Archive for the ‘software development’ category

Awesome tools for rapid UX prototypes – Letting you focus on the solution!

June 18th, 2009

Comic Life is great for creating story flows in a rough and ready way, with a little style.

Balsamiq is an excellent tool for rapidly creating purposefully low-fi wireframe mockups

Napkee enables you to import Balsamiq mockups and turn them into HTML prototypes! Lovely!

Axure is excellent for rapidly creating interactive prototypes.

Liferay Portal is a pretty awesome portlet container that, with a bit of UX (HTML, CSS and JSP) hacking, enables you to rapidly produce fully functional portals. It comes with a vast array of portlets out of the box, saving you a whole load of time.

JQueryUI is a lovely toolkit for quickly developing interactive prototypes. I’m not completely convinced by it as a production tool (heavy JS? but i could be wrong), but excellent for prototyping

Important iPhone Push Notification consideration

April 16th, 2009

A point worth noting by all iPhone developers considering the exciting opportunities of cloud-side iPhone app notifications – how much will it cost you to provide this service?

An important point to consider.

Yes, Story Driven Development has an acronym. Oh, and here’s a definition and further reading too!

January 30th, 2009

As i was asked, i happily confirm the acronym: STDD. I’ve also provided a lovely definition by Tracy Reppert and a pdf from August 2004 for more reading:

“The basic premise is that before any code is written, a team takes a story (or rough idea of a requirement) and fleshes out that story by producing an executable ’story test’.

Opponents say that STDD is ‘cowboy coding’, or ’snake oil’, or just ‘a hindrance to real work.’ Proponents argue that STDD produces the simplest system possible and is the wave of the future, the new frontier.”

All written in 2004! I’m just happy it’s finding its feet in smaller web agencies now. Well, at least the one work for (yes, i’m kind of pushing it)!

Here’s also a lovely PDF:

http://www.industriallogic.com/papers/storytest.pdf

iPhone development: Stage 1: Familiarise self with Objective C

December 24th, 2008

Thanks apple for this primer:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/gettingstarted/docs/objectivecprimer.action;jsessionid=EBE50C6510FD05380290B42E0C4E8EC6.worker10

I’ll add comments as i get through this primer.

iCode iPhone Programming Blog

December 23rd, 2008

http://icodeblog.com/

Neat!