April 2012
2 posts
2 tags
PHP: a fractal of bad design →
I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there.
You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in handy sometimes.
You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw part on both...
3 tags
Sparrow for iPhone
Sparrow is the best mail client for OSX, hands down. It gets a lot of details right. Facebook integration for avatars. Excellent threading for conversations. The way attachments are handled through cloud services is simply brilliant. 1
So, obviously it is a big deal when Sparrow for iPhone hits the app store. Some of the features have made the transition from OSX, such as the Facebook...
March 2012
1 post
4 tags
Continous Retaliation
Our development team recently got inspired by this project, and decided to get our own Thunder Missile launcher to launch missiles on developers pushing non working code for review. This beauty now sits on a workstation waiting for someone to break the build. We currently use Hudson as our Continuos Integration server, which in turn triggers the build on Gerrit events. So, each time someone...
January 2012
12 posts
3 tags
Building a lifestream using Tumblr and ifttt
Life streams are an interesting concept. They reflect your entire life on the Internet, gathered in a single chronological flow. I used to have one as my personal blog, powered by Storytlr. A couple of years ago they stopped hosting and instead open sourced their code instead (which can be found here). For a while I tried using this, customizing it to get the look and feel I wanted, running on my...
3 tags
Android's Back Button
Speaking of the developer guidelines for Android: the inconsistent behavior of the back button is the single most common irritation I’ve read when it comes to Android. If developers adhere to the new guidelines for Navigation with Back and Up this should mostly not be a problem any longer. A bit puzzling though why the guidelines is consistent in all cases but one: System-to-app navigation....
3 tags
Android Developer Guidelines →
Guidelines for how to design apps for Android while maintaining a consistent look and feel, and a predictable behavior. One of the things that are great about iOS is the Human Interface Guidelines, so this is definitely a good step in the right direction for Android.
2 tags
Sublime Text Replacement Icon →
Stunning replacement icon for Sublime Text 2, the stunning and powerful text editor (available on Windows, Mac and Linux).
3 tags
Scriptogr.am
Scriptogram, a new site with an interesting concept. It connects with your Dropbox account and converts Markdown documents found in a specific folder into blog posts. A few details:
Markdown documents found in /Apps/scriptogram/posts are synchronized and converted into blog posts.
Only the scriptogram folder is accessible to scriptogr.am
Custom domains can be used for your blog
Custom CSS can...
8 tags
User experience versus Developer Experience →
When I use an app on my phone expect it to work whether I’m online or offline. Look at the standard apps on your phone – email client, text messages, notes apps. They all work when you have no mobile or wifi signal. Sure, you can’t send or recieve new mail, but you can read your old mail – which is a hugely useful feature, and in fact I’d say a vital feature. Say you’re trying to find where you...
2 tags
What’s wrong with this Social Network - Facebook
Facebook is in theory a great way of keeping in touch with old friends and relatives. You can, with a low amount of work, find people that you’ve since long lost contact with and get up to date with what they have been doing. And there are things that work really well:
Finding friends
Messages
Events
Messages works great as a compliment for email. People change their phone number and...
2 tags
What's wrong with this Social Network - Google+
Google+ is a young social network from Google. It has the possibility of becoming something good, but in its current state it just isn’t. The first, and most severe, problem with Google+ is that it lacks personality and it is hard to define its purpose. Sure, it’s got a few things going for it:
A clean interface
An easy way of deciding what to share with what circle
Messenger
Hangouts
...
2 tags
Path & The Art of Keeping It Real →
Jon Mitchell pretty much nails it when explaining what it is that is so great about Path:
Path is not conducive to networking or discovering people. Twitter and Facebook are great for that. Google+ can dump thousands of new people on you without even asking. We don’t need another place to network. What we need is a place for intimacy and trust that is still enhanced by the sharing power of...
A geek with a hat » Why programmers work at night →
Excellent article on the behaviour of developers, with a lot of things to identify with. I love being the first one to arrive at the office in the morning; I probably get as much done in that first hour or two before anyone else arrives as I do all of the other hours of the day in total.
I also often find myself solving most of the problems I get stuck on when showering. But then again, there...
Path's UITableView timestamp clone →
The magnificent scrollbar clock in the Path UI, now available on GitHub.
Recommended iOS apps
I use a lot of apps. And by that, I mean a lot. I currently have 92 apps installed on my iPhone, out of which I surely use about 30 on a daily basis. When I compile my recommendations, I usually only mention those that are useful for others as well; many of the ones I use are mainly pieces in my workflow, and for most they wouldn’t make that much sense. I see this list as a list of...
December 2011
1 post
4 tags
Final should be Default for Classes in Java
David J. Pearce wrote an interesting post on why classes should always be final by default, unless otherwise defined. The argument goes like this: non final classes can be extended, and thus rely on their parent class. You can also override methods in the parent class and change their behavior, something that may come back to bite you later (when the parent class change. You risk introducing...
October 2011
1 post
3 tags
An anecdote in regards to version control
A younger programmer asked an elder about his code and his coding style, and how the older programmer would do certain things. The older programmer said ‘Let’s take a look at your code’, so the younger took out his laptop, opened his editor, and showed him.
The older programmer looked at the code, thought about it for a bit, and then started editing it. He deleted the class...
September 2011
1 post
2 tags
Little Big Details →
Great site for showing little UI tricks that can make a big difference.
July 2011
1 post
2 tags
The science of password selection →
Excellent breakdown of how we select passwords.
June 2011
1 post
2 tags
The Unix Philosophy: The Rule of Modularity →
glennstovall:
Write simple parts connected by clean interfaces There is a company that used to be a shining example of this rule, but they have lost their way. That company is Lego. take a look at a recent star wars set they have released: […] You can see there are many parts that are specific that would only work in this set (particularly on the top of the ship). […] For multiple...
April 2011
1 post
3 tags
The Dusty Programmer: What John Locke Taught Me... →
Because random Strings that start with 4, 8, 15 might not be so random after all.