Entries from February 2008 ↓

Smashing Magazine, king of the top-x lists, posts another list today, this time outlining 50 cool CSS techniques. Some of the links are blog posts outlining the technique while others are simply links to sites using the technique, leaving the obtainment and grokking of the source code as an exercise for the reader. I found the Triadic Background Setting with CSS and the CSS Transparency Settings for all Browsers particularly helpful. Good list!

Antony Stubbs writes on his blog today about trying out Scala on a simple project. Mr. Stubbs takes care to lay out the original algorithm for the project first in Java, and then show how functional programming and Scala makes it much nicer and compact. Good read for those of you still wondering whether or not to try out Scala.

With the upcoming Eclipse 3.4 release, one of the new features for RCP developers will be the ability to run their RCP applications in full screen mode. Chris Aniszczyk has an article about the new feature along with a code sample on DZone.

Yahoo! released version 2.5 of the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library today. New components include a file uploader, image cropper, and profiler (as well as many others). You can read more information about the release on the YUI Developer blog and then download it from the YUI web page . It is also worth mentioning that the library now has over 270 examples available online to get you going with.

Jakob Nielsen has a top-ten list on his site regarding top application design mistakes. It’s a good list including things we’ve been hearing from usability experts for a long time now, such as Non-Standard GUI Controls, Inconsistency, and No Feedback. As a bonus design mistake, Nielsen aims at those reset buttons you see all the time on web forms.

Six Revisions has Eight Tips on How to Manage Feature Creep. IMHO, the most important tip is to  just plain accept the fact that feature creep is going to happen, and work some time into the schedule for it. Flat out rejecting all of the customers requests after the requirements document has been drawn up is a sure-fire way to loose a customer. It is much better to put a fudge-factor into your delivery estimates so that when things come up, you know you’ll have some time to handle them.

One of my favorite features of Groovy is the safe navigation operator. As a Java developer by day (heroic blogger by night?), I spend a good amount of time fixing bugs revolving around null pointer exceptions. With Groovy, the ? operator saves you from constantly having to check for null. Andrew Glover has a good example of Defensive Programming with Groovy over at The Disco Blog today.

James Golick has an interesting post on his blog entitled “The Crunch Mode Paradox“. The basic premise is that during crunch time, even though your developers are putting in more hours, productivity decreases and the chance of introducing bugs increases dramatically. Any developer who has had to pull a few all nighters before a release date knows that the code written in those wee hours of the night isn’t exactly the cleanest.

This is one you’ll want to send to your manager!

Code Commit has an article on UI development techniques in Java on their site today. Anyone can throw together a simple UI, but this article takes the reader through the entire process of working out a design on paper first, making a first attempt at the UI with a graphical layout tool (Matisse in this case), throwing that out because the auto-generated code sucks, and redoing the UI in a much more logical fashion by hand.

Michael Silver brings us an article today entitled “The Theory of One (or how to get work done)“. It is easy to get overwhelmed at times and have so much to do that you mentally shut down and spend the day farting around on the internet instead. Michael’s theory is that if you can force yourself to do one, small, achievable task a day (such as writing a single line of code), it makes it that much easier to continue and get even more work done.

So I now present to you my “one blog post a day”.