It’s exciting to see some of the directions that CAREO is taking. Developer D’Arcy Norman is putting a lot of effort into extending the presentation styles for the interfaces, apparently driven by the needs of the SciQ project.
The old “browse subjects” interface…
… and the SciQ version:
Tracking the many developments on D’Arcy’s weblog (CSS, RSS, the theming engine), it’s clear that we would like to incorporate at least some of these features into UBC’s implementation of the CAREO repository.
There’s the rub. Most of these features are in the early stages, and likely won’t be ready for installation for at least a couple of weeks. Funding and project timelines dictate that the system must be in place by… well, by now actually.
I’m very new to the ins and outs of software implementation, but I suspect this is a familiar tradeoff: superior functionality vs. missed deadlines. Obviously it’s exciting to see improvements happening so quickly — but paradoxically the very speed of change (on this and innumerable other fronts) seems to hamper our own development.
Most of the complications are happy ones, truth be told. It looks like I’ll need to find a good designer to exploit the CAREO interface.
Watch that link for D’Arcy’s weblog- I ended up re-directed to a WebCam site and a series of never ending porn pop-ups!
Jeez. I assumed you were kidding, but it was indeed happening. I hadn’t realized that as extra “http://” in the link code for D’Arcy’s weblog had that effect.
Sorry about that. I hope this hasn’t affected too many others.