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development

Coming Soon: Python Screencasts

August 27, 2013 13:52:44.171

Time for me to learn something new, and in the process, maybe convey a bit of knowledge. I've started looking into Python, and I'll be publishing some screencasts on the subject. I'm running a bit ahead in terms of recorded content at the moment, so look for the first screencasts to appear in about 2 weeks.

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posted by James Robertson

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Usability

February 12, 2012 10:47:05.488

Dave Winer makes an excellent point about usability:

They're always moving stuff around in software like this. This is a lesson every generation of developers seems to have to re-learn. Little things like this break users. So what. Once you have competition and look into why people switch, you'll find that "it just works" or "it works like I think" is a highly valued non-feature. It's not something that you can put on a comparison chart. To users it's a subjective thing. It has to do with whether they like you or not. To you however, it's engineering. This feeling is created from hundreds of little subjectives they don't even see, that Ebert would totally understand. In film it's called suspension of disbelief . We don't yet have a name for this in software.

He flared that off a complaint by Roger Ebert about changes to Twitter; it could just as easily have flared off of a bazillion useless changes Facebook has made over the years, or the atrocities Microsoft has committed with Office. Since they put in the Ribbon, I can't find anything anymore; it's the main reason I switched to the OS X suite. IMHO, Office has become downright user hostile.

posted by James Robertson

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Flash Loses

February 8, 2012 16:26:56.000

Looks like Flash is over - Google has bailed on it, and - more importantly - so has Adobe:

Adobe will continue to work on their Flash platform, but mostly as it relates to their AIR technology. For interactive and immersive web content the company is focusing their efforts on HTML5. That should make things pretty clear: there won’t be Flash in Chrome for Android. Sorry, folks.

That makes the "glaring hole" on IOS into more of a fading issue....

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posted by James Robertson

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Tiobe Rankings?

January 11, 2012 8:44:16.000

posted by James Robertson

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My Old Enemy, the Oracle Installer

November 8, 2011 19:05:36.205

I remember the hell of the Oracle installer years ago, when I was installing Oracle 8 under Linux. Surely, I though, 11g has to be better under Windows?

Well... not so much. First, it complains about misisng files as you get about 3/4 done. With modal dialogs that have a "continue" option. Awesome, that. Then, it fails to install your database (if you asked it to), claiming that it's missing a default template. remind me what business Oracle claims to be in again?

You can install a db manually, of course - getting prompted with a slew of questions that you probably don't care about unless you're an honest to goodness DBA. Why they don't have an option for "take a all the defaults and just go" is beyond me.

On the other hand, unlike the Linux installer of yore, it doesn't crash multiple times on install... I guess that's progress.

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posted by James Robertson

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An Industry Observation

October 28, 2011 9:37:11.381

In a conversation about various Smalltalk environments on the VSE mailing list, .NET came up. What piqued my interest was this statement:

The default .API for .NET is *not* webservices. Anyone saying so is clearly trying to advocate a language missing real .NET bindings.

Never mind the context, or even the obvious edge in the statement - that's not what grabbed me. It took me back to Steve Yegge's rant about Google (and their non-support for a platform). But again, this isn't really about that rant, or about Google, either - it just made me think about the difference between how Microsoft approaches things and how Apple does.

The impression I get (from way on the outside, admittedly) is that Apple has "a way" of doing code. There are standards, both at the API level and at the UI presentation level. Microsoft? Not so much. There was an obvious push from one influential group for .NET a few years back, but it largely foundered - most app dev at MS still uses C++, and .NET is really only focused out now.

I'd say that Microsoft is just too big to be that focused, but apparently Amazon got religion (at the behest of a really committed CEO). Likewise, Apple is obviously focused - and that makes me wonder: is the real difference having a CEO who's willing to jump in and get his hands dirty? Lots of firms have CEO's who advocate best practices, and then leave their team to execute on that as best they can. Is having a control freak a better way?

posted by James Robertson

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A More Detailed Look at Dart

October 12, 2011 0:06:50.005

Alan Knight took some time with the new language, and has some fairly detailed thoughts on it.

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posted by James Robertson

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The Tyranny of C Style Syntax

October 10, 2011 8:20:27.946

Dart has been previewed today, and it's, not suprisingly, yet another C-Style programming language. I'll have a look at the language, but I really wish we could get away from curly braces :)

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posted by James Robertson

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Waiting for Dart

September 10, 2011 1:29:29.100

Google has two smart guys working on Dart - a new browser based language that will get unveiled next month:

Two conferences being held next month, one in Aarhus, Denmark on October 10 and another two weeks later in Portland, Oregon, are scheduled to feature Lars Bak, the designer of the V8 interpreter used in Google Chrome. In Aarhus, Bak will be joined by Gilad Bracha, a Google engineer and co-author of the original Java Language Specification and the creator of the Newspeak programming language, a derivative of Smalltalk.

Google released "Go" to a lot of yawns a few years back; seems to me that anything trying to compete with Javascript will have its hands full. I'll be interested to see what happens.

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posted by James Robertson

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We Know Less About UI Design Than We Think We Do

August 20, 2011 12:14:08.448

It's easy to read an article like this one - which notes that the vast majority of people don't know that ctrl/command-F executes a search - and chuckle about our superiority. What it should do is makes us sit back and think, because it's clear that the "simple" UI's that are presented to people aren't as simple as we think they are. There's a reason that the touch interface pioneered by Apple with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad has caught on so well - it finally operates the way most people want a device to operate. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

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posted by James Robertson

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