http://www.pathf.com/blogs Running commentary about agile development, user experience design and Ajax. Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:26:26 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en photo credit: victoriapeckham We have reached the most critical point on a project I'm working on. After a few months we think we know enough about the domain and application to build a product road map that will take us to the first public release. The proof of ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2010/03/values-product/ acl9 is a an authorization library for rails applications. It is one of the widely used library if not the most widely used now. Our experience with acl9 shows that it might be heavy weight if your authorization needs are simpler (which most projects are) but could be useful for ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2010/03/optimizing-has_role-in-acl9-2/ This year's Day of Mobile had a number of interesting tracks, including the ever popular hack-a-thon. In the hack-a-thon, developers worked alone or in teams to build applications that targeted any one of the mobile platforms (iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Palm, Windows Phone) and presented their applications to the attendees ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2010/03/optimizing-has_role-in-acl9/ The midVentures25 event is happening this Thursday, and Pathfinder is proud to be sponsoring the event. midVentures25 is the first Chicago-based startup demo day & conference: 25 of the best investor-ready early-stage startups will demo their products in an open-floor expo. The top 5 startups will have a chance ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2010/03/pathfinder-sponsors-midventures25/ Day of Mobile is happening this Saturday, and Pathfinder is proud to be sponsoring the event. This should be a very cool event , and we're excited about interacting with other mobile developers in the Chicago area. We look forward to seeing you there! ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2010/03/pathfinder-sponsoring-day-mobile-chicago/ photo credit: moonlightbulb Refactoring versus Rewriting I started my first real Agile software development project in 1999. I'd been doing more traditional software development before then all the way back to 1980. I won't bore you with the details of those earlier projects, but my feeling was that there had to ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2010/03/refactoring-rewriting/ Instead of a "loading" animation that we may bail out on, why not tell a story? I was impressed with this technique used by BMW.  They are running banner ads on NBC's site which hypes the upcoming Olympic events. You see a car in the banner ad, you expect to ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2010/02/storytelling-design-2/ [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="216" caption="Claude Shannon"][/caption] So, it's little Stevie Jobs' birthday today. Certainly he's been influential in the world of digital computing. But when folks wax on and wax off about how great some of these more recent figures in computing have been, I like to remind them of some ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2010/02/remembered-claude-shannon/ I recently published the mort_calc gem at gemcutter.org. The code can be found at http://github.com/perry3819/mort_calc/. The gem calculates the APR and monthly payment for a mortgage in the United States. Calculating the monthly payment is straight forward. C = Loan amount E = Extra costs r = monthly interest rate = interest rate / 1200 N ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2010/02/mortcalc-gem/ There's still a lot of internet chatter about why you'd want a tablet anyway. I think there's a big space between the laptop and the iphone, and that in particular, the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch will take over from a lot of purpose built devices that ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2010/02/ipad-15-examples/ photo credit: Rich B-S Gwarred Mountain over at Climax Studios has posted a very thoughtful blog post about software development methods and the appropriateness of Agile Software Development. I was ready not to like this article, what with the title and things like this: If I have to sit through another ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2010/02/postagile-game-development-world/ photo credit: World Economic Forum It is very easy to misunderstand software and it's capabilities. Although people and software often perform the same tasks, they often do so in very different ways and achieve very different results. The results software can achieve are sometimes surprising, even amazing. But what computers ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2010/02/computers-people-playing-chess/ A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Skype Video Phone, part of a trend towards trading needless complexity for simplicity and ease of use. It's also on the wrong side of another trend: The trend away from single purpose mobile devices to flexible mobile platforms. For ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2010/02/single-purpose-devices-flexible-platforms-functional-cases/ [caption id="attachment_4787" align="alignnone" width="533" caption="Tiling a Polygon"][/caption] One of the most challenging problems I came across working on a .NET PDF Annotator and Editor application was to tile a 2-D polygon and also accurately determine the number of tiles that fill the surface of the polygon.  The tiling part was not ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2010/02/tiling-2d-polygon-gdi/ photo credit: barkWe've discussed the benefits of Agile development before and that the iterative approach to building the architecture -- where you explore architectural issues (very few apps are completely new and unknown) a little bit through each iteration -- is an effective method for arriving at a good ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2010/02/architectural-anxiety-waterfall-approach/ Sphinx (and its rails plugin thinking-sphinx) is my choice of search engine on ruby/rails project. It is powerful yet super easy to setup. However, testing Sphinx code is not easy at first. Since Sphinx works by leverging database commit hooks, it cannot be tested within the bounds of unit testing framework ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2010/02/unit-testing-sphinx/ photo credit: B Rosen I remember my first real grownup and serious web project outside of the university environment. It was 1994 and SSL was a novelty. People were making insane predictions that one day up to $600 million (think Dr. Evil) worth of consumer goods would be sold on ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2010/02/flashback-iphone-early-days-web/ photo credit: musiciennedusilence A friend of mine from college is a physics professor who does a lot of stuff with the space station and the new Google Lunar X Prize, that awards up to $30 million for the first non-governmental organization to land a robot on the moon. He likes ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2010/02/moon-iphone-wheels/ It's no accident that Steve Jobs is arguably the ultimate technology pitch-man. He's worked with some of the best designers, ad agencies and creative people on the planet even since the early days of Apple. But how would he pitch your idea? It's a fun question to ask and I ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2010/02/steve-jobs-pitch-product/ Laptops are a strange, inefficient tradeoff between an iPhone’s portability and a desktop’s capabilities. They don’t satisfy either need extremely well, but they’re much closer to desktops than they are to iPhones. The usefulness and portability gap between a laptop and an iPhone is staggeringly vast ... Ergonomics are awful ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2010/02/big-space-laptops-iphones/