Category Archives: Software development

Prototyping

2007-12-01 – 08:27

Via Steve Northover’s Inside SWT:
The week was an almost perfect example of prototyping. The code we have is utter crap and we have cut every corner, however, we have learned the technology and explored the area. Prototyping is about reducing risk using a short term, high energy, low quality approach to prove that a solution [...]

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Loading data model with Fixtures in Rails

2007-10-21 – 14:26

I’m putting together a smallish data model in Rails. Some of my data is pre-existing, including a bunch of Items, some of which have SubItems. I found some hints on how to represent the initial data with YAML and to piggy-back on the Fixture functionality to load it in a migration, all from Agile Web [...]

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Economics of Cynicism

2007-10-06 – 13:43

For some reason I thought Joel Spolsky was anti-Apple and pro-Microsoft. Now I realize he’s a cynical guy who used to write about software development, but who’s now busy running a small, successful software company, and who writes about talking about software.

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Core Image-based image editors

2007-10-01 – 06:38

A gaggle of sub-$100 image editors written atop Core Image:

DrawIt – $49
LiveQuartz – Free
ChocoFlop – Free
Acorn – $39.95
Image Tricks – $14.95
Pixelmator – $59

I haven’t spent time on any of these but a comparison would be pretty interesting. Too bad none of them are open source.

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QuickTime’s Strange API

2007-03-29 – 07:24

A while back one of our projects at work needed a plug-in for Unity to play QuickTime movies in the scene. It worked out well; the plug-in took me several days to implement, including one false start where I tried to superimpose a standard QuickTime view, minus the controls, over top of the running Unity [...]

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