle customers and partners to build mobile apps quickly. Our design patterns are common solutions that developers can easily apply across all application suite products. Crafted by our insight into Oracle Fusion Middleware, the patterns are designed to work with the mobile technology provided by the Oracle Application Development Framework.  Normal 0 false false false false EN-US JA X-NONE

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  • ASP.NET Tooltips Extender Control

    Tooltips is always a good usability practice to display descripitve and meaningful message on UI, which provide guidance and extra information to users visually. However, I cannot find this kind of handy "control" in the latest version (40412) of the AJAX control toolkit. (Feature request?) The traditional HTML "title" or "tooltips" tag of control cannot make the users (nor even developers) happy, so I searched and found this Tooltip Extender control today. It is nice and handy for...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Now you can design ADF applications that look like Fusion Apps

    - by Grant Ronald
    One possible failure point in ADF applications (and I’ve seen happen) is getting Web designers to build the UI without any knowledge of what ADF does.  The resulting design may look pretty but might be virtually impossible to implement using ADF. To help address this Oracle have released a set of Visio templates which help guide you in “Fusion”/ADF look and feel.  I’ve been lucky enough to have some of our usability teams mock up these templates for some ADF projects I’ve been working on and they are a great help in conceptualising the final applications. You can find out more about these Visio ADF templates here.

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  • Translating Fusion Apps Customizations: Composers mean Usable Apps in Any Language

    - by ultan o'broin
    Quick shoutout for the Fusion Applications (Cloud Applications to you) Developer Relations blog post about translating Fusion apps customizations using composers and other tools and utilities provided by Oracle. Great to see Fusion help customizations included in the post, as well as software, and it also includes a nice heads up on what's coming to enable customers to make changes to text themselves in Release 8 of Oracle's Cloud Applications. I am proud to say that I logged the enhancements for what's coming in Release 8  to come to life and also wrote a spec for its requirements based on the customer research done internationally through the Oracle Usability Advisory Board). Remember,  copywriting is design and translated versions means reflecting local UX requirements too! Nice post guys!

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  • Is it practical to have perfect validation score on HTML?

    - by Truth
    I was in a heated discussion the other day, about whether or not it's practical to have a perfect validation score on any HTML document. By practical I mean: Does not take a ridiculous amount of time compared to it's almost-perfect counterpart. Can be made to look good on older browsers and to be usable on very old browsers. Justifies the effort it may take to do so (does it come with some kind of reward on SEO/Usability/Accessibility that cannot be achieved in a simpler way with almost-perfect validation) So basically, is perfect validation score practical on any HTML document?

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  • What program do you use to write technical documentation?

    - by Tatu Ulmanen
    I'm writing an architecture/technical documentation for an inhouse project and I'm becoming more and more frustrated with Microsoft Word as I seem to use most of my time getting things to align correctly. Word has horrible usability issues but I didn't come here to rant, rather I'd like to know whether there exists something more suitable for the job. The point of this documentation is to provide a "big picture" of the system, and as such I'm not generating documentation from source code but rather writing it all by hand. Are there any alternatives to Microsoft Word for writing properly formatted technical documentation with less frustration?

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  • How do you verify that your prototype/application meets the requirements?

    - by Roflcoptr
    Recently I wrote an small prototype that uses some relatively new technology. Now I wanted to verify if this prototype is usefull and could be used in real world example. But now I have a problem, how can I do that? Normally, it would be a good thing to compare the prototype with already existing similar applications and compare if you perform better, provide better usability, etc. Since I'm not aware of something similar, this is quite difficult Normally, I would see if the requirements of the customers are met. But there aren't any real requirements and no real customers. It as just an idea. So the problem is, how can I get feedback on my prototype to see how it is accepted by potential users and what should be improved in a real implementation?

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  • Must all new features go through betatest?

    - by LTR
    Obviously, small usability fixes and bugfixes go directly into the stable product. What about small new features? Can you afford to just release them after internal testing, or do they have to be betatested by customers first? Situation: This is a young commercial project, produced by a one-person company. It has an existing userbase and is at it's second major version. Previous betatests have produced some results, however most feedback came from the stable product and not from beta versions.

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  • Looking for Java Developers Using Mac

    - by Shay Shmeltzer
    The Oracle's Middleware User Experience team is currently looking for Java developers on Mac OS . If Mac OS is your primary development platform, we would like to invite you to participate in a customer usability feedback session allowing us to learn more about your experiences developing Java software on Mac OS. Sessions are typically 1.5 hours and would be conducted in your office via web conferencing. If interested, please send an email to this email address with the following information: Name: Job Title / Role: Daytime Phone: Provide a brief description of the programs you create in Java: Is MacOS your primary development platform? What is your primary development environment, tool, or IDE? What version(s) of the JDK do you currently use?

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  • How to smartly optimize ads on website

    - by YardenST
    I've a content website that presents ads. Now, my team want to optimize it for a better experience for the users. (we really believe our ads are good for our users.) We are sure that every website deals with this issue and there must be some known ways and methods to deal with it, that smart people thought of before. so what i'm looking is a tested, working method to optimize ads. for example: if i was asking about optimizing my website in Google, I would expect you to answer me: learn SEO if i was asking about optimizing the use of my website: usability testing. navigation: information architecture what is the field that deals with optimizing ads?

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  • Can I use metro style interface in my own web application?

    - by LukeP
    I am wondering if I would need to license the Metro style or if I can just freely use it in my own applications. I mean, is it patented or protected in any way that would prevent me from building my own implementation? I effectively would like to copy the visible part of it. I like to idea of being able to: Provide an interface which is used somewhere else (as in 1 less to learn) Use the interface that has been tested for usability (I personally like it) Have the possibility of getting free publicity because of implementing full Metro style web application while not associated with Microsoft, etc.

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  • Is there any Ubuntu translation indicator?

    - by Oyibo
    For more precision: I'm runnning Ubuntu 12.04 I'd like an indicator which shows up to the left of the date/volume/wifi icons If possible I'd like to be able to change the translation language The indicator could use internet based translators (google translate etc.) or have a complete library come with it so translations can be obtained offline. Relating to usability: I'd like to have it work in a way where you click on the indicator icon and you can start typing either directly or once a window has opened and it instantly shows the translation you need (with your target languages pre-set or determined in options).

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