I’ve already blogged about ZeroKode, the drag-and-drop visual GUI design tool for ZK. Well, version 0.8 has been released. It’s a little slicker, more responsive, but it still has the same issue of requiring a knowledge of the ZK component heirarchy. A lack of popups over the components is also an issue, since the icons are not exactly self explanatory.
This brings up an issue with these new web-based RIA’s. I say “new” because they are not new to the desktop, but new to the developers of web applications. These are concept such as the “explorable interface,” where the cost in time and effort of trying out things is minimal. ZeroKode fails in this regard in several ways. For one, finding out that a component doesn’t belong as a child in the component heirarchy by trying to drag it onto that heirarchy and having to deal with a timeconsuming popup. Further, the properties form for each component is accessed through another popup — another time waster.
This is also a reason why an “undo,” probably linked up to the back button, is so important in RIA webapps; without an undo, the cost of exploring is high. As anyone who has played chess knows, humans are very good at searching forward, but lousy at backtracking. That’s why so few of us are Grandmasters.
