http://m.lifehacker.com/site?sid=lifehacker&pid=JuicerHub&targetUrl=http%3A%2F%2Flifehacker.com%2F5367129%2Fnine-workspaces-where-famous-folks-get-stuff-done%3Fop%3Dpost%26refId%3D5367129

Posted via email from coderanger’s posterous

Great article by Obie Fernandez. To be honest I do use pair programming occasionally, normally to check over code that is important to be right as it’s a fundamental concept, or when I want to get the design right first time, or something that is difficult to fix later on if broken; but he has some great points in using it completely full-time

Posted via web from coderanger’s posterous

Posted via web from coderanger’s posterous

Having installed the latest Office on a new laptop for my wife I am absolutely dumbfounded at some of the design decisions with it.

As my wife said, “how do I open a document or even create a new document?” … hmmm you have to click the weird logo in the top left to get a menu of commands with the things you want. Don’t ask me why the clipboard operations have been given pride of place on the left side of the main ribbon tab, most people never use them as those that know about the clipboard (and a lot of people do not) would use the keyboard, either way there should be “New”, “Open” and “Save” with Save being a nice big priority button.

“How do I save the document to a different place” … sorry again you have to go the weird logo menu thing.

“Is there any way to turn off the smart quote things as they cause problems with our computer system” … oh this is a toughie, you have to customise the toolbar strip (at the top above the ribbon) and add the “AutoCorrect Options” command yourself; then you can click the new button and edit the options, after which you will probably want to remove it again.

Then Word still has the horrible image handling, I remember working on the great word processor for the Commodore Amiga called Wordworth by Digita and we had much better and more intuitive graphic handling within documents … Word is just horrible and so messy to use!

Rant over, but I pity anyone who has to show someone how to get to grips with Office now, eek!

Posted via web from coderanger’s posterous

Posted via web from coderanger’s posterous

I love Paris, its such a beautifully architectured city, with glorious buildings and many parks

Posted via web from coderanger’s posterous

Lately at work we have been thinking about our core product DigiGuide and wondering about a few things. We are now up to v8.4 and have been developing DigiGuide for more than 10 years mostly though our own feature lists and desires but also listening to customers.

Well it dawned on me recently that perhaps listening to our customers wasn’t the right thing to do, we now seem to have a very powerful but also very complicated product … great for all those people who have been with us from the beginning, terrible for everyone else as the barrier to entry is now very high. As Henry Ford once said, “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse.’”

So what to do … well I do think you have to listen to your customers, but you have to try and fit their requests into your vision without necessarily bolting on the new feature that they don’t think they can live without. “Perfection isn’t when you can’t add any more, it’s when you can’t take anymore away”

The beauty of having 10 years of developing a product is that you know all the good things, all the bad things and all the things inbetween … your product truly has been specified and prototyped more than it could have been when it started.

Well knowing all this, don’t be too afraid to just start again. Why not, you could create a brand new version that took all that knowledge on-board to end up being something that would really do what the majority of people want without any of the complexity … a ’rebooted‘ version if you like.

Posted via web from coderanger’s posterous

Now I have repaired my laptop (the graphics card died again … third one this year) I will be able to start working on more changes to twitcher.

Firstly, I hope to be pushing an update shortly that allows JSON powered Short URL services like bit.ly and 9.gp to use the ShortURL plugin system in twitcher. This will allow most types of short url to be added easily using a simple XML configuration file.

Secondly, after using the great ReadItLater site (see my earlier blog post) I would quite like to integrate this into twitcher in some form.

Lastly, I would hope to add some simple form of syncronisation as it really annoys me when I have twitcher at home and work and I have to keep skipping past the tweets I have already seen in one of the other locations.

If you have any suggestions then do get in touch.

I found this great iPhone app and web site that does exactly what I do in normal usage … I open up lots of links from various places to read later.

Unfortunately on the iPhone/touch this is very painful as you can only have 8 pages open and even though you have visited a web page completely, when you are offline and you revist the page all the content has disappeared and requires re-downloading (doesnt mobile Safari cache anything?!?!). This was particularly painful for me when on holiday recently with intermittant WiFi connection.

With the great ReadItLaterList.com bookmarklets you can tap any link within Safari and ‘save’ it for later, I even found a twitter client that allows links to be opened or ‘saved’ for later using this service.

They even have an iPhone app that downloads all the content of your ‘reading list’ and caches it for offline reading later on … brilliant, exactly what I wanted.

I suggest you give it a try, it really is quite useful.