Dynamic User Interfaces

I'm having lots of discussion on building user interfaces dynamically. Here are the links I was talking about.

In the Longhorn world there's XAML - http://longhorn.msdn.microsoft.com/lhsdk/core/overviews/about%20xaml.aspx

In the GNOME world there's Glade/Libglade - http://glade.gnome.org/ and http://www.jamesh.id.au/software/libglade/.

In the Mozilla world there's XUL - http://www.xulplanet.com/, http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xul/ and Rapid Application Development with Mozilla.

The first one is vapourware until 2006 (2007?). The first two are reasonably tied to their respective platforms of Windows and Linux. The third is cross platform (built with the blood, sweat and tears of Netscape employees and Mozilla contributors). And there's also the in-house proprietary API that we've got.

Do we switch, or maintain the existing code base?

tech/code | 30 Oct 2004 | #

Great Hackers vs No Great Hackers

Via this submission to Joel's upcoming Best Software Essays of 2004 book, I learned of 2 really good essays contrasting whether you want to hire a great hacker or a professional software developer.

Essay on hiring Great Hackers - http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

Essay on hiring professional software developers - http://software.ericsink.com/entries/No_Great_Hackers.html

Graham's essay covers more ground, and rambles, but is excellent. Very interesting to see the defensive responses of people who seem to have a bent against people who code for fun more than code for a living. Perhaps they know they aren't great hackers :-)

That's not to say that Sink's essay doesn't say plenty of good stuff - indeed creating teams that work together to meet your customer's needs is vital to the success of any software business (see Peopleware on that point) especially for small ISVs.

But in practice, every software company needs both Hackers and "professionals". You need people who'll do the boring stuff so that the product gets out the door, and you need the trailblazers who will do the amazing stuff to get you the market in the first place. I think I said something like that before, but in regard to open-source vs proprietary development models. Bringing hackers and "professionals" together and forming a close-knit team is what a good Software Team Lead does. And they're as rare as hen's teeth.

Footnote: The exception that proves the rule is Google. I keep reading about this incredible team they have of highly innovative people. The only Google-ite I know is Marc, and he fits that mold.

tech/code | 29 Oct 2004 | #

Have you cut code today?

There are lots of people around me who are day-job software engineers - clock in by 9, clock out by 5, do the job and go home - they certainly don't waste time reading books or writing code at home.

For me, it's different. I code because it's something that I enjoy to do. I'll trade sleep for coding time - the day just isn't complete unless I've written some code.

Sometimes working at a big company as a software engineer, I spent a lot of time writing documents, attending meetings, triaging bugs, assigning work packages to my team, playing politics, writing an RFP or suffering compolsory training on some irrelevant topic. All these other things are necessary evils when you work at a big company.

At the end of the day though, I put up with all these things because eventually I get to do what I love to do - cut code. And writing software is what they are ultimately paying me to do. When you interview they don't test you out on how to write a document or attend a meeting - they want to know if you can code. Why then do big companies divert their software development staff to these other activities? As it has been said many times, a software developer does not a good manager make. At least most of the time.

And I'm a software developer - the longer I'm in this industry the surer I am. Why? Because if I haven't cut some code today, I'm just not happy.

tech/code | 26 Oct 2004 | #

The past weekend

A very nice weekend was just had by the Davies in Chicago. Lots of shopping on Saturday morning (because it was raining) - spent up big at Old Navy, Randhurst Mall, and Circuit City.

On Sunday it was beautiful weather, so in the afternoon, we drove to downtown straight from church. Feeling adventerous, we went via the I-94 instead of the I-90 - without a map. We didn't get lost, so I was pretty happy with my navigation skills. We visited Lincoln Park, 1200 acres of open space forming Chicago's largest park. We walked around the Clock Tower and found the zoo but ran out of time. It was very beautiful down by the lake, must do this again before it gets cold.

Footnote: I forgot to mention one important shop we visited, IKEA, which was amazing. From 10am 'till 10pm that store is full with people buying stuff - probably stuff they don't need too :) (28/10/2004)

travel/chicago | 26 Oct 2004 | #

Online photography course

Garrett LeSage posted about Jodie Coston's Free photography course at the morgueFile.

