Zmarties

To showcase their new AJAX like toolkit, Backbase have put together some demo sites making use of their technology.

One such demo, BBGoogle, uses the Google API to get search results, that can then be manipulated via drag and drop - at the moment the order of the results can be changed, and you can drag results out into a bookmark area. You can also drag the three "windows" around within the page, and whilst the bookmark window grows as necessary to accomodate all your bookmarks, the search results window is of fixed size - a poor design, but I guess that wasn't what they were trying to show with the demo. Overall an interesting demo, but not all that useful as it is.

Unlike the Google drag and drop implementation used by Personalized Google which updates the layout as you drag without needing you to drop it, this implementation only does the action when you drop, which doesn't quite give enough feedback for my liking in this case. Its worth noting that Google is already on (at least) it's second attempt at producing a drag and drop personalization UI - there's also one used in personalization of the Google News results. The News version does not move the item until you release it, instead providing feedback by placing a coloured rectangle where the moved item will end up.