regular expressions
Whenever the regular expression topic comes up, I unashamedly recommend the best tool on the market for parsing and building regular expressions – RegexBuddy. But there’s one tiny problem. RegexBuddy costs money. I’ve always encountered vague resistance when recommending commercial tools that I considered best of breed. The source
nostalgia
I think I spent most of my childhood – and a large part of my life as a young adult – desperately wishing I was in a video game arcade. When I finally obtained my driver’s license, my first thought wasn’t about the girls I would take on dates, or
web development
As I work on UI prototypes for the new web venture, I’ve been brainstorming names for the web site we’re building. I’ve surveyed some of the finest minds in the software developer community (for very small values of “fine”), and we’ve come to a collective realization:
version control
When it comes to readily available, free source control, I don’t think you can do better than Subversion at the moment. I’m not necessarily advocating Subversion; there are plenty of other great source control systems out there – but few can match the ubiquity and relative simplicity of Subversion.
mousing surface
This post, and its comments, were updated in 2015 to reflect current choices and opinions. Hi there. I want to talk to you about ducts.* Sorry, when I said ducts, I meant mousepads. As I have a long-standing mouse fetish, you might not be surprised to learn that I also
user experience
We’re currently in the midst of building the new web property I alluded to in a previous post. Before I write a single line of code, I want to have a pretty clear idea of what the user interface will look like first. I’m in complete agreement with
programming languages
Our old pal A. K. Dewdney first introduced the world to Core War in a series of Scientific American articles starting in 1984. (Full page scans of the articles, including the illustrations, are also available.) Core War was inspired by a story I heard some years ago about a mischievous
software development concepts
(Update: This piece originally ran on April Fools’ day; although the content of the post is not an April Fools’ joke, the retro styling definitely was. View a screenshot of how this post looked on April 1, 2008) I occasionally follow Jamie Zawinski’s blog. Jamie’s an interesting guy.
user-experience
You may know Bruce Tognazzini from his days as Apple Computer employee #66, or perhaps his classic books Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design. He’s still quite relevant today; his list of the ten most persistent UI bugs is an excellent reminder that many of the biggest
technology trends
I lived in the Denver area at the time Denver International Airport’s completely computer automated baggage system was unveiled in 1994. The troubled development of this system was big local news. The premise of Denver’s plan was as big as the West. The distance from a centralized baggage
user experience
Despite Apple’s historical insistence that the computer mouse should only have one button – which led to the highly unfortunate convention of double-clicking – most mice have more than one button today. In his classic book The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin revisits the earliest days of his involvement with the Mac
unicode
These are available as bumper stickers and t-shirts: Here’s my rhetorical question to you: why is this funny? * The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) * There Ain’t No Such Thing as Plain Text * On the Goodness of Unicode