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Entries tagged with development:

Offshore development spam

Oct 19th

Like probably most of my competitors, I get unsolicited offers of cheap software development services on a regular basis. But this recent email stood out like a sore thumb. And not because of typos and grammatical inadequacies either:More >>

If architects had to work like web designers

Sep 21st

I got the following sent to me via email last week and I thought I'd share it with you. I've since found out that it's been doing the rounds for a couple of years at least but it's only just caught up with me:More >>

The irony of Mojavi

May 25th, 2009

How ironic that the folks behind Mojavi, one of the oldest object-oriented PHP development frameworks, don't use their own toolkit to build their website.More >>

On illogical naming conventions

May 18th, 2009

I spent a couple of days looking under the bonnet of Codeigniter, one of the most popular of the PHP frameworks out there.More >>

Naming procedure line labels

Apr 13th, 2009

I recently worked on improving a VB6 application, and as part of the task, I decided to clean up the way procedures used line labels.More >>

What Joomla can learn from Wordpress

Mar 16th, 2009

Over at playingwithwire.com, Viktor Petersson explains why Wordpress is a better platform than Joomla, from a usability perspective.More >>

Why you don't want that new web project

Dec 15th, 2008

Zeldman offers some humourous, yet frighteningly real, signs you don't want that new web project.More >>

Why bother with development frameworks?

Nov 3rd, 2008

Having worked with a couple of web application frameworks over the last couple of years, I got thinking.More >>

Stupid browser no more?

Mar 10th, 2008

Good news for standards based developers. Microsoft have now decided that IE8 will comply with web standards by default.More >>

Shop smart and save?

Jan 21st, 2008

So says the slogan on most of the product pages at Getprice, the Aussie online comparison shopping resource. Their contact page event tells us that:More >>

Westpac's website woes continue

Sep 8th, 2007

The SMH Blog reports on Westpac's continuing problems: Thousands of Westpac customers went without their internet banking and online broking services for most of yesterday following a website glitch which, as of this morning, has still not been completely fixed.More >>

Click on the logo and break the website

Mar 16th, 2007

On the web, it's standard practice to have your logo a clickable link which takes the visitor to your home page. Although I have seen the occasional business website which doesn't allow you to click on the logo, I haven't seen any that break the website when the logo is clickable.More >>

Fabulous Firebug

Jan 10th, 2007

Is this the future of web debugging? I think so.More >>

Better screen cursor management in VB

Dec 8th, 2006

One of the more subtle aspects of traditional VB application development is controlling the screen cursor when you're performing some lengthy operation which might involve multiple functions or subroutines. The polite thing to do is obviously set the screen cursor to an hourglass just before you commence a processing task which is likely to take more than second or so. The polite thing is to also switch it back to an arrow, once you're finished.More >>

API Guide

Oct 10th, 2006

Sooner or later, every VB programmer needs to be able to plugin to the native Windows framework to perform some task which isn't possible with their development platform. The KPD-Team from Belgium, offers a nicely documented and searchable database of over 900 useful functions which make up the API-Guide:More >>

JavaScript with XHTML

Oct 4th, 2006

Having recently ported some HTML pages to XHTML, we were a little surprised that our favourite validator continued to warn us that our very simple one-line javascript code was no longer correct:More >>

Programmers excuses

Sep 5th, 2006

Recently, I stumbled on this amusing list of things developers have said, when their software doesn't quite work as intended:More >>

Document your PHP projects with PHPXRef

Jul 25th, 2006

PHPXref is a handy developer tool, written by Gareth Watts, which cross-references the source code in PHP projects and creates readable HTML documentation which can be viewed with any web browser. The main features of PHPXref are:More >>

Award winners fail the website accessibility test

Jun 23rd, 2006

One of the most important aspects of public website design is to ensure that online information and services are accessible by all people, including those with disabilities. In Australia, the Disability Discrimination Act (1992), for instance, requires that all websites that receive federal funding be accessible to users with a disability.More >>

Email obfuscator

Feb 20th, 2006

Displaying mailto links in web pages is much less widespread than it used to be in the good old days, largely thanks to the proliferation of web scraping spam harvesters.More >>

Sony software: dumb, dodgy and dishonest?

Dec 20th, 2005

For as long as the their executives continue to attend stupidity classes, Sony will continue to cop a battering from the consumers. Their Star Wars Galaxies online game has earned comments like:More >>

Ticketmaster: useful, unless you want to buy tickets

Dec 16th, 2005

A couple of days ago I attempted to purchase some tickets for the second U2 concert at Telstra Dome, next March.More >>

How much is a website?

Dec 9th, 2005

After some six years of web development, I still get the I want a website, how much will it cost question on a regular basis. Over the years, I have learnt to reply with:More >>

VB grows up

Oct 28th, 2005

For experienced VB.NET developers this isn't really anything new but having spent most of my time in the last five years writing web applications in PHP, I have to admit that I'm a bit of a late starter in this area. Having just recently worked on a new project using the .NET framework, I can tell you that as a former Visual Basic developer, I'm really impressed.More >>

Westpac crippled feedback page

Oct 21st, 2005

Recently, while attempting to use the Westpac website for online banking, I experienced some problems. Not wanting to phone their hotline, I attempted to contact them via email. Like so many other larger organisations, Westpac don't publish their support email addresses, insisting you use their online feedback form instead.More >>

Top design stupidities of 2005

Oct 19th, 2005

According to Jakob Nielsen's recent article, things haven't changed all that much in web design over the years. It seems that selfishness, ignorance and sometimes even downright stupidity still persist and are becoming a common pattern. In order of infamy:More >>

Mozilla autocomplete bug

Oct 12th, 2005

I recently came across an annoying little bug which seems to affect all Mozilla based browsers, including the current version (1.07) of Firefox. It seems to happen when you have a form text input field and you're using Javascript to validate whether the user has entered anything into that input field. So, for instance if you had a text input field like this:More >>

Free software

Oct 5th, 2005

With so much confusion about the free software and open source software models, I think it's important to reiterate what is meant by those terms, and specifically what is meant by the word free.More >>

XP manifest files

Sep 27th, 2005

Even though Windows XP supports skinnable interfaces, Visual Basic 6 applications will not automatically inherit the new look and feel. This is not surprising, considering VB6 has been around long before Windows XP came out. What is surprising though, is that your VB.NET applications also will not automatically inherit the new look.More >>

Microsoft move in on LAMP

Aug 26th, 2005

Microsoft is going to release Visual Studio 2005 Express in 2006. As much as I am tempted, I won't comment on that by the way. It will cost somewhere around AUD$89 and the word is that it may be released free as part of some promotions.More >>