Software As She’s Developed

Over on Ajaxian, there were some interesting comments following from the “Ajaxifying the Address Bar” entry here last week. I made a little live search demo to show the kind of idea I had in mind. Please try the Live Search Demo for yourself and let me know how you find it. The FAQ […]

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With the recent news on ITunes supporting podcasts, a few thoughts. New readers of this blog might wonder why I’m mentioning podcasts … I haven’t said too much about podcasting here recently (since so many others discuss it already), but I’ve been keen on podcasting since it kicked off. The “Who Invented Podcasting” debate. Really quite […]

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Fowler’s original refactoring text was based on a number of patterns. So you have a refactoring like “Introduce Null Object” which is a direct mapping to the older “Null Object” pattern. Now there’s also Joshua Kerievesky’s “Refactoring to Patterns” book which makes the idea more explicit. And in a new interview with bill Venners, […]

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We’re used to the distinction between “static” and “dynamic” websites. I think it’s fairly well-established that “static” means plain HTML with a possible sprinkling of CSS, while “dynamic” means a website with forms and maybe a bit of Javascript. “Web application” is a more sophisticated, goal-oriented, version of that. Now that we have the “AJAX” label, […]

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Jeff Attwood asks “Did you ever get the feeling that the browser address bar is the new command line?” Russel Beattie expressed a similar sentiment a little while ago: “(I)t struck me that really what’s happening is that the search box is really becoming just the place where we ask our computers questions about anything. It’s […]

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Couple weeks ago, I argued that self-documenting code is self-reinforcing. Some choice quotes on this topic from Mike Clarke (via his blog) (emphasis mine): Ever since I was a wee programmer, I’ve been reminded that good code has a lot of comments … The trouble is, I can’t ever remember being taught this important lesson: […]

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In the previous entry on AJAX and server-side crypto, I alluded to progressive enhancement. Naturally enough, people have been discussing progressive enhancement wrt AJAX , and at least some AJAX applications will doubtless apply this notion. For instance, a form might be validated in real-time on the server-side if possible, but if not, it will […]

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Office apps, backup, calendars - trying to store it online was all the rage of the mid-90s. By 2000, we would be hopping on our flying scooters and whizzing past the great data cloud in the sky. Well, it was nice to dream. Here are two major reasons it never happened: Options for rich clients - like Java […]

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As you know, it helps usability a lot to work closely with users. What I’ll say here is that working with users helps other -ilities too. I’m defining usability as UI, human-computer dialogue, and functionality. I think it’s clear that working with users contributes greatly to these things already. Let’s now look at the “hard” […]

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An unfortunate feature of many lookup services is their insistence on having the user type something, then qualify what sort of thing they’re looking up. Or, to qualify by typing in a different form field. Examples: The Aussie White Pages Lookup requires you to indicate the state (from eight choices) you’re searching for. Most foreign language […]

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