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    Wireframes library and templates

  • Haris Khan 6:25 pm on July 16, 2009 Comments

    Our motto for ultimate User Experience is to make every application Simple, Beautiful and Usable. Beautiful part can be achieved by some Photoshop magic and creative instincts. To achieve simplicity and usability one has to have very good overview of the entire application to make sure that the information architecture caters to easy access of information and also has the intuitiveness to make its adoption easier.

    One of the key stages of any good design is its wire-framing stage. This is the stage which really helps you think through the entire application and come up with creative ideas. Recently in one of the Refresh DC’s events I came to know about a library of readily available wireframe templates and libraries named Unify. I encourage you all to explore its videos and try to use it in your design practices.

    Few other resources: I Love Wireframes

    If you know any good resources on wireframes then please do share them in comments section.

Zigron launches its new website

  • Haris Khan 3:29 pm on June 23, 2009 Comments

    Zigron has grown tremendously over the last two years and during this time we have tried our level best to keep our website up-to-date. Keeping the iterative approach in combination with “market driven design” philosophy,we are now launching Zigron’s new website and brand identity.

    Zigron has used its successful approach of “Simple , Beautiful and Usable” methodology to design and develop our new website which will cater to a wider range of our ever growing client base and industry verticals.

    I will truly appreciate your feedback or suggestions for our new site.

     

  • Google’s Data Center Tour Video

  • Haris Khan 11:33 pm on April 7, 2009 Comments

    Enjoy the video of Google’s Data Center tour.

  • Zigron at NVTC’s Emerging Business and Entrepreneur Event

  • Haris Khan 7:21 pm on March 18, 2009 Comments

    photo

    On March 17th 2009 Zigron Inc exhibited its services and products at Norther Virginia Technology Council’s Emerging Business and Entrepreneur Event.

    The Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC) is the membership association for the technology community in Northern Virginia. NVTC has about 1100 member companies representing more than 200,000 employees and Zigron is its memeber.

  • PingMyCompany named as one of the most underrated sites of 2008 by Mashable.com

  • Haris Khan 6:37 am on December 23, 2008 Comments

    Mashable.com recently added Zigron’ s PingMyCompany.com to its list of most underrated websites of 2008.

    You can read the the story and the list here on Mashable.com

  • Clarity by skewing

  • Haris Khan 8:57 am on November 18, 2008 Comments

    Recently I got hold of this website which has applied cartogram on the Presidential Election results. It’s a great way to show relevance, visually.

    Some of the images are as below.

    2008 presidential election results on a population cartogram:

    Electoral college by scaling the sizes of states to be proportional to their number of electoral votes:

    Based on County-level election returns:

  • Save your Eggs…

  • Haris Khan 8:15 am on November 17, 2008 Comments

    Few days back we had arranged a group competition to save the eggs when they are throw from the roof top in a box. Six different teams were made and each team was given around 1.45 hours and a very small budget to make these boxes. Goal was to safe eggs by adopting creative design concepts.

    I am proud to announce that all eggs were saved which shows Zigron team is quite talented . The competition resulted in a tie as all designs were equally creative thus everyone was declared as winner.

    Below is the slide show from the event.

  • Visual design and story telling..

  • Haris Khan 7:19 pm on August 22, 2008 Comments

    This week I had the pleasure to attend An Event Apart design conference. It was a great experience to hear some great presentations and learn new approaches towards design. In next few posts I will try to share all of my experiences.

    Starting off the best presentation of the day one was by Jason Santa Maria who is the Creative Director at Happy Cog studios. It was about “Storytelling by Design”. He had raised a very good point that why the design experience on a Wired in-print magazine is so different then Wired’s web experience. The point was that in-print designers try to set the mood around the content but on the web we lose the esence of story telling and just focus on content. Ironically, I think it should be the other way round as we have more tools and independence on the web. The other issue designers face is that we don’t have the control on the medium. Unlike print where the designer can exactly control the layout web designers are at the mercy of browser type, screen resolution and personal settings.

