Case Study: Poor Web Usability and Design

Posted on October 7, 2008 by engfer| 5 Comments

At the time of writing this article, I couldn’t find a more perfect example than the landing page of the open source software distribution web site, Sourceforge.net. Now, I’m not really sure what web usability and design standards (if they even used any) their designers/developers were using when they made this page, but I am going to pick apart and explain some of the problems that I see as poor selections and decisions for the landing page. Continue reading →

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Posted in Usability

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Why Rapid Prototyping Generally Sucks For a Developer

Posted on September 23, 2008 by engfer| Leave a comment

Rapid prototyping can be a wonderful thing for involving the end customer in the design and development process; it can make them happy (it shows progress) which makes you money; however, if you have the wrong kind of customer, your life as a developer can becoming a living nightmare. The horror is increased by several orders of magnitude if you have the requirement to produce fully functional prototypes.

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Posted in Rants, Software Design

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Google Chrome CSS Selector Speeds Compared

Posted on September 15, 2008 by engfer| 14 Comments

Google somewhat surprised us all and released it’s web browser on Sept. 2, 2008; most users of the shiny new browser have been extremely impressed with the initial speed and features. I have to say that even I am impressed by this new browser (as long as I’m not behind a corporate firewall).  Since the CNET article came out about the extreme speed of Google Chrome, I immediately wondered how it would perform against other browsers in the mootools.net tool Slickspeed CSS selectors test, so I decided to do some benchmarking of my own.

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Posted in CSS, Javascript

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90′s Male Thunderbird Spotted in the Wild

Posted on September 15, 2008 by engfer| 3 Comments

A 10-15 year old blue male Thunderbird was spotted prowling the cement prairies in Arlington, TX.  It is currently the mating season for the Thunderbirds; moreover, judging from the color of the genitalia, we believe that there is a physical problem with this male because it seems that “no mates will accept him”.

Seriously, why do people do this? Especially on a Thunderbird?

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Posted in Rants

The Main Reason For JavaScript Unreadability

Posted on September 12, 2008 by engfer| Leave a comment

One of the things that I have noticed about JavaScript is that there are many ways to solve the same problem (sometimes I even think of it like perl’s answer to browser-side scripting); one one side, this is definitely a good thing.

However, not only are there many ways to solve the same problem, but everyone that tries to solve that same problem produces JavaScript code that is so radically different from any previous attempt at the problem that it makes these problems seem more difficult than they really are.
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Google Chrome Behind a Corporate Proxy- A Long Way to Go

Posted on September 2, 2008 by engfer| 4 Comments

Google just opened its website to download Google Chrome, so we decided to go ahead and download it and give it a whirl behind a corporate proxy.

Well, the outcome wasn’t as bad as we initially thought, but we did see that it has a long way to go before prime time.

Here’s a short roundup of the praises and problems I have experienced to this point…

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Should I Pay for Additional Hosting for myNetflix?

Posted on September 2, 2008 by engfer| 8 Comments

I developed the myNetflix application in mind for easily viewing (not editing) your Netflix queue’s on Facebook so that your friends and others could view your movies and you could easily share them or add them to your queue; now I am hitting a road block because I am trying to advance the application but it will likely need more dedicated power and CPU time than with my shared hosting on engfers.com, which translates to more $$$ for a better hosting plan.

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15 Books To Make You a Better Software Engineer (Not Web-Developer Designer)

Posted on August 29, 2008 by engfer| 7 Comments

<strike>Web Developer</strike> Software Engineer

We were starting to get sick of the “X# Design Websites That Web Designers Need To Follow!!11!!” articles and other similar items pertaining to web development design coming through the pike on the social news sites like Digg and Delicious (we won’t even bring up reddit… try reducing the stories to programming), so we decided to do something about it.  There is nothing wrong with those articles, but every once in a while it would be good to see a resource that talks about enterprise design; unfortunately, not everyone is a freelance web-developer.

So we decided to put together a list of books that we thought you should read to make you a better software engineer… Continue reading →

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Posted in Software Design

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JavaScript Is Not “Truly” Object Oriented

Posted on August 29, 2008 by engfer| 7 Comments

What do you mean? You are wrong, JavaScript is an Object Oriented Programming language!

NO… IT’S… NOT!

If anyone else tries to tell you that, you need to slap them! It has object-oriented like features but it is not object-oriented in nature!

Prove it!
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Posted in Javascript

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The Proper Way to Align Images and Icons with Anchor Tags

Posted on August 28, 2008 by engfer| 6 Comments

How many times have some of you tried to add an icon image to an anchor tag (link: <a>) or make some other random image part of that link and have had one-heck-of-a-time trying to align the text of the link and the image (<img>) tag?

I know that I have (especially when each browser treats the vertical aligning differently)…

Well here is the better way of aligning them that will make your life at least 10 times easier using 0 img tags and 1 anchor tag with CSS styling… Continue reading →

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Posted in CSS

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