I am very excited to announce that as of about 3 weeks ago I am an official member of the eBay San Dimas project, which is a one year old effort to create an Adobe AIR based version of eBay. I just returned back from eBay where I was able to learn a ton more about the project.  I will be in charge of developing the new messaging functionality in eBay Desktop and we already have an exciting design that will simplify and enhance eBay users ability to send and receive messages. A first version of what we are thinking should be out in a version for you private beta users very soon.

The goal of the San Dimas project is to create an application version of eBay that remembers more user settings, that can work offline, and that allow users to work more quickly and efficiently to perform eBay tasks. Building applications is what we at EffectiveUI love to do best and I have quickly learned on this project through the able direction of Alan Lewis from eBay that for the first public release of San Dimas the focus will be on simply on creating a very usable and straightforward application, one that greatly simplifies the use of eBay. The focus therefore will be on execution of key eBay functionality in the application. This will be the team’s focus for the rest of the summer as we push towards a public beta.