12 Factor applications: 13 years later
The 12 factor methodology is about 13 years old. How did it age in the cloud-native era? Do we need a 13th factor?…
Usability: What does this button do?
In software development projects, paying proper attention to usability aspects, can greatly help ‘getting the message functionality across’. Usability is a field of expertise on its own and involves techniques like wireframes, prototyping and card sorting. Not every project is the same and (sadly) lack of time or budget can prevent specialized interaction designers to be involved in the project. This means that making the application ‘usable’ becomes the responsibility of graphic designers or developers (or it is neglected altogether). Not an easy combination of tasks…
FireScope – Firebug extended
Today I stumbled across an interesting new Firefox extension: FireScope. It’s developed by Sitepoint, a site I visit regularly. I was aware of their reference material on html, css and javascript and now they use that content to feed this extension. FireScope is an extension to Firebug, assumably known and installed by anyone interested in FireScope. On the official firefox add-ons page it has the status ‘experimental’ and hence requires logging in.…
Careful with that pixel, devigner
A couple of days ago I attended a presentation titled ‘WPF in LOB applications’. Without the abbreviations that would be ‘Windows Presentation Foundation in Line Of Business applications’. It was just an overview but some interesting points were mentioned. First of all, it was explained that Microsoft Silverlight is a web-based subset of WPF. Now that places things in perspective for the web-minded. Then there was some coverage on XAML, a markup language used to develop interfaces, thereby separating business from logic.…