Source code control tools are important for anyone working on projects with files stored on computers, especially software developers. They help you to have a record of every version of every file in your project, and make those files available to multiple developers working in a distributed environment. Many people have excuses for [...]
Many LabVIEW developers will put off building an EXE from their LabVIEW project until the very last minute. One of the great things about LabVIEW is that you don’t really need to build an EXE in order to run your application — you can simply run it from source code. So, developers spend [...]
I do a bit of driving around the San Francisco Bay area visiting clients. When I’m on the road, I love to listen to the Software Engineering Radio podcast. Their most recent podcast, Episode 56: Sensor Networks, is very interesting and discusses cool topics like how to track containers (as they travel on [...]
Recently, Tomi Malia blogged about user interfaces and how to use hand-drawn paper mock-ups as a tool for quickly developing, iterating, and proving user interface concepts before committing them to code. This is a great technique and I highly advocate the practice. But, my personal favorite is a whiteboard with dry-erase markers.
A white [...]
Anyone who wants to create software that looks and feels “professional” should study the various human interface guidelines (HIG) available on-line.
For example, the following are some guidelines published by some well-known organizations:
Apple Human Interface Guidelines
Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines
NASA User-Interface Guidelines
Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines
One of the coolest things about the Internet and on-line [...]
One area of software development that is currently out of range for small companies is good application lifecycle management (ALM) software. There are some solutions out there, but they require very expensive licenses and pretty complicated server setup. That’s why I was excited to hear that SourceGear (a Micro ISV) has announced [...]
This year’s results of the annual poll of Version Control Systems, by VSoft, shows that Subversion is well on the way to passing Microsoft Visual SourceSafe as the #1 choice.
An interesting statistic is that, since last year, Subversion use has grown by ~50% and Visual SourceSafe use has dropped by ~15%.
Which version control system do [...]