Author Archives: admin

A comment about commenting

#1, #2, #4, and #5 in these Five Rules for Writing Good Code are right on the money, but the edict against comments in #3 is shortsighted. A concise, five-line function following language and framework conventions can still benefit from a comment explaining why the function works a certain way, when it should be used, and what other related functions should be looked at. Sometimes your audience is unfamiliar with the language or the framework or the project and needs to make a change quick; inline comments will help them make it the right change.

Google Wave is not for you

Sounds like Google Wave might actually be pretty useful for:

  1. non-technical people in corporate environments who are
  2. sloppy with email and
  3. use email for lots of collaboration but
  4. aren’t familiar with all the tools and process that tech companies are accustomed to using (wikis, bug-trackers, IRC, version control, archived mailing lists, etc.).

In other words, non-technical, corporate environments.

MiniMash looking for beta testers

Some friends of mine are looking for early beta testers for MiniMash, their online video editing and publishing site. If any of my early-adopter readers out there are interested in video editing, or interested in trying out an application pushing the rich internet application envelope (video editing!), drop me an email, and I’ll get you into the early round of testing.

Goodbye to Google Groups

John Resig, creator of jQuery, rips Google Groups a new one. Not using Gmail’s awesome anti-spam technology in Google Groups only creates problems for Google Groups users who aren’t also Gmail users. Google has become so enmeshed in (and is profiting so much from) their own monoculture that they no longer need to care about how their products interface with the rest of the world.

10/GUI

Pretty cool proof of concept video for 10/GUI, combining multi-touch and a new approach to window management.

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

This feels like something Apple might ship with OS X if they didn’t have to worry about alienating existing users. I already tend to arrange my windows (and OS X’s Dock) horizontally, with application drawers on the left and the right for constant visibility when other windows are on top. Two hand, ten-finger multi-touch is definitely on the horizon.

Like wide-screen or two-monitor desktops, the primacy of the horizontal axis in 10/GUI takes full advantage of the human field of vision being much wider than it is tall. But I wonder how (and if) you can change a window’s width, and also how it would deal with smaller windows (like preferences dialogs).

(Via Dustin.)