I have tried the approach listed in “Getting Real” by 37signals and I have great results.

The client was very happy because he can imagine his website.

Now I am considering to buy or make such nice tools :)

http://www.uistencils.com/website-stencil-kit.html

1. Pencil

Pencil (free) is a Firefox plugin that professes to enable you to build wireframes and prototypes. As a prototyping tool it’s quite good, allowing you to quickly put together a reasonably high fidelity mockup. However, be aware you’ll still need to produce the visual design elements for Pencil, as it relies on dragging and dropping pre-made graphical elements.

The output wireframe elements that ship with Pencil do tend to be based on the look and feel of a Windows desktop application. This really is undesirable for a web application, however you could modify this with your own page elements.

Another downside of Pencil is that its export functionality provides only a few image formats. This means that Pencil falls short of being a real interactive prototype development tool.

Balsamiq Mockups

Balsamiq Mockups (price:$US79, demo available) is an interesting product running on Adobe AIR. Its representation of the interface elements has a refreshing hand-drawn, sketch-like quality to them. This does help promote the degree of changeability of the wireframes, as they look very much like a draft. If you lack the skills to create hand-drawn sketches then Balsamiq is a useful tool, as it allows you to produce quality roughs. Balsamiq also offers a standard collection of interactive screen elements, which is helpful to start off with.

http://gomockingbird.com/ is like balsamia

https://www.jumpchart.com/ – for very simple pages- I cant find how to change the layout.

Denim

A java based.

http://dub.washington.edu:2007/denim/

Eclipse based plugin – http://wireframesketcher.com/

And a nice topic in stackoverflow http://stackoverflow.com/questions/55363/best-tools-for-creating-website-wireframes

After my blog post about the junior software developers I have very bright idea of how the world could get benefit from them.

When you catch a junior in mistake – let him contribute to the open source community. Not with coding. With translating. Take some open project and translate it to your native language.

Maybe after all the junior will release that he is much happier to translate than coding :)

win-win condition.

N.B. On the picture – Young coder is coding in Word.

ENTITIES = {
 'À' => 'À',
 'Á' => 'Á',
 'Â' => 'Â', (more...)

The first Rails framework was fast. then it become slow, big and the idea of convetion over configuration becomes more poisoned.

Currently to start with Rails