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Software Development, Human-Computer Interaction, Projects…

Posts filed under “Software Development”

Tuio.js: Multitouch and tangible interaction in the web browser

Tuio.js is a JavaScript implementation of the TUIO library for multitouch and tangible interaction in the web browser. It brings a 1:1 port of the original TUIO Java library. How it works TUIO is based on the OSC protocol and usually transferred via UDP. Tuio.js uses node.js and Websockets (Socket.IO) to push OSC/TUIO messages to […]

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Why Facebook App Development is Seriously Flawed

Recently, the facebook API has been voted »Worst API« in a developer survey. Bad news first: It really is the worst API (or at least the worst API that we have worked with). Good news: It would be quite straightforward for facebook to drastically improve the overall app development experience by working on at least […]

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Code Like You Mean It

Very good presentation by Dan North about »Deliberate Discovery: Code Like You Mean It«. »Ignorance is multivariate« and »We’re ignorant about our ignorance« – yes, based on past project experience, I guess I can confirm that! ;) He also mentions an interesting book called »A mind of its own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives«…

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JavaScript Development vs. Flex Development (and why today, web development sucks…)

Blog post titles with »vs« in it are often quite controversial. Most of the time, eliminating bias in those posts is neither desired nor possible anyway. Same here. However, having worked on real-world projects both using Ruby on Rails/HTML/JavaScript and Flex/AS3, I think that I’m able to kind of compare these different ways of developing […]

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Outstanding Book on Software Development

The average software developer reads less than one job-related book per year. This may be true or may not be true. I have no proof for this claim, I just heard or read it »somewhere«. Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It does not have an answer either but sheds lights on […]

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Ruby Development on Windows

Several months ago, I set a Ruby development environment up on Windows but quickly realised that people were right saying that it doesn’t work well: I had lots of crashes, installation of some gems was tricky, and the Ruby version didn’t play well with the Rails version at that time. So I installed VirtualBox and […]

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How to be a Programmer

»To be a good programmer is difficult and noble. The hardest part of making real a collective vision of a software project is dealing with one’s coworkers and customers.« When a book about programming starts with this software development truth, it’s a good sign that it is worth reading. Robert L Read’s short book »How […]

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Asynchronous Callback Functions in FlexUnit

FlexUnit provides support for asynchronous testing with the Async class. While this class works well for event driven tests, it doesn’t support callback functions like you might want it to. A typical event driven asynchronous test looks like this:

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Excellent Book on Software Development

Just want to quickly point out an excellent reading for all software developers, architects, team leads or project managers: »Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are not the Point« by Mary and Tom Poppendieck. Although there is a chapter about technical excellence that covers architecture, TDD, evolutionary development etc., you won’t any code in it (a […]

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Faster parallel MXMLC compilation using Ant

Whenever you have a Flex project consisting of several modules, you can take advantage of compiling those modules in parallel – provided that they don’t depend on each other – using Ant and the Ant-Contrib tasks. In a project with five modules, I’ve seen a speed increase of about 30% compared to normal sequential compilation. […]

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