software

Busy working on Mesquite

I have been busy working on Mesquite with Robert lately. You can follow what we’ve been up to in our development blog!

Sunny Sunday Mill Valley Groove Day from the album Honeycomb by Frank Black

The joys of C++

I have been working on some C++ code lately at work (among lots of other things) and to put it mildly, it’s been a frustrating experience coming from the Java world. Sure, I studied C++ in school. However, there’s a big difference between having studied a language and actually practiced it. I never really did anything more significant than school projects with the language and wasn’t really complaining about it, being pretty happy with Java. Not that Java is perfect either but that’s a different story…

There are lots of annoying things in C++. At least, things that annoy me. I’m More >

Ditch IE already…

Digital Proof offers to collect articles and information on how IE is bad for you, your computer and kittens… So get on with the program and ditch IE already!

456 Berea Street

bad things from the album interstate 5 CD single by The Wedding Present

Del.icio.us user interface design

How do you approach user interface design?

Lots and lots of iterations until something feels right. Avoiding features until the interface for them is apparent. Seeing how users use the existing features to do things I didn’t expect, and then making those things easier.

Joshua Schachter, answering a question from Rands in A Del.icio.us Interview

If it doesn’t feel right, the job is not done. Until your software feels natural, until interacting with the computer just flows, without having to think about it, tweak the interface. And when you think you’re done, watch your users: nothing is more rewarding for a software developer than More >

This post courtesy of Quicksilver

I tried to install 10.3.6 yesterday and for a reason or another, my laptop kernel panic’ed on me during the install. I had to reboot and wasn’t too hopeful that it would even work. Much to my surprise though, I was able to login without issue. Only noticeable problem though, no Finder, no menu bar, just floating icons at the top right of the screen and my empty Dock at the bottom right (I only use the Dock for the trash and to monitor running applications). Since I had Quicksilver installed though (and its icon was showing among the other More >

Weblog editors and crashing

inessential.com

One of the benefits of using a desktop weblog editor is crash protection.

Say you’re writing a post in your browser, and your browser crashes. The post is gone.

Say you’re writing in MarsEdit instead. You can save as a draft periodically so you can prevent a crash from losing your post.

But—even more—MarsEdit automatically recovers your post in the event of a crash, even if you didn’t save it as a draft. When you re-launch MarsEdit it will re-open the post or posts you were working on.

I concur: MarsEdit has saved my posts a couple of times already. It’s not only a More >

The Ruby on Rails conspiracy

Seems like there’s a conspiracy going on for me to look more closely at Ruby on Rails. It all started with Brian McCallister’s post.

Then, while looking at the Rails website, I noticed that references were made to Basecamp, which I had previously put in a corner of my mind a while ago as something to look at, being in a similar application segment than Mesquite. Basecamp was developed using Ruby on Rails. The plot was thickening…

Just recently, I got to meet Brian personally and he tried to convince Robert and I to use Rails to develop Mesquite…

Finally, TextMate, a much More >

Making Stattraq work better with permalinks.

I am using Stattraq to keep track of the traffic on this weblog. I installed it back in August and recently installed the ViewCount plugin. However, much to my disappointment, Stattraq doesn’t play that nice if you use permalinks. The problem lies with the fact that Stattraq in its current version does not properly put the article id in its database if permalinks are enabled: it will use the id 0. Of course, ViewCount relies on the article id to work its magic hence the problem…

To solve this issue, I decided to improve how Stattraq was handling the article id and you More >