I always love reading articles by Joel Spolsky and this one is no different. User Interface Design For Programmers is an excellent look at how to begin creating usable interfaces. Many programmers find UI design to be a mysterious process and either avoid it or spend minimal time thinking about and or creating the UI, instead choosing to spend more time on what they find challenging – coding!
CodeWeavers, a company that enables developers of Windows software to easily port their applications to Linux, recently announced that with Apples upcoming move to an x86 architecture, that they will be offering a major expansion of its software porting capabilities to include support for Windows-to-Macintosh application porting.
Demetrius Nunes has created an offline version of the Rails documention that is available via a Windows Help (CHM) File. This makes the docs completely searchable and available in an easy offline format. If you use a Mac, be sure to check out the free Unix based chm viewer.
Simon Willison says that lots can be learned about the Google service by Dissecting the Google Firefox Toolbar. Getting the Page Rank and Spellchecking are a couple of features worth checking out!
You can upload multiple files with a single file element using some DOM scripting and CSS by following this very simple tutorial. The result is a very usable file upload interface!
No more batch files! Service Snapshot Manager is a sweet utility that easily lets you create profiles to start and stop different combinations of Windows services. I have 4 profiles on my development system, one for PHP development, one for Rails development, one for ASP development and finally one for developing nothing! This utility lets me switch between the profiles by clicking on an icon in my system tray. Very simple.
[link via Dan’s Shorts]
I don’t use Apple’s Dashboard. Personally even though widgets can be cool, I don’t really see the purpose or usefullness of them. What’s even worse, is that if you don’t use Dashboard, it continues to load with every start and consumes valuable CPU cycles. DashOnOff is a nice free tool that lets you turn off this feature of Tiger.
Folksonomies: A User-Driven Approach to Organizing Content is a great article by Joshua Porter that will introduce you to the concepts, pros and cons of using Folksonomies to categorize content on your sites.
37signals, the company who created Backpack and the Ruby on Rails framework, are about to release a new application named Writeboard that they are touting as The app-less web-app – Signal vs. Noise. The promo material for this new product indicates that:
What if a web-application looked more like a web-document? What if the whole “application� was a single document, a single URL? What if the interface was one page? No account, no preferences, no settings, no “navigation� in the traditional sense. What if you could email it around just as you do a photo or a file attachment?
Sounds very interesting and what is even more intriguing (at least to me) is what new goodies we’ll see introduced into the next version of Rails!
Photon is a smart, intuitive, and highly configurable iPhoto plugin that gives you the power to manage your Movable Type™, TypePad™, Blojsom and WordPress photo-blogs in the familiar surrounds of Apple iPhoto.
