Programming Social Applications

Defining Content Views

The concept of views may be completely foreign to many application developers, but it’s a critical one to understand when you’re developing gadgets for social networking containers.

Having a cohesive view architecture is vital to an application’s success. There are countless instances where an application with a good concept fails because its developer expects people to use it from a specific view, so he neglects the other views by simply putting an image of, or call to action to load, the larger view (or vice versa, if he develops a small view but ignores the large).

The most important point here is that a user will never use your products in exactly the way that you intended them to be used. For this reason, you must spend equal time thinking about all of the views and how they interact, rather than focusing 99% of your attention on a single view and leaving the others as an afterthought. Some users may want to interact only with the subset of functionality defined in a small view, while others want to use all of the views depending on the particular tasks they want to complete at a given time. With this in mind, let’s explore view functionality in the context of an application gadget.

Each container defines its own views and variations depending on its use for gadgets (e.g., whether the container is inherently social in nature or geared to business applications). Table 3-9 outlines the view types that can be used in many of the available containers.

Table 3-9. View ...