Adding Polish to My Web App
I have to admit that the process of adding polish to an AJAX web app is a lot like a regular app. Getting users to hammer on it - including yourself, and working to see what you can do to make it better, cleaner, smoother. The goal should be to have it work exactly like the user thinks it should act. Face it, it's a web page with a few widgets on it - it shouldn't require a manual to operate. If it does, then there are big problems.
So today I did a lot of little things - a few to the back-end, and a bunch to the front-end.
Probably one of the biggest things was the addition of the 'resolution' of the display. Face it, there may not bee the need to show all the data points, but maybe so. What I added was a very simple way of compressing the data (averaging points) so that the data looks 'smoother', but retains a lot of the shape of the original curve. It's going to make it more useful as it's footprint on the client will be smaller, and therefore faster to deal with on older machines.
It looks nice.