Topic: Confluence

Chiphone Meeting: Chicago iPhone user group gets its TDD on

John McCaffrey, Friday, August 28, 2009 @ 10:25 am

Eric Smith from 8th light gave a hands-on TDD presentation at last night's Chiphone meeting, hosted at Obtiva's downtown office, (conveniently located near the the train).

There was a good crowd of people, most attendees have 'played around' with iphone development, 4 have actively developed apps (3 people have live apps in the store).  From my quick survey of those that have submitted apps, it seems most of them were free utility apps or simple games, with at least one commercial app Dash for Confluence. It also seemed that no one had yet needed to do any animation beyond the basics, with just a bit of core-animation, but no need for more lower-level openGL or animation engines.

Eric started off by saying that he's given talks on iPhone testing, but that just telling people what to do is not the same as letting them experience it for themselves,  so we did a Randori, where a pair starts working on some code, and every 3 minutes one person from the pair swaps out and chooses his replacement from the crowd.

What I liked about this was that I felt like I got to know the audience better, and actually watch people reason their way through the code or a testing/mocking issue.  (You know how sometimes you go to a user group, and it can be hard to get a chance to talk to others, or sometimes there is a 'know-it-all' guy, and you just want him to shut up. Knowing that you are going to have to go up there and code is a great way to silence those types)

When it was my turn,  there was an interesting issue with one of the tests that had us all stumped for a bit, but ultimately ended up being one of those problems where you need to deconstruct everything and build it back up. (The issue was that while we were trying to set fooController.textView.text = @"foobar", we hadn't instantiated a textView object, or set it on the controller yet.)
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Software Development

Icons are evil; so are menus – unless you do them right

Brian Dillard, Tuesday, November 18, 2008 @ 5:37 pm

Menus and dropdowns seem like attractive design choices because they conserve screen real estate while providing users access to a potentially large number of commands. But if you resist the easy out of menus and dropdowns, you may find that your applications become far more usable.

Survey the software you use for yourself, both browser- and desktop-based. Think about which applications provide the most invisible, effortless interfaces. I doubt it will be the ones that hide commands in complex menus and dropdown systems.

For some negative examples, let's look at Firefox and its more social cousin, Flock. Each app offers an advanced bookmark management mechanism, but the usability of that mechanism suffers in each due to over-reliance on cryptic menus.

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Software Development