TehNrd

I finally got around to submitting a paper for Dreamforce 2010. The title…..wait for it……wait…..”Take Your Visualforce Pages to the Next Level with jQuery & jQuery UI”.

Visualforce is great for building solid and scalable web apps. Where it falls short is enhanced web 2.0 (I actually cringe at this term) usability. It lays a solid foundation but lacks slick UI features that users of today’s web expect and will soon demand. jQuery and jQuery UI make it incredibly easy to add enhanced functionality. In this presentation I will show best practices, pitfalls to watch out for, and of course show off some slick apps that use jQuery. What this won’t be is an advanced deep dive on jQuery. This presentation will show anyone who has a little web and Visualforce experience how to apply jQuery to projects they are working on as soon as they get back to work.

Salesforce has seriously pushed Flex the last few years but I guarantee you that 90% of the time I can build the exact same functionality in less lines of code with jQuery. It’s time to show some diversity at Dreamforce. Simply look at this trend for google searches.

jQuery is the most popular javascript library out there today and it even beats Adobe Flex in terms of people looking for more information. If Flex gets a dedicated session at Dreamforce so should jQuery!

If you are a regular reader of this blog you know I’ve got a quirky style with a touch of humor thrown in there. I’ll be sure to carry this over to my presentation unless salesforce makes me be all serious and professional, BORING.

If you like this idea please hit the link below and cast your vote.

Take Your Visualforce Pages to the Next Level with jQuery & jQuery UI

It is the slickness. I hope to have more info on what this is all about in an upcoming post but couldn’t resist posting this little teaser.

Popups suck. Everyone hates them, but it wasn’t always like this. There once once a time long long ago when popup actually displayed relevant information related to the site you were browsing. This was in a time before tabbed browsing and advertising behemoths. Then came advertising on the web and popups galore. Here begins the downfall of the popup. It wasn’t long before popups became incredibly annoying and web users closed them without a glance. Popups were used, abused, and are now the scum of the internet user experience.

So why this brief, and quite frankly masterfully written story on the history of popups? The help link you can add to Visualforce pages is a popup. There are a few reasons I don’t like this. One, it is a popup, and people hate popups. Two, you also have to manage an entirely separate page for what could be a very simple help dialog. And 3, it just doesn’t provide a good user experience. It feels so 1999. Read more…

Here is a little jig i like to call the “Salesforce Seizure”.

Seriously, if you have photosensitive epilepsy I wouldn’t watch this.

Looks like it only happens in Firefox, possibly related to this and this.