brunobergher::blog

Kyle Meyer, from Astheria, ran a very informative review on Silverback, the Mac-only usability testing software by the folks at Clearleft, currently in beta testing.

The app seems very useful, on the verge of must-have, appropriately using native Mac features to record usability testing sessions. It generates a Quicktime movie of the screen capture of the session, with a thumbnail view of the user (shot by the built-in iSight camera) and recorded ambient audio (via the build-in microphone) which can be viewed, analyzed and shared of other team members.

Please do click through to Meyer’s review, and take the opportunity to enjoy Astheria’s design, which is probably the most beautiful blog design I’ve seen in while.

In the need to round just some of a shape’s corners in Illustrator, I googled for some native way to do that. At least in CS2, as far as I can tell, that’s not an available feature.

The good thing is I discovered this nifty set of scripts which greatly streamline the burden of creating some specific, mostly mathematical operations of shapes—such as rounding only the selected anchors in a shape.

Ironically, Round Any Corner, the one script I needed, doesn’t work 100% percent of the time (sometimes it misses on or two anchors, and you have to reapply it to only those anchors). But Metaball works like a charm, and Reverse is a native feature to CorelDRAW (long abandoned) which I’ve always missed in Illustrator.

Installation is a breeze and there’s no mystery in using the scripts: throw them in the /Presets/Scripts folder in the Illustrator install path, open the software, select the paths or individual anchors and use them. Well worth the download.

The author is some generous Japanese person who I couldn’t identify, because the rest of the site is in Japanese.

Just finished watching a video on Woopra, a service/app that intends to provide real time information on the people visiting a website at the moment of the analysis.

It’s really neat watching people logging on the the website, knowing where they’re from, even getting their Gravatars, all in real-time.

The interface aparently needs a bit of polishing, but they provide some nice visualizations, including a world map of where your visitors are coming from.

One drawback I can see saw far is it’s requirement of a client-side app to be installed on the user’s machine. Maybe if it was written in Flex/AIR it could be run both as a desktop and as a web application using the same code base. Since I haven’t downloaded the software yet, I can’t comment that far.

My website is pending approval, and I plan to get back on it when I give Woopra a test run.

I’ve been programming for just a couple of years. I have barely no desktop development experience, focusing only in web sites and applications. Mobile apps? Even less.

So I’d think: “how excited could I get watching Apple’s iPhone SDK launch keynote?”. Well, I’m surprised with myself. I’m blown away with them.

If you haven’t watched it yet, please do, or this will make no sense at all.

When Google announced the Android platform it seemed like a milestone, that the standardization of the APIs would be the solid foundation upon which developers would create the mobile apps of the future. I remember talking to my co-workers how I found it interesting that this niche event felt like a moment that would change things to come.

But now, this is a real turning point. OK: it’s a closed platform, only works with two specific devices, depends on a yet-to-be-tested distribution channel*, but, in my truly humble opinion, has what it takes to shape the future of mobile computing. Or even of the entire computing experience.

The keynote was only opened and closed by Steve Jobs—therefore mostly free of his RDF—and filled with useful, tempting information. Each round of explanations about the layers of the iPhone OS made me giggle, finally laughing out loud with excitement when Scott Forstall said the API included full access to the accelerometer (with X, Y, and Z axes!) and multi-touch events. It’s just top exciting.
And the SDK is free.

I just find it amazing that the presentation left me with a weird, uncontrollable desire to start writing Objective-C. Oh, now I need a Mac. : )

* Well, if you don’t count the iTunes Music Store, which is now the #2 music seller in the US, and works much alike the App Store.

The IE team announced in their blog that they’re changing they’re previously stated position that IE8 would use version targeting by using HTTP headers or meta tags to choose the way a page should be rendered. That meant that if even if the browser had a much more standard compliant rendering engine (they passed the ACID test!), developers would have to explicitly tell the browser to use the new engine. This has been widely covered, such as here and here.

But they ended up deciding things differently, and now the browser will default to the new engine, much more reliable than the IE6/7 one (standards-wise). Developers will still have the option of targeting specific browser versions with headers/meta tags, but sites that are already deployed will not have to be changed at all to take advantage of the advances in the new Microsoft browser.

Apparently it’s one of many consequences of the recent publication of Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles. It doesn’t matter what the reason is: it’s good news anyway!

Last week Ted Patrick wrote that they’re working in Adobe on a project to compile any kind of C/C++ code to ActionScript, making it runnable inside the Flash Player.

I’m not sure I understood this completely. Because if I got it right, this means that an infinite amount of platform-specific, legacy code will suddenly become cross-platform without any software that the basic AIR runtime. Ted says they’ve successfully ported Quake I, and that it ran OK.

This could be the beginning of a really big change in the entire software scenario, and seems worth a lot of buzz.

So maybe I got something wrong, but it seems pretty revolutionary stuff, isn’t it? If you’re reading this and by any chance could clarify this
to me I’d be very, very pleased. And forgive me if I got something wrong.

Update: sorry for the duplicated post. ScribeFire ain’t as reliable as I thought.

This may be really old, but it’s that kind of tip that’s always useful, even is somewhat late.

For about a year now I’ve been using the great gotAPI, e simple website that compiles reference and documentation for a bunch of programming languages. It’s basically a group of XML indexes of documentation website, showing content in an iframe, providing direct links to the official websites were the docs are. Very simple, very effective.

And the site even remembers the tabs (languages) you kept open from the last time you visited.

Learning Flex through this tool has been infinitely easier and faster then if I had to depend on Adobe’s search.

Google Reader is great, no question about it. It’s my favourite feed reader, and proves itself useful time after time.

There’s just one thing that bugs me sometimes: when you have 137 subscriptions, as I do at the moment, it can get really hard to know what to read first. I realized how I was getting behind in information because it’s hard to decide what feed tagged as ‘design‘ to read from a list of 29, even knowing not all of them are really important.

So I did something simple: started a new tag, named ‘_must_read_frequently’, and set it as the the initial folder, under Preferences. Then I went about my feed list and tagged six or seven of them.

It’s been a lot easier to prioritize.

I know it’s something very simple, and not innovative at all, but maybe it just might be useful for someone.

* You can name your new tag whatever you want, of course; I just recommend adding the underscore or some other special character before it’s name so that it shows up as the first item in the folder list.

Just writing as a personal note and hopefully as help to others: I’ve just spent quite a few minutes struggling with a deploy package for a PHP site which worked in my machine and not in my co-workers. Debugging the HTTP responses with Fiddler we realized the problem was with the BOM—or Byte Order Mark—, three bytes of non-printing characters that sometimes are added to the beginning of UTF-8 encoded files by some text editors. These are \EF \BB \BF  in hex and usually printed as  when converted to ISO-8859-1 (in UTF-8 only, the Wikipedia article shows the differences among this and other Unicode enconding).

The problem was that a cookie was not being set by the PHP app because the BOM was being sent before the cookies, so the setcookie() function returned false, since it cannot send a cookie after any output has been sent to the browser, because of HTTP protocol restrictions.

We just could not figure out what was causing that, since the exact same set of files was being used in both my machine’s and my co-worker’s installations.

It turned out the problem was in the main configuration file, which had to be edited by him to make the application work on his machine. He used EditPad Lite to alter the configurations, and it seems that, by default, this program does add the BOM to the beginning of UTF-8-encoded files. So, if you use EditPad Lite (or maybe the Pro version), I surely recommend you should change that option upon installation.