Note: this article assumes you’re somewhat familiar with the idea of Test-Driven Development. Automated tests improve (minimally) the quality of your code by revealing some of its defects. If one of your tests fails, in theory this points to a defect in your code. You make a fix, the test passes, and the quality of …
How to Improve Your Tests by Being an Evil Coder Read More »
Why “balancing customer needs with business needs” is short-term thinking.
Anti-Fragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a goldmine of practical ideas for software developers, despite it not being a software development book. Redundancy is one example of such an idea that is explored. Taleb explains how having some redundancy reduces fragility, and means we don’t need to predict the future so well. Think of food …
Beyond DRY – Why Redundancy Makes Your Code More Robust and Less Fragile Read More »
Last month I was fortunate enough to spend two weeks traveling around southern China including Hainan, Guangzhou, Macau and Hong Kong. It was an awesome trip; I would particularly recommend stopping by Hong Kong for a few days to check it out if you get the chance. It’s an amazing, vibrant city. At some …
Both the Developer Console and Google Analytics can display your app’s active users – the number of users that opened your app at least once on each day. Knowing the number of active users is a good start to getting an idea of user engagement, but the problem with looking at it in isolation is …
What percentage of your users use your app daily? Read More »
This is an excellent talk by Alex Faaborg at Google I/O 2013 about cognitive science principles and how they apply to interface design. Here’s a summary of some of the main points and how they could be used to improve your apps: We can search for objects of the same colour much faster than searching …
Google I/O 2013 – Cognitive Science and Design, and how it applies to Android apps Read More »
9 patch images in Android are great but if you happen to have a family of graphics to convert, it can get pretty tedious. I had a collection of button graphics that needed converting to 9 patches using the same stretchable regions. Rather than do it all by hand with Photoshop or GIMP (and inevitably …
Android: 9 patching a family of images the easy way Read More »
I recently added a feature to StarCraft 2 Build Player to start playing build orders when the users’ phone is nudged. The idea is so you don’t have to waste precious seconds looking down at your phone to tap the “Play” button, instead you can just mindlessly bump your phone on your desk and you’re …
I’ve recently been experimenting with OpenGL ES 2.0 on Android for a graphical app (some excellent guides can be found at http://www.learnopengles.com/). So far so good. It turns out that gone are the days of countless fixed function calls like glBegin() glVertex3f() glColor4f() for sending vertex data, nowadays you use shaders for everything and send …
From a fresh install of Kubuntu 11.10, attempting to update your software through the “Software Updates” dialog will fail due to lack of permissions. To resolve this, run sudo apt-get install polkit-kde-1 The Software Updates dialog will then correctly ask for an administrator password so it can make changes to the system.