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.
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…
There is a another force.com developer meeting for Seattle coming up this Thursday. If you are in the Seattle area and want to meetup or learn more about developing on the force.com platform please stop by.
Just a friendly reminder that this Thursday, April 1st at 4:00pm will be the our monthly meeting.
The meetings as always will be held in the West Monroe Partners office located at:
1215 4th Ave, Suite 1010
Seattle, WA 98161
This session will be an open forum so bring any questions, problems, and/or issues you have so we can discuss with the group.
If you have something cool you’d like to show off or present let me know and we can arrange for you to speak at one of the upcoming sessions.
To be honest I sort of feel bad about writing this post. I have already reviewed, ranted about, and tweaked the new salesforce.com UI, but here comes my third consecutive post related to this. I promise my next post will be about something super cool and radtaculous you can do with salesforce!
We hoped to enable the new UI in the next few weeks and like any good admin or developer I checked all of our custom Visualforce pages to make sure everything still looked and worked correctly. Everything started out so smooth. Everything was looking good. My basic, and for the most part, static Visualforce pages seem to work fine.
In my last post (you can read it here) I was ranting like an angry hippopotamus about the new salesforce.com UI released with Spring 10 and what I think it should look like. This follow up post will show you how to make the changes I proposed in that post a reality.
Before we work the magic and make the new UI even better I want to expand on some of my thoughts regarding the new UI. Some may say it is “change” and change is hard, you just need to get used to it. Not true. Change should never be hard. Change should be something better. It should be a measurable improvement over the previous version. A perfect example of this was the recent redesign of cnn.com. This was a massive improvement and nearly everyone everyone applauded the changes. Change was easy because it made our user experience better. I don’t hate the new salesforce UI. I don’t even not like it. There is just something about it that doesn’t feel right. I can’t place my finger on it but I think the changes I’ve made below will make a huge improvement. Blah blah blah, enough pointless blabbering, let’s get to the good stuff.
Since the original post I have had some time to get comfortable with the new UI and several of the changes I initially proposed probably aren’t needed. My first stab at changing the UI was also a bit bold, too bold. I took my changes of the UI to the extreme to really emphasize the direction I think the new UI needs to move. In reality the changes needed are much softer. What it came down to in the end was eliminating the massive amount of white space in the record detail section and bringing back the old style page block section separators. So how do we do this? Greasemonkey to the rescue!!!!
The first ingredient of awesomesauce is to install the Greasemonkey plugin for the Firefox browser.You can download that here. Greasemonkey allows you customize websites with fancy pants JavaScript.
The new salesforce.com UI has been rolled out to all instances as of March 6th and the feedback is starting to roll in. Based on the feedback I have heard, direct and indirect, is that there appears to be four groups of people. A few people that love it, a few people that like it, a lot of people that are undecided, and a lot of people that don’t like it. This is probably not the distribution of feedback salesforce was hoping for.
Heads up that if you are a Force.com/Salesforce developer or want to learn more about force.com development in the Seattle area there is a meeting this Thursday, the 4th.
The meetings as always will be held in the West Monroe Partners office located at:
1215 4th Ave, Suite 1010
Seattle, WA 98161
When: Thursday, March 4th, 2010
Start Time: 4:00 PM
This session will be an open forum so bring any questions, problems, and/or issues you have so we can discuss with the group. If we finish early, we can maybe grab a beer at one of the local bars downtown.
If you are interested even a little please stop by.
This story starts some time ago. I have been complaining about the system/debug log in salesforce.com ever since they released what I would consider version 1.1. You can see my post here, Please fix the Debug Log!, pleading for salesforce to fix the debug log. This was back in July of 2008! From what I can tell there has only been two noticeable changes with this debug log. I will refer to them as version 1.1 which was implemented around the time of the message board post above and the the most recent Spring ’10 incarnation which I will refer to as version 2.0.
A while back Jeff Douglas posted on his blog how to embed a Flex slider into a visualforce page. This is pretty slick and can be really useful, but I’m not a really a fan of Flex (I’ll post about that later) so today let’s look at doing the same thing a little different.
Instead of using Flex to build the slider I will show you how to do this with javascript. This requires less code and I feel it is easier to implement.
We are going to add a super nifty ultra slick slider withonly 16 lines of javascript code.
I have always been curious how many lines of Apex code I have written. Is it a couple hundred (haha, ya right), several thousand, a gazillion million trillion? There was never really a good way to figure this out unless you pulled down all of the data and inspected it file by file. Lame.
My posts have been lacking lately but in the next few weeks I plan on creating some super slick demos that mix jQuery and Force.com into a delicious concoction of wonderfulness. Before I do this I’d like to go over the basics of setting up jQuery to play nice with Force.com (or salesforce.com, all the same).
If all we need is jQuery, the first thing we need to do is download it here here: http://jquery.com/.
There will be two versions, one is considered production and the other development. These actually contain the same code but the production file removes all unnecessary spaces.
This smaller version allows the script to be downloaded quicker by users viewing the page and will provide a better user experience to those with less bandwidth. Read more…
I recently saw a tweet that included nothing but a link and a lot of salesforce.com related tags.
Visual Force Blows (link was shortened in original tweet so I couldn’t see title)
What could this be I pondered? A new product announcement? A glowing review of the force.com platform? Upon clicking the link I entered the “I hate Apex and Visualforce Zone” (Dun Dun Dunnnnnnnnnnn). Some dude on a blog (man, everyone has a blog now days) is trying to build a dynamic link menu with data pulled from salesforce objects and using visualforce to display. This seems pretty normal right? Let us check out some excerpts first:
On Apex and Visualforce:
Sounds great in theory, however in reality it makes you want to stab yourself. A lot.
I on the other hand would bathe in it if I could. Oh ya….Visualforce and Apex, sooo bubbly clean. Ya, that was weird. Let’s move on. Read more…
Tomorrow, January 7th, there will be another Force.com Developer Meeting in Seattle (first Thursday of every month). If you develop on the Force.com platform with Apex, Visualforce, use the API, or want to learn more about these topics please feel free to join us.
Date: Thursday, January 7th.
Time: 8:00 – 10:00 AM PST
Location: West Monroe Partners 1215 4th Ave Suite 1010
Seattle, WA 98109
The West Monroe Partners office is located on the 10th floor.
Public Parking garages are located in the building, as well as in a 1-2 block radius. The area is also well serviced by public transportation.
The agenda for this meeting will be as follows:
Presentation/Demo – Jason Venable (tehnrd.com) will be demoing his runner up application he created for the most recent Force.com Cloud Developer Challenge. The site is GameForce and includes two games: Blackjack and multiplayer connect four. (http://tehnrd-developer-edition.na7.force.com/gamehome). It was built with 100% Force.com, no flash or JavaScript. Jason is a Salesforce.com Admin and Developer at F5 focused mainly on process automation for the worldwide sales team.
Open forum – opportunity to discuss any questions/issues you may have about all things Salesforce
If you would like to present an application you have built or share some best practices you have learned with the group, please let me know so we can schedule it into a future meeting.
See you on January 7th!
Yup, thats me! I’ll be showing off the gaming site I built on force.com, http://www.tehnrd.com/gameforce/. I’ll show off the basic UI stuff but we will also peel back the covers to see how it works the magic on the back end.
Take Your Visualforce Pages to the Next Level with jQuery & jQuery UI