    A very interesting book site NoOneBelongsHereMoreThanYou.com was shared as a case study for its out of box approach.I agree with Jason that its wonderfully done and it has a very unique approach. The image on the the left is the homepage and you will see that it doesn’t have any traditional elements like About Us or Info rather it has a compelling text which draws you in. Similarly I also liked Jason’s site, which tries to break away from conventional design and take each post as an individual story that’s why you will see different design around each post.

    Great visual design which has a story to tell has been around for many years and its very apparent from the below example of Charles Joseph Minard graphic illustration of Napoleon’s Russian campaign of 1812. If you move from left to right, the design illustrates the size of Napoleon’s army in yellow when he started his march toward Russia and moving from right to left in black you can see the size of his army when he was returning to France. Its amazing to see that how a simple design explains such an dramatic event in history. I think at the end it was just Napoleon and his buddy who reached back.

    Jeffry Zeldman also gave an interesting example of how conflict between design and marketing team can result in a funny situation. RealPlayer wants to be a dominat player in media players but on  Real.com it seems that someone was able to convience the the company to psuh a paid version of realplayer down our throat by making free version very hard to find. Apparently someone wants us to download the paid version only. Nice job!!

    At the end I will also encourage you to viist a design site named Fray.com which has some great visual stories. In my next post I will share some more great snippits on design and in the meanwhile if you know some other great design sites then please share them in comments.

  • Mobile Development Overview..

  • Haris Khan 7:41 am on August 21, 2008 Comments

    Mobile space is the next paradigm of computing where more and more mobile devices are getting the computational power to now host interactive native applications. Offcourse iPhone has taken a giant leap but now other devices are also catching up. Recently we spent sometime to figure out which development environment will be best suited for new generation of mobile applications. In this report we have not covered FlashLite and iPhone.  As a result we produced a technical discovery document to explore different mobile application development environments and how one can go about it. Below is the report and you can also download the pdf version of report.

    This report was created by : Abdul Wadood, Atifa Nadeem, Naima Khan and Haris Khan.

    Overview:

    Mobile application depends heavily on the exact requirements. Our basic assumptions are stated in the section 3. Based on the basic requirement to create a very generic mobile application following are the three approaches in the order of our preference:

    Development Platforms/Technologies

    In this section we have briefly explained how each development platform will be used across different handsets and OS for basic features.

    1)- Java ME (formerly, J2ME)

    Introduction / Development Approach:

    a- A configuration provides the most basic set of libraries and virtual machine capabilities for a broad range of devices.
    b- A profile is a set of APIs that support a narrower range of devices.
    c- An optional package is a set of technology-specific APIs.

    Deployment Approach:


    To be MIDP 2.0-compliant, devices must support OTA provisioning. The easiest way to package MIDlets for wireless installation is to use the J2ME Wireless Toolkit, which incorporates a small provisioning server that emulates a production OTA environment. Available in version 2.0 Beta 2 and later versions of the toolkit, this nice feature enables you to get an idea of whether a server will provision a device with your application successfully without the hassle of setting up and configuring a local web server to act as an OTA server. Some MIDP 2.0 features – like the push registry – are available only to applications downloaded via OTA. If your application uses those features, the built-in OTA server is a critical tool of the development process.

    Features:

    PUSH

    The MIDP includes a feature called “PUSH Registry” to push data from server to mobile devices, without the interaction of user. The MIDlet registers a port along with the protocol name in the mobile device. From the server, a message is sent to the specific mobile device using the particular protocol and port where the MIDlet application is registered to listen. After the message is delivered to the mobile device, the AMS calls the MIDlet application. Once the message is delivered to the MIDlet, it is the application’s responsibility to process the message accordingly.

    SMS Integration

    Data Synchronization:

    Devices and Platforms:

    Motorola:

    Nokia:

    Blackberry:

    Samsung:

    LiMO:

    S60:

    Wireless Providers:

    Verizon

    T-Mobile

    In short, if you are aiming for a mass-market consumer application and not just one targeted at business users or tech-savvy users, your hands are pretty much tied. The only way to achieve that goal is to go on-deck with T-Mobile

    AT&T

    2)- BREW

    Introduction/ Development Approach

    Deployment Approach

    Features

    Brew compatible mobile phones can get push based sms/email on the Alltel’s network

    Interfaces like ISMS, ISMSMsg, ISMSNotifier, and ISMSStorage are there to handle SMS integration for BREW applications.