I'm bookmarking, because if I can find some free time, I'd really like to take better photos. Buying this might help, but I need to get the most out what I have beforehand.

photos | 23 Oct 2004 | #

Euro-Patents

The issue of software patents continues to be a strongly-debated issue world-wide in the IT industry.

In Australia, Linux Australia and the OSIA are continuing to highlight the dangers of software patents in a Open Source forum with the legal world.

In Europe, Red Hat, MySQL and others are contributing to the No Software Patents campaign to stop Europe following the same mistakes as the US.

Reading No Software Patents led me to this:

This is sobering.

tech/IP | 22 Oct 2004 | #

Same, but different.

Everything is the USA is different to Australia. Everything. But at the same time it's all just the same.

For example, take TV. We have Comcast cable TV at home (it came with the apartment) with some 80 channels. At home, we have 5 channels (7, 9, 10, ABC and SBS). That's quite a bit different. Yet why is it so that there is often nothing on TV worth watching either here or in Australia? :-)

Same with politics. People don't like what Bush has done, but don't like what Kerry stands for. Substitute Howard for Bush, and Latham for Kerry and it's just the same. Even the election result is likely to be the same - the conservatives will be returned. So how are they different? The Australian elections showed that Australia has a vibrant upper house with multiple party representation, where minority views can get aired (e.g. the emergence of the Greens and Family First parties), whereas in the USA it's strictly a 2 party system, and where there is even less difference between the parties. I think Australia's system is better.

There's also the difference in service industries. In the USA walk into a shop and the staff bend over backwards to help you. It's quite a contrast to Australia when sales staff can be even rude (in comparison) to potential buyers. It's been quite an eye-opener for me. Of course the shops are all the same in both places - trying to make you want to buy stuff that you don't really need.

Church is different too - we visited Willow Creek this past weekend and had a great time, just like at our home church back in Australia. Both churches are trying to reach out to their communities, and present a message relevant for today. They are different though on scale. Willow Creek is enormous.

Even light switches are different. Up is on in the USA and off in Australia, and vice versa :-)

travel/chicago | 21 Oct 2004 | #

Cool Mono Apps

Edd writes on Seven Cool Mono Apps, which interestingly enough, has some overlap to my post to LinuxSA today.

tech/code | 20 Oct 2004 | #

Chicago Photos up

First set of Chicago 6 month trip photos available at http://michaeldavies.org/gallery/chicago6months.

travel/chicago | 19 Oct 2004 | #

Out with the Xircom, in with the Linksys

We now Cable internet... not without a small hiccup though.

After 4 years my Xircom RBEM56G-100 bit the dust - it never worked properly in Chicago. Of course this immaculate timing meant that my cable internet sat unused for 24 hours since shadowfax didn't have an onboard NIC.

Having Circuit City, Best Buy and CompUSA within 3 miles of home is a wonderful thing when you are in the market for electronics. I picked up a Linksys PCM200 for a very cheap price - plugged it in and it just worked (tulip driver). Nice when that happens.

meta | 16 Oct 2004 | #

2 weeks down

The Davies family have survived 2 weeks here! Tomorrow is what we're looking forward to - Saturday!

As long as the weather is favourable, we'll drive north on route 12 into Wisconsn to see the "colors[sic] of Fall".

Independant of the weather, we'll make our first family visit to Woodfield Mall, which just has to be seen to be believed. J will certainly enjoy the crocodigle (crocodile for everyone above 3 year of age).

travel/chicago | 16 Oct 2004 | #

Legacy Windows DLL signatures

Useful reference to find method signatures in legacy Windows DLLs: http://www.pinvoke.net/

Shamefully, this is a IE-only. Interestingly it is a wiki.

tech/code/C-Sharp | 15 Oct 2004 | #

Book Review: User Interface Design for Programmers

Last night my copy of User Interface Design for Programmers arrived in the mail from Amazon. I finished it just a little before midnight - I couldn't put it down! Joel of Joel on Software hits the UI mark with this book. There are many original observations about what makes an application usable, concepts that aren't difficult, non-intuitive, nor surprising, but enumerated together like this in just 144 pages (including index) is rare.

I've already emailed my boss asking if the company can buy a copy to give to the development team back home.

