Providing feedback in user interfaces is quite important. If you have a task, which may take a while, one of the ways to signal to the users, that the system is working, is by displaying a progress bar. If you don’t know how to make one, we do have one available for you.
It should be a surprise, but most companies moving into the internet space doesn’t seem to get the fact that less is more. 37Signals just announced they cut 66% of the features of their next product giving them:
It’s really no surprise - right? Yet so many product managers seem to insist that the 100+ pages specification is the product they need in order to bring the product to the market.
A new group has appeared on the net – the PHP Security Consortium (PHPSC). It is an international group of PHP experts dedicated to promoting secure programming practices within the PHP community. Nice. While many PHP developers make sites people are supposed to use and enjoy, few as actual education and experience in how to make secure applications and websites.
Through projects and articles, they’ll try to educate PHP developers.
Apple choose not to do a live feed from Jobs keynote at MacWorld SanFran this time, but with a little delay it’s available online. Some surprises was spoiled ahead, but there was a number of cool introductions – The Mac OS X Tiger, iPod Shuffle (flash player), Mac Mini (headless computer), iWork (office-like suite) and an update to iLife (Moives, Photos and more). I’m still looking for PowerBook updates though. Where are they?
Most developers and programmers know more than one programming language, but often do most of their development in just one language. Listening in on IRC channels on people using something other than their favourite language is often quite interesting. It’s often a common misconception, that their favoured programming language - be that perl, php or java - is the ultimate tool no matter what the challenge is. When they are forced to use something else, a large part of the development process seem dedicated to (a) bitching about how much easier this and that would be in their favoured language and (b) forcing the language they use into looking like their favoured language.