    Open Mobile Alliance for Data Synchronization and Device Management.

    The BREW platform is pre-integrated into the MSM™ chip software and includes reference implementations for many other device-specific issues (drivers and UI). All the mobile vendors doesn’t provide with MSM™ chip. So, we have very limited number of mobiles by default for running BREW application.

    Wireless Providers

    Every mobile vendor is supposed to provide handset with the support of BREW for different wireless providers.

    3)- Windows Mobile

    Introduction/ Development Approach

    Deployment Approach

    Windows Mobile-based Smartphones and Windows Mobile-based Pocket PCs (Phone Edition) can be bootstrapped by means of over-the-air (OTA) Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) push. This method is useful if the mobile operator prefers to bootstrap the device over the air at the point of sale or after purchase. In this method, a provisioning document that uses the format defined in the WAP Provisioning specifications can be pushed to the device over the air through the WAP connectionless non-secure push mechanism over the Mobile Terminated Short Message Service (SMS) bearer.

    Features

    The “Direct Push Technology” from Microsoft uses Exchange ActiveSync to keep data on a Windows Mobile based device synchronized with data on a Microsoft Exchange server. The ActiveSync technology on the device manages the direct push communication with Exchange Server. It establishes an HTTP connection with the server for a specified time, and then goes to sleep while waiting for the server to respond. The server responds with either a status indicating that new items were received or that no new items arrived. The device then sends either a synchronization request or another direct push request. Exchange Server 2003 Service Pack 2 includes a direct push component that augments the Exchange ActiveSync infrastructure that supports synchronization.

    .Net Compact Framework provides different DLLs for SMS integrations (Microsoft.WindowsMobile.dll, Microsoft.WindowsMobile.PocketOutlook.dll). Using these DLLs you can integrate SMS Send and Receive functionality as well as SMS filtering support in your mobile application.

    Exchange Server 2003 is used to synchronize data using ActiveSync. It uses OTA for Installer Packaging.

    Nokia & Sony Ericsson
    Net60 is an implementation from Red Filve Labs to bring .Net Compact Framework applications unchanged, to Symbian platform (the OS running the Nokia and Sony Ericsson Smartphones).

    Wireless Providers

    Most of the carriers have handsets with Windows Mobile.

    If you have any queries please feel free to contact me at haris[dot]khan[at]zigron[dot]com

    Download the report

  • Technology + Transparency = Helps you hire better

  • Haris Khan 10:39 pm on July 26, 2008 Comments

    PingMyCompany.com was started with a pure and simple intention to gather more data about ourself as a firm and know about others too. I have explained it before and Rashid also shared his development story

    Now after 3 months since its launch I have witnessed a change which I was hoping to happen but didnt expected to happen so quickly. Before PingMyCompany’s launch people hardly knew about Zigron and what it does. It was very hard for us to get the talent which was a right fit. Yes we had our portfolio out in public but it was hard to attract potential hires as they were never the target individuals for those projects.

    Now during interviews when I ask potential candidates what they know about Zigron and the first thing they say is “PingMyCompany”. 

    PMC has not only helped us get our name out but most importantly it has helped us attract the right talent. We were getting alot of resumes but most of them didnt really matched our needs but after PMC the quality of resumes have improved dramatically. We are still getting the same number of resumes but now we are getting individuals who really understand what we do and how they can be part of it.

    So the take away from all this is that companies need to create more engaging experiences for their future hires through technology and transparency. There has never been a better time to do this as technology to build such experiences and means to reach out has never been so cost effective ever in the history of mankind.

    Considering all this we are working on upgrading PingMyCompany.com to create more engaging experience, so stay tuned via PMC blog and twitter feed.

    Please feel to share your own ideas on how firms can create such experiences in different fields to attract top and most importantly the right talent.