One fix installations stuck at ‘Preparing…’ Since moving to Snow Leopard, I’ve noticed an innumerable number of times where software installations would get stalled at the “Preparing…” stage. If you’ve noticed it too, chances are you’re an iPhone developer, too… It turns out the simple fix for this problem is to quit the iPhone Simulator, [...]
“Typical” computer science workspaces off-putting to women This is something that has concerned me greatly. In part, because my wife (who graduated from Caltech and who is smarter than I am at mathematics) would do quite well as a software developer–and she won’t touch the industry with a 10 foot pole. And in part because, [...]
Here’s a user interface design anti-pattern I just ran into. So I’m trying to complete my company’s on-line sexual harassment training program. I guess they teach you how to be better at engaging in sexual harassment; I dunno. And the reason why I don’t know is because when I logged into the program using Safari [...]
After watching Objectified again a few days ago I started formulating an idea of the concept of “Design”. It seems to me there are two separate concepts of “Design” that have become mashed together. The first concept, which to me is interesting but somewhat useless, is the idea of design as art or as artistic [...]
I ran into a minor issue yesterday with an application I’m working on in my spare time. The application itself has a state machine underneath the surface which sends messages to the UI layer at certain state changes. One of those state changes triggers a UI animation to display the results. And the animation was [...]
Cocoa with Love: Demystifying NSApplication by recreating it
Upgrading to v2.0 of GWT under Eclipse, here’s some of the things I encountered: (1) For some reason my old 1.7.1 GWT projects are hopelessly broken; I can’t seem to debug them. Creating a new v2.0 GWT project seems to work fine. And I haven’t a clue as to why my v1.7.1 GWT projects, when [...]
I just spent the morning putting together a syllabus document describing the design parameters of the user interface I’m working on, complete with citations references to a number of research articles describing different aspects of visual design, usability and the importance of speed. In the next few weeks I have members of a team I’m [...]
I don’t know why it didn’t dawn on me that this would work. After all, it’s not like I’ve been using C++ for the past 18-mumble-years. (Oh, wait; I have. Meh.) So we define a class AClass, BClass and CClass such that AClass has an operator that converts it to BClass and CClass, and BClass [...]
So the people I’ve worked with hate Eclipse because Eclipse insists upon imposing (by default) a standard project structure on a Java project. It gets in the way and prohibits the flexibility necessary to get work done. And they love Maven because it imposes a standard project structure on a Java project, so (to quote [...]