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I recently had an issue in flex where I needed the click event for a component in an ItemRenderer to not bubble up to the parent list. Since the click event was being dispatched by Flex SDK code, I could not directly do this by passing false into the event’s constructor. I had hoped to find a property I could set on the object, something like “clickBubbles”, which I could set which would accomplish this.

Either that property doesn’t exist or I could not find it. My solution was to basically hijack the event and send an impersonator in its place.

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Heuristic reviews are a great tool for finding usability issues in any existing interface, from web-based to desktop. It’s a quick and relatively inexpensive way to uncover, document and prioritize usability problems.

From usability.gov:

The goal of heuristic evaluation is to find usability problems early in the design of a Web site so that improvements can be made as part of the iterative design process … The result of this analysis is a list of potential usability issues or problems.

While I use heuristic reviews and find the results to be very helpful, I’ve never been too thrilled with the final documentation. Even when formatted nicely, they’re nothing more than a laundry list with a bunch of words and numbers and no hints or ideas on how that information can be grouped together and translated over to an application. Quite frankly, after the second page my eyes do tend to glaze over. And if my eyes glaze over, I can’t even imaging how it affects the client. So I was challenged to come up with something better.

My co-worker, John McCaffrey, wanted to give his client some ideas on how to improve their site — a heuristic review but with a sort-of Cliffs Notes component that could highlight the value of the review but not induce eye fatigue. He was also looking for something more visual to grab the interest of the client and keep them there long enough to start looking at the data. He mentioned that he really likes our annotated wireframes and an idea was born. Create a mashup of annotated wireframes and heuristic evaluation.

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photo credit: fdecomite

Math is fun!

I never understand why people hate math so much.  I guess I hated history & literature as much as fans of those subjects hate math.  I remember always hearing that you would never use math in real life, which is just not true.  I use it all the time, and this post is about one of those times.

A coworker of mine is creating an iPhone app, and whenever he encounters tricky math, pulls me in, as he realizes I have fun with it.  His problem was:
given two points on a circle, find the shortest number of degrees between them
So given points at 4° and 20°, the result should be 16°.  Seems easy enough, except a few fun scenarios.  356° and 4° results in 8°, and 360° and 0° are the same.

I thought through it, and my original approach was going to figure out what quadrant each angle was in, and then do some calculations to adjust the distance to keep the answer <= 180°.  But then I realized that was going to be nasty, and then I remembered our good friend the radian.

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photo credit: FireChickenTA99

Developing an application with WinForms can lead to difficult testing scenarios.  There are a ton of  automated UI testing toolkits that essentially record workflows and replay them.  This can work, but leads to unwieldy tests, and makes it difficult to integrate them into automated tests and builds.  I recommend using the Model View Presenter (MVP) pattern for your application architecture to relieve this pain point.  Todd  Snyder from Infragistics has a nice blog entry explaining the differences between MVC and MVP patterns.  The gist is: you have a coordinating  Presenter that communicates with the View via its interface, and orchestrates the interaction between the View and the Model.  The important piece here is the View  interface.  This view interface can allow you to stub or mock the view in testing scenarios, to completely eliminate the need for any UI interaction.  As long as your UI code is used as a shell that does nothing but pass messages, this makes testing REALLY easy.

We recently built a project around the MVP architecture. Eventually we wound up creating a test harness providing us simple methods such as:
public void MouseUp(IDocumentPresenter presenter, int x, int y)
This simulated a mouse up event without actually requiring an input device or the UI that it acts upon. With simple method like these, you can build up some pretty complex tests that run quickly and don’t require any special libraries to run.

Before embarking on your next GUI framework based application, be it WinForms or other, evaluate the MVP pattern and the ease of testing that it can provide. It’s worked really well for us.

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There’s a list of deadly sins out there for just about anything related to information technology. Some have seven items, some have five, some even have nine. I haven’t seen one with 21 deadly sins yet, but I won’t be surprised if I do. Some focus on IT departments, some on unused software, some on agile software development, and quite a few on whatever they’re trying to sell you.

We’ve seen a lot in our ten years of developing software at Pathfinder, and the list that rings truest is the shortest and pithiest, from the Standish Group:

• Ambition
• Arrogance
• Ignorance
• Fraudulence
• Abstinence

Each of these is best illustrated by example:

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In just over a week, I’ll be headed off to RailsConf for my second visit.

Here’s an overview of some of the sessions I’m looking forward to.

First, of course, is my own: Below and Beneath TDD: Test-Last Development and Other Real-World Test Patterns. It’s at 2:50 on Tuesday, May 5, in Ballroom B. I’ll be talking about how Test-Driven Development can fail, how to recognize failure patterns, and how and why to move back to a successful process. No matter what your level of comfort is with testing, I think you’ll get something out of this talk. It’s going to be fun, and I’m excited about the chance to present.

I’m also going to be giving out free copies of Rails Test Prescriptions (well, it’s an ebook, I’ll be giving out free licenses). I haven’t quite worked out the exact details yet, but it’ll be similar to last year’s plan, and will involve seeing me or attending my session. Follow the book on Twitter for information about giveaways. Follow me on Twitter for general updates about the conference.

And come up and say hi — I’d love to meet people who read this blog or the Rails Prescriptions book.

Other talks and sessions that I’m particularly interested in include:

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‘Fixin’ the Start Line!’ by UHLMAN

Companies (and people) new to software development tend to think that projects start with development, as in writing the actual code, as in here’s my idea … when can I see it and btw, why am I paying you for time that you’re not coding. Most are not aware of the upfront work needed to get to the point of coding or, perhaps, even the value of it. After all, they gave you the idea so let’s see less talk and more coding.

What is some of that necessary work that’ll drive us towards development? The upfront work definitely includes requirements — the details that allow us to start writing the code. But even before the requirements are started, long before diving into the wireframes and user modeling, features list or user stories, projects need to begin with a business problem and a blue-sky idea on how to solve that problem. In short, the product concept.

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photo credit: Potato Benevolence

The recent acquisition of Sun by Oracle, and not IBM, took the community by surprise. Open source Java developers have benefited immensely from Sun’s Java and IBM’s contribution to Java space. IBM has a generally favorable view from open source community since IBM has few significant open-source contributions including those to Apache software foundation and Eclipse. When I heard about IBM’s talk of acquiring Sun, I was certainly bothered by the demise of Sun as a company but nevertheless hoped that whatever happens, Java and MySQL, and the strong community behind it, should stay largely intact. And I felt comfortable with Java landing in IBM’s lap considering its largest contribution to Java community by any corporate vendor. Oracle is a strong and focussed company but its contribution to open source world is minimal. As open source developer or company, you are also concerned about the fate of mysql. Like everybody, I am trying to make sense of what this will mean for the open source developers.

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I m sure many of the .NET programmers who have worked on building .NET windows applications must have had a chance to play around with the MSI/Deployment Project. This is the built-in project that the framework offers to build installers for deploying and installing windows applications. I think this project provides decent capabilities for packaging and installing windows applications but definitely has some limitations.

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Touching Static by ooOJasonOoo

I have kind of a long standing rant-thing about static languages vs. dynamic languages, defensive programming, exceptions, and the best use of a developer’s time and effort. It’s been dormant for a while, but Sharad’s comments on static v. dynamic, which I largely agree with, and this short piece by David McLaughlin on defensive programming gave me an itchy ranting finger.

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