Coder’s Eye

Thanks, Jonathan Snook for creating such a useful (and gorgeous) set of printable reference sheets for the excellent Prototype library for Javascript.
I use Prototype to support almost all my Javascripting on the net, both at work and on personal projects. It is a great library, and this reference just makes it clear how clean […]

[Read more →]

I’ve been meaning to write a Javascript “best practices” style guide for some time. Bad Javascript is just so painful to read and so easy to find that it brings a bad flavor to the whole language. I might be exaggerating, but only a little.
The Dojo Javascript Programming Conventions just released recently makes […]

[Read more →]

Web Design From Scratch has a nice, well illustrated article on Current Style in Web Design.
Of course, I don’t want to advocate always running with the herd, but in this case I’d argue that it isn’t so much the herd, but more of a pack. OK, so that isn’t such a great metaphor. […]

[Read more →]

The situation was that my wrists and fingers hurt almost all the time, and it was clearly due to computer use.I decided to do some real research with the intent to follow up by adopting a new scheme for interfacing with my computer…. I was willing to learn new keyboarding skills, even to the point of learning to chord-type.Searching for the Ergonomic Holy GrailMy solution constraints: must be possible to use for the medium-term future…. should be programmer-friendly What I came up with: retrain from qwerty to dvorak typing vary posture get a zero-force touchtyping keyboard with an integrated mouse I knew it was going to be difficult to change my keyboarding habits…. With a QWERTY layout, one can only type about 10% of the words in the English language without leaving the home row…. For example, the home row for the left hand has all the vowels, with only “Y” requiring any finger stretching, and that is with your strongest finger, the index. The right hand has “DHTNS”, which makes many word startings-and-endings immediately accesible.Here are the steps I took to switch: Bought Dvorak key labels for all three of the keyboards I use at the houseIt took about two weeks of mental pain before it “clicked” and I regained any real ability to touch type…. The stick was that I really hate wrist pain and I honestly believed the ergonomics would help (even if only marginally) decrease my pain…. I can’t honestly say how much the Dvorak has played a part in this wonderful change, since I changed a few other aspects of my approach to computer interaction at the same time…. Changing layouts allowed me to relearn some other aspects of data input, which would have been difficult to address in isolation.I am now a somewhat faster typist than I was before, and I have not lost my QWERTY skills.

[Read more →]

One thing I just don’t understand is why more people, especially framework designers, omit or skip logging. Django appears to, which is incredibly annoying to me. It is a complex framework, which makes all kinds of assumptions and relies on convention to infer a lot of functionality. That’s great, but being able […]

[Read more →]

I’ve long agreed with the point made over at ongoing about the XML Languages. Most are poorly considered ideas, entered into without understanding the enormous scope of the task. Most duplicate functionality rather than extending or utilizing something already existing and understood by millions of people and programs.
It is the famous Not Invented […]

[Read more →]

Smart Money Daily points out a great resource for website usability guidelines. Created by the US national cancer institute, it gives more than simple “give img tags ‘alt’ attributes’. Instead, it goes into why you should do so, and even more importantly, what evidence there is that this is an important guideline for […]

[Read more →]