Blue Sky On Mars (Java)Kevin Dangoor's Weblog of Technology, Entertainment and LifePerformance improvements in unreleased products- May 20, 2005 There's the old question "if a tree falls and no one hears it, did it make a noise" Just as goofy: "if you improve the performance of an unreleased application, did it actually get faster" I'm definitely in the "premature optimization is the root of all evil" camp, but the time has come for some performance work on Zesty News. I currently have well over 1,000 unread items, and it takes a few seconds to bring up the main view. Fixing this does make the code more complex, which is why I'm glad I.http://www.blueskyonmars.com/archives/001752.html SIFR: Great looking typography on the web- May 13, 2005 Wow. No, I mean wow. SIFR, an LGPLed combination of JavaScript, CSS and Flash, let's you easily use any font for text on your pages, regardless of whether the user has the font. It leaves your pages fully accessible and searchable, and it drops and and removes very easily. Look at the example page to see the kind of coolness I'm talking about. (Link via Ian Landsman.)http://www.blueskyonmars.com/archives/001741.html Mouseover DOM inspector- May 12, 2005 Do you have a spiffy new AJAX page that you're trying to troubleshoot under IE Check out the Mouseover DOM Inspector for a way to analyze what objects are sitting on your page at that moment. (Via Ned Batchelder.)http://www.blueskyonmars.com/archives/001738.html Joel explains Hungarian notation- May 11, 2005 Joel Spolsky, as always, is entertaining and takes a bit of exposition to get to the point in his latest article: Making Wrong Code Look Wrong. In the article, he makes a differentiation between "Apps Hungarian" notation and "Systems Hungarian" notation, and now it makes sense to me. Whenever I saw people talking about Hungarian Notation, I always saw the Systems version which seemed completely nonsensical: why would someone have a variable name that just duplicates information that you've...http://www.blueskyonmars.com/archives/001737.html The tale of making Zesty News cross-platform- May 11, 2005 As I mentioned earlier, Zesty News has a browser-based interface. But, Zesty News is not a web-based program: it&8217;s a desktop application. You install it on your computer and access the program through your web browser. So, I get to deal with the intracacies of cross-browser compatibility and the deployment aspects of a desktop application. Joy! But, it goes beyond that. While I can imagine telling a geek friend, &8220;yeah, you just point your browser at http:localhost:xxxx and there you.http://www.blueskyonmars.com/archives/001735.html |