ClickShirt is an OpenLaszlo application that has been live for a few months. So this isn’t a newsflash announcing it; instead I’m going to analyze some of the highlights of the application, and how well they demonstrate what we call the “Cinematic User Experience”: continuous transitions, efficient use of space and ambient education. ClickShirt allows users to design T-Shirts and order them through CafePress. The application provides WYSIWYG editing of a T-Shirt design. Users can select from existing design templates, start from scratch, upload artwork, and modify colors, fonts and text.

Continuous Transitions

Continuous transitions between different states of an application comfortably guide the user smoothly from one part of the application to another. This is not to make the application “flashy”. Smooth transitions help the user understand where they are in the flow of the application. They also prevent the user from searching for a back-button.

The ClickShirt application uses continuous transitions throughout. When you select a shirt on the welcome screen, the shirts slide off-screen, and the new screen replaces it.

Efficient Use of Space

Even with today’s high-resolution monitors, screen real estate is expensive. Just because there’s more available room on-screen, users don’t necessarily want to have the application in their browser use it all up. It’s also hard to learn to use an application that consumes the entire monitor with moving parts. Ideally, an application should show the user the information they need at that particular step, and show/hide subsequent steps as the user proceeds through the application’s flow.

ClickShirt uses custom floating components to display custom selection options. This happens at a couple of points in the application: when the user selects a T-Shirt design element to edit and when selecting which T-Shirt to order.

Ambient Education

The unconstrained development capabilities of Rich Internet Applications allow an application to educate the user while he/she is using the application. This can take many forms: tooltips, inline documentation, etc.

The ClickShirt application goes further. It has animated instructional movies between (continuous) transitions that tell the user how they can customize T-Shirts.

In addition to being a posterchild for the Cinematic User Experience, ClickShirt has many truly impressive features: editing history, authentication, user-saved designs, a full drag-and-drop environment and a very clean and custom appearance.

If you were unable to attend AJAXWorld 2007 in New York a couple of months back, you can still view David Temkin’s keynote talk by visiting Laszlo’s microsite. (Note that you will have to provide some information before viewing the recorded presentation).

Here’s a direct link to the form.
David’s keynote covered the history of Rich Internet Applications, trends emerging now and showcased some OpenLaszlo applications (such as Laszlo Mail, Gliffy and Webtop). It contains some very interesting analysis of how usage of the web has evolved over the last dozen years.

This is a highly worthwhile talk. In case you think that’s it’s purely a Laszlo pitch – it’s not; Adobe’s Apollo project gets a mention too.

Laszlo Systems organizes meetups for the OpenLaszlo developer community. We held a number of them in 2006, and have just announced the first meetup for 2007:

Laszlo Developer Meetup (San Francisco, CA)
Thursday, May 31st from 7:00-9:00 pm
Location: CELLspace 2050 Bryant Street, San Francisco, CA 94110
To sign up, visit: http://www.laszlosystems.com/events/501

OpenLaszlo meetups are informal, fun and a great place to network. Plus there’s free pizza and beer. Last year’s San Francisco meetup was packed.

If you’ve been working on an OpenLaszlo application, you should sign up as a presenter. The meetups are centered around individual developers’ presentation. You’ll have an opportunity to showcase your work, talk about your experiences, and answer questions from the community.

See you all on the 31st!