In late 1994, when I need to write a programming language it was a pain. You must start with flex, lex and so on, and the way will be very long.

Then I found GCC was able to compile in a pseudo-machine language, already optimized. Then a set of backend was able to emit mc68000, 80x86, power pc code…

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In the last seven months I have the need of sketching a bunch of interfaces, but I cannot find a valid tool. I was a Software Architect of a big huge project, busy also on other smaller projects as project manager.

I need a rapid way to sketch use cases, to pass them to a very young team.

Web interfaces are not easy to design, and we was in a very weird situation: the team was forced to use DAOs, with no O/R mapping tool. So I need also to map some interfaces to a database model, to help them building the model and the view classes

After some search, I ended up with MS Visio.

MS Visio is great, but too difficult to use, doing training is hard and so I must discourage its use. Worst, Visio costs a lot, and it is not included with the standard MS-Office Tools.

Visio offers only WinXP look&Feel, which is not the best for designing agnostic web interfaces.

Thank you to a friend of mine, I have the discovered the BalsamIQ Mockup project. Let’s see why it is a so good solution.

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iPhone is the brand-new Apple product which has changed the way Apple thinks. Because of iPhone, Apple strip the word "Computers" from its brand name. And because of iPods and iPhone products, Lepoard developmenet slip a bit, blurring the focus on pure technology.
To be true, I do not beat on  the iPhone success, but the product success is at least  bright this year. And the iPod touch has also added value to the iPods product catalog. But I am an IT-man, damn you boy! So I want to buy it to play with it, to program with it!

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Per un importante cliente di ValueTeam, ho sviluppato per un'applicazione chiamata PDFGenerator, che è stata pacchettizzata come un vero e proprio prodotto.
PDFGenerator nasce in una situazione caratterizzata da un alta variabilità dei requisiti utente.

Le specifiche del progetto hanno subito variazioni significative nell'arco di quattro anni, ed alla fine i requisiti utente erano parecchio mutati.  L'applicazione, già fatturata, non era ancora stata validata dal Cliente finale, ed era passata di mano moltissime volte.
Da un lato c'era la necessità di fornire uno strumento semplice da utilizzare, dall'altro la possibilità di espanderlo nel momento in cui le esigenze di Business del Cliente fossero cambiate, contenendo i costi di sviluppo.
Questi due aspetti erano acuiti in questo contesto, poiché i dati potevano provenire da fonti assai eterogenee per tipologia (database o personale del marketing) e l'utente finale doveva elaborarle in modo uniforme e rapido.
Per queste ragioni la specifica era cambiata spesso nel tempo, e la sfida era notevole.
PDFGenerator è semplice dal punto di vista software, e la sua forza sta nell'idea, e nella capacità di capire l'utente finale.

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There is a future for SmallTalk? I was a very strong fan of the SmallTalk language, but in the last five years I have seen more and more contraction of its usage in the IT field.

The OLPC project, which uses also Squeak Smalltalk and its done by the core team fo Squeak, is not going very well.

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We read in wikipedia:

"Mac OS X is the successor to the original Mac OS, which had been Apple's primary operating system since 1984 [...] The first version released was Mac OS X Server 1.0 in 1999, and a desktop-oriented version, Mac OS X v10.0 followed in March 2001"
The funny thing about MacOSX launch was the huge hype on the retail box: it was named "The world's most advanced operating system" and really it was very huge leap ahead.

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I think ajax is a very new technology, but with too much hype on it. I think we’d try to do simple things with it, avoiding too much bloated interfaces.

I have found a good ibm article with shows “In-place editing” avery easy way to get a more responsible site. Finally the same article points to Prototype window, a very easy to use windowing system.
Happy hacking!

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I am happy to announce Version 1.0 of BWolf my book manager writte in python django. I have just installed it for my first customer. You can grab the 1.0 version from the Subversion repository.

 

This first release basic features are:

• Book categories and topic organization. Books are shown in nice page of 10 elements each.
• Ability to "checkout" books (not yet perfect but it works)
• Ability to create "Events" and to attach books to them (interface will be improved soon).

Happy download!

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