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That's all I do anyway...copy everyone else's great ideas.
As far as the look and style, I think it would be cool if it had the look and feel of the DC blog. Might be easier too.
Many winners employ dashboards to give users a single overview of complex information and use lightboxes to ensure that users notice dialogs. Also, the Office 2007 ribbon showed surprisingly strong early adoption.
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The winners of the first competition to identify the 10 best-designed application user interfaces are:
- Campaign Monitor by Eyeblaster (Israel): Integrated management of multiple advertising campaigns for media buyers.
- CMSBox by CMSBox (Switzerland): Content management system.
- FotoFlexer by Arbor Labs (USA): Photo editor.
- PRISMAprepare by Océ (The Netherlands): Print shop software.
- Seating Management by Magellan Network and DesignBox (USA): Hostess-stand reservation book for restaurants.
- SQL diagnostic manager by Idera (USA): Database performance monitoring and diagnostics.
- SugarSync by Sharpcast (USA): Synchronizing files across multiple computers.
- SuperSaaS by SuperSaaS (The Netherlands): Creating and hosting scheduling and reservation systems.
- Wufoo by Infinity Box, Inc. (USA): Online forms, surveys, invitations, and payments.
- Xero by Xero (New Zealand): Accounting for small businesses.
Throw in some customization options (colors/fonts), and maybe the ability to decide whether you want to show titles, full posts or x-length "previews" of posts and you'd have a unique forum/blog hybrid.
On one side of the battle lines is the original Web page description technology called HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language. Over the years, its abilities were augmented first with JavaScript, a basic programming language, and later a JavaScript-on-steroids technology called Ajax. On the other side is Adobe Systems' Flash, which got its start as a method for graphic animations. It's grown into a much more powerful programming foundation over the years and has been joined more recently by a competitor: Microsoft's Silverlight.
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Consumers typically need not worry much about the programming plumbing beneath their online applications. But suppose you're the person on the hook for your company's online expense reporting tool or a start-up planning to build an online music mixer for anyone on the Internet. You'll have to place a bet on which technology is best and which programmers to hire or train. Few expect the competition to have a winner any time soon.
