http://www.pathf.com/blogs Running commentary about agile development, user experience design and Ajax. Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:28:20 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Cover image from Amazon.com It's been way too long since I blathered on about style issues. Today I'd like to talk about testing style. This article assumes you are already writing tests and already using something approaching a Test-Driven Development process -- I'm not here to argue about process, at least ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2009/07/elements-of-testing-style/ Patrick Lynch over at A list apart has just written a great article about the role of aesthetics in web design.  In it, he specifically deals with the question of how much of a role visual aesthetic design should play in the design of web sites.  To answer the question, ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2009/07/aesthetics-and-web-design/ Recently I have taken a bit of a detour into the world of telephony, working with Asterisk-Java, which by itself is a very valuable tool, and worth knowing a bit about if you are integrating a system with Asterisk. While it is a Java-based library, I am integrating it ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2009/07/asterisk-and-groovy/ Photo Credit: by dpascoe Not many people talk about good practices to use for comments in code. Many people see them as an extra or freebie, so not a lot of thought gets put into them. The truth is, though, that comments are a great tool for giving insight ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2009/07/3-misuses-of-code-comments/ Fluent NHibernate is an extension of the widely used and very popular NHibernate framework for Microsoft .NET. It is an open source framework that sits on top of the NHibernate layer and utilises all the core NHibernate methods. This framework provides an alternative to the standard XML based mappings (.hbm xml files) of ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2009/06/fluently-nhibernate/ photo credit: Marco Arment Whenever I hear the plan uttered (and in my Wall Street consulting days, I heard this a lot), that we should build an HTML (or Flash) prototype, impress the client and then fill in the back end, an unwanted image comes to mind. We're digging a ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2009/06/digging-a-hole-and-covering-it-with-leaves-the-software-development-version/ Business Week had an article earlier this week on Cloud Computing that made a complete hash of the subject. However, there was one paragraph that was right on the money: Apple and Google understand in their bones that simplicity and ease of use are essential to broad adoption of products ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2009/06/the-importance-of-user-experience-do-you-understand-it-in-your-bones/ I have a native iPhone application in development which requires me to interact with a server that uses a stateful protocol over a persistent connection to transfer messages over the wire. This is definitely not a trivial application to write, even though the UI itself is very simple. The Problem Stateful ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2009/06/working-with-nsurlprotocol/ It's been a while since I've been desparate enough to had a chance to do a nice "what's in your toolbox" kind of post. In honor of the iPhone 3.0 upgrade, and Steve Jobs' liver, let's do an iPhone-toolbox post. I'm unabashedly happy with my phone, because it's strengths and weaknesses ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2009/06/whats-in-your-dock-iphone-edition/ photo credit: stuartpilbrowYour project is going along fine. After the initial bumps, the team has reached max velocity and is running through story points like there’s no tomorrow. The demos are a success, with the client loving how everything is coming together. Communication between the team members and the ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2009/06/feature-fatigue/ The ChicagoRuby users group (not to be confused with chirb.org another great Chicago Ruby user group) held their second meeting at their downtown location. While the meetings out in Elmhurst are always informative and helpful,  the downtown location may allow for a bigger crowd, and the weekday time might work better ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2009/06/chicagoruby-meeting-test-prescriptions-recap/ photo credit: great_sea A few weeks ago Alice Toth and I had a conversation about how we can better serve our clients, and while we normally delve into project efficiencies like communication, developer training, and good QA practices, this time we both concluded that we need to do a better ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2009/06/mowing-the-grass-revisited/ When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur. -- John Wooden photo credit: mister b 1138 A few weeks ago I had a discussion with some colleagues on the adoption of Agile within large corporations. The consensus was that Agile was almost always adapted rather than adopted -- ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2009/06/agile-fundamentals-the-feedback-loop/ Check out the reader comment on this characteristically astute Dvorak screed from 2007. Kudos to MarketWatch for giving readers a voice equal in visual prominence to the headline of the column. Click to view in all its full-sized glory. via Daring Fireball. http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2009/06/why-i-love-the-internet-part-87/ If you liked my colleague Alice Toth's presentation on Agile Requirements, you'll like her talk on integrating design and agile development: AGILE AND ME a story with just enough documentation. A typical waterfall project produces pages and page of end-to-end requirements for the entire project as it is envisioned (but not ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2009/06/integrating-design-and-agile-development/ Windy City Rails is September 12, 2009 Here are a couple of upcoming Ruby and Rails-based appearances by Pathfinder personnel: On Tuesday, June 23, Noel Rappin (referring to himself in the third person) will be the guest speaker at the Chicago Ruby.org monthly meeting. The meeting starts at 6:00 at Chicago Ruby's ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2009/06/upcoming-pathfinder-appearances/ "I have tried Campfire, and I'm still not quite sure why people pay for it. I think you can take simplicity too far personally. It could be replicated on a weekend (As was done at google with huddlechat) so I don't see the value proposition there." Source With apologies to Mike ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2009/06/what-value-isnt/ While never untrue, it is more of a necessity now, that a programmer should know more than just one language or framework. After being a focussed Java/J2EE developer for a long time since college, in the last couple of years, I plunged into .NET, Ruby/Rails and then Javascript/prototype/jQuery etc and ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2009/06/how-to-learn-a-new-programming-language-or-framework/ After playing with my friend's iPhone for awhile, and using the company phone for testing out our iPhone applications, I started to get really jealous of how cool it is, and how uncool my samsung windows mobile phone seems by comparison. The more I used the iPhone, the more I got ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2009/06/5-things-i-can-do-with-my-windows-mobile-phone-that-you-cant-do-with-your-iphone/ Florian Mounier has spent the last six months developing GWT UML, a slick little UML diagramming tool written in, obviously, GWT. It's smooth, good looking, supports class, object and sequence diagrams. You can save your diagram as a url or export it to an SVG. You wouldn't try to do ... http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2009/06/gwtuml-just-enough-uml-for-wikis/