Intelligent Input Processing

Hello again after quite a long time!  Quite a lot has happened over the past few years, from starting and graduating from University, finding a job in another company and travelling around the world.  I have also been involved in some small side projects, some of which have actually gained some traction.

One such project which I did some basic parts of is a a system for maintaining a list of classified vehicle listings for used (2nd hand) and new cars...or any other kind vehicle.  The interesting part is the way a new listing can be added with minimal effort.  Typically people *hate* filling long forms, and entering the details of a car is no exception.  Even if the form is actively trying to help the user by showing suggestions, it still is not as streamlined as just typing text or actually filling out a hand-written form.

So here I found the thing I hated about forms - having to switch between inputs and having to think about the value I should enter next.  I don't want to think about it, I just want my form to fill up, by itself if possible.  A little experiment lead to the development of a small but quite helpful feature which tries to offload this (minor) effort from the user.

As the data was a simple table, we could predict what the user is going to enter; some details on a car.  There aren't too many attributes when you think about it - a make and model, year, colour, engine and transmission.  You could also do away with some of them, even though it might hurt search rankings.  The result was that a form may be populated by simply parsing the semi-natural text taken from one big text box.  The user no longer had to enter different and specific values in each entry - just one descriptive sentence where order does not matter and mistakes may be easily fixed.  All we needed is some initial data to "teach" the system what to expect.

We now have a very clean solution for entering listing details where a short description relieves us from having to think about each individual attribute of a car (what an epic case of 1st world problemism).

By some luck, this little experiment has made it through to a website and is now available for many users to enjoy.  Let's hope these kinds of little experiments from professionals and enthusiasts keep getting better and more popular so one day we may have a more user-oriented internet, rather than a machine-oriented one.  Oh by the way, the website making use of this little tech is http://www.pickacarmalta.com!

Hallo!

So, hi.  Well, let's start with the basics.  I am a human named James and even though this is not the first time which I am sort of 'blogging', it still feels a bit strange.  I had a website once and I wrote some stuff over there, but it's been ages since then (the domain does not even exist any more hehe).  So recently I started thinking about being part of the 'front-end' of the internet, as I am a programmer and my contribution to the internet has been somewhat invisible, you know, not many people will look at your code, but a considerable number of people wondering around the tubes of the internet will have a look at your page during their daily hunt for lolcats.

At first I thought maybe Google+ might be helpful.  Mind you, not that it is not helpful, but it is really a micro-blogging thing, so - it's not enough.  But anyway, this Google product revolution got me curious about how things have changed and I remembered they had this free blogging service.  The new layouts are definitely a great improvement so that raised my hopes too.  Also, I did not want to spend money on hosting at the moment, so pretty much this was the best solution.

I think I started off with the basics but got lost.  Oh, well, as I said, I am James, from Malta but I am living in Germany, for now (so there is no one to pay bills, cook food etc. see why I won't pay to get my site for now? :P).  I work as a programmer, mostly using Java, and let's put it plainly, I'm not the kind of coder that uses a tonne of frameworks and stuff, mainly because I deal with rather lower level applications rather than the popular business apps.  By the way, I am also starting to code some Android apps too (Sorry applers, I'm really not a great fan of mac and stuff :P).

I hope that amounts to a proper intro, as in, you got to know my name right :D?  Well, enjoy my blog, if any of you plan to follow up or something.  If not, you can throw me in one of your circles on Google+ :D

Regards

James