“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.”
— George Bernard Shaw
While we wait patiently for some comments from the folks gracious enough to do some testing with the latest release, let’s take a quick peek ahead something that we might want to tackle next. We are rapidly winding down the initial goal of getting all of the basic mechanics working for installing, setting up, and using the app to move artifacts between instances. Once we have all of that working satisfactorily, we will want to expand our efforts to include some of those other items on our list of things that we would still like to do. One of the major items on that list is the shopping experience, or the way in which a developer would locate an app in the store. Just focusing on the presentation itself for just a moment, let’s take a look at some of the many similar experiences for that there are right now.
All Applications
If you select plugins on the primary navigation, you get redirected to the All Applications page.
This page features a left-hand panel for various filter options and then a right-hand panel of full-width application tiles that include details about the app and two installation options, scheduled and immediate. In the upper right-hand corner there is a Find in Store button, which will take you to our next example.
App Store
This one also has a left-hand filter column and a right-hand column of application tiles, but on this one the tiles are not full-width and there are no install options. There is a cool mouse-over feature, though, and this one includes user-ratings, which can also be used as filter and sort options.
My Company Applications
The application manager built into the Now Platform uses tabs rather than filters, and the application tiles are full width, but do not include the description of the app. Rather than install options there is an Edit button, which makes it look similar in appearance to the first example.
Service Catalog
Not an application shopping experience, but a shopping experience just the same, and with many characteristics similar to those of the other examples.
This one has a left-hand panel for selecting a category from a category tree and the tiles in the right-hand panel are more like those in the App Store. Obviously, the content of the tiles would have to be adjusted to include the relevant data for applications, but the one benefit of this one over the others is that we have access to the source code. This is a standard Service Portal Page, which we could potentially clone and then modify for our purpose. The same is also true of the individual widgets that make up the page, as they could also be either cloned or replaced.
At this stage of the process, we do not have many of the features that make up much of the content in some of these examples. Today, there are no categories, no tags, no reviews, no ratings, and no other helpful ways to filter the list down to the things in which you might have an interest. Introducing any such features would be a project in and of itself, but we can still attempt to build a rudimentary shopping experience without those, and then throw those in later as the needs arise. For now, there aren’t that many test apps in the working model, so filtering is not yet a pressing need.
Just to see what we can do, let’s grab a copy of the catalog portal page next time and start hacking it up to meet our needs. It won’t necessarily be everything that it could be right at the start, but it will be a beginning.
