Telrock's original design brief stated that Opal should be "Outlook for SMS". That it should look and behave like Outlook in every way. This was, of course, a reflection of Opal's target audience: enterprise users who are already familiar with Outlook for email.

Although I could understand the business need behind wanting to emulate it, I was worried that Outlook's multi-pane interface was overly complicated for the modest requirements of SMS. It was important to notice that Email and SMS are very different mediums. Although emails can run into the thousands of words and contain complex attachments, SMS messages are limited to 160 characters. We also had strict limits on screen real-estate: Opal had to display on 800x600 screens and re-layout as would a desktop application when scaled. I knew that there would be several factors that would affect the usability of the whole application.

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Web Applications have been around for years, what makes RIAs different? Answer: The User Experience.

At Bits And Pixels we do one thing: Architect Rich Internet Experiences. Although it's our tagline and may appear to be blatant marketing speak, it's not. Our focus in RIA development is usability and the user experience. It is the user experience that sets RIAs apart from existing web applications and the usability of an RIA, just like the usability of any application, will ultimately determine end user acceptance or rejection of the product.

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Welcome to the Opal UI Case Study series by Bits And Pixels.

Opal is the Enterprise SMS Messaging RIA that Bits And Pixels built in conjunction with Ali McLeod and Steven Webster for Telrock Communications. In this series, I will take you through Opal's user interface, highlighting some of the usability and UI design decisions that were made and discuss the challenges we faced and how we overcame them.

If you have not seen Opal in action, we have prepared a narrated Flash Presentation on the Opal UI over at Bits And Pixels that should give you a good idea of how the application looks and works.

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As part of reviving the What Is Flash Wiki, I restarted the scheduled automatic daily backups of the database from the web server to my local backup machine and thought it would be nice to share with you how I achieve this as it involves JScript for scripting Windows and JScript is a close cousin of ActionScript (they are both based on the latest ECMAScript specs.)

Update: If you're looking to do the same thing on OS X, Mike Chambers has a great post on Shell Scripting on OS X with ECMA / JavaScript

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I have just revived the What Is Flash project. More information is available on the What Is Flash Announcements page