One highlight for me was on options dialogs:

"When you are designing and you try and abdicate your responsibility by forcing the user to decide something, you're not doing your job."

"... This doesn't mean eliminating all choice. ... There's another category of choice that that people seem to like: the ability to change the visual look of things without really changing the behavior. Everybody loves WinAmp skins; everybody sets theior desktop background to a picture. Since the choice affects the visual look without affecting the way anything functions, and since users are completely free to ignore the choice and get their work done anyway, this is a good use of options."

This caps off a great chapter explaining why functionality options should be minimised - the default should just work. It's like customising your emacs or vim extensively, works great until you need to use another machine and then you need to tar up your configuration and port it to a new machine. Sometimes it's just better to learn the defaults, and stick to them because your productivity will increase because the defaults are always there and they work all the time. (BTW, that's an argument to use vi[m] - it's always there :-P

Other ideas that are gold are Activity Based Planning, Imaginary Users, hallway usability testing, "Days are Seconds", "Months are Minutes", and "Seconds are Hours". You'll have to read the book to work out what they are. Chapter 16, Tricks of the Trade is also gold. Stuff that I'll use at work today.

Overall, a great book, a must have on your shelf. It's my latest addition to my Essential Books collection.

tech/books | 15 Oct 2004 | #

Look out for beagles

I'm still playing around with Beagle (wiki, planet) when I can find the time - I really like what these Novell guys are doing. The ideas they're coming up with are getting mirrored elsewhere - I've found that I now can't live without the copycat LookOut for OutLook at work when I'm compelled to use this abbomination of an MUA.

tech/code | 14 Oct 2004 | #

The US Medical System

So I was quite a bit sick the last couple of days - ear infection, infected throat and conjunctivitis. Being overseas in Chicago for less than a week made this more difficult than it should have been - trying to get medical attention without knowing the full details of your employer-provided medical insurance means that everyone wants to charge you full price.

A simple trip to a family doctor (a GP in Australian-lingo) costs USD 151. Eye drops and some anti-biotics costs a total of USD 122. That's a total of AUD 380! That would have cost me AUD 30 for the doctor and maximum AUD 40 for the medicine. I should be able to claim back all but USD 100 (AUD 140), but that's still double the Australian price!

I know the aim of the 2 systems is different - Australia aiming to have affordable healthcare for all and the USA aiming to have the best healthcare in the world, but this is ridiculous. How can anyone afford to get sick over here unless they are earning amazing amounts of money?

tech/misc | 14 Oct 2004 | #

A small bright spark

There was one good thing about yesterday - I discovered that the local grocery store, Jewel, sells Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

Woohoo!

travel/chicago | 09 Oct 2004 | #

Fun with a rash

So had no fun last night with the company paid-for health scheme - J had a rash and we wanted some advice, so we called up the 24 hour emergency advice line and was refused service. "But my company is paying for this?!?"    "We don't have any record of you in our system - contact your HR department - we won't help you"

Nothing like being in a foreign country, at night, needing medical assistance and being refused it. Not happy with my employer today.

We ended up getting advice from people who would normally have charged for it, but hearing our sob story of being Australians in the US for only 24 hours, they helped us without cost. J is ok, might still need to see a doctor, but that's easier to do during the day.

travel/chicago | 09 Oct 2004 | #

Safely here in sweet home Chicago

Arrived in Chicago safely late on Monday night 30 hours after we left Adelaide. Of course I couldn't tell anyone about it because once we were dropped off at the appartment I discovered that international phone calls were barred. There was no internet. I had no car. And there was no food in the house.

Of course we survived. A local call to a pizza bar saved us. And it wasn't bad pizza anyway :-P

Got the rental car the next morning (actually we had 3 different Avis branches contact me - I could've had 3 rental cars that day :-) Then had to find my way back to the appartment and the family. No real problems driving on the wrong side of the road - I guess it's only been a couple of months since I was last out here. Didn't get lost.

Went grocery shopping, spent a fortune, had a look around. Still nice weather, somewhere in the 20's. Jetlag not too bad.

Started work, some chaos. Starbucks in the company cafe helped. Chewed 4 days of work email, discovered that my domain was offline again, rang Australia to get a manual reboot. And since you're reading this, everything must be working again :-)

travel/chicago | 08 Oct 2004 | #