I attended a fun meeting of the Bay Area Laszlo User Group this week. It’s an independent group started by a local developer, but Laszlo lends its tiki conference room and sponsors refreshments.

The group project was a tree control written in LZX, now posted at mylaslzo.com. I’ve always wanted to do pair programming as advocated by the serious XP folks. This was like XP for learning: lots of digressions to explore a new concept, discussion of style as well as practical tips, plenty of refactoring, group debugging, and in the end, some code for everyone to take home and use in their own projects.

Notes are posted on the group’s wiki.

September’s meeting is not yet scheduled, the date and topic will be posted on this page or you can sign up on the yahoo group if you are interested.

I recently spent some time with LZX developing a prototype app. I thought it would be interesting to write up how we approached the problem and show some of the results that are now posted on mylaszlo.com.

The problem:
– create an e-commerce app
– 1 week (4 days days for me)
– 3 people

It was natural to consider developing yet another Pet Store, but we were bored with that concept and perhaps other folks are too. We created a store, but chose to sell three varieties of pots: tea pots, garden pots and cooking pots.

The Pot Store is a work-in-progress. It needs some attention to the design to clarify navigation. The graphical elements are pimitive and it is not a fully functioning store. However, it was a great learning experience and employs some interesting user interface ideas.

* The subtotal updates as you buy, with a small motion to draw the user’s attention. You can see a summary of what’s in your shopping cart with rollover, without losing the context of the catalog view.

* The catalog layout is an example of a continuous user experience. You can get product details without losing context. (I consider it a bug that sometimes teapots fly across the screen. They should all move smoothly out of the way to a nearby spot.)

* Shipping/billing Address in the checkout section conserves real-estate and minimizes screen (and brain) clutter by only showing the fields that you need. (click “ship to a different address” checkbox)

I’ve written up some details on my experience of the development process….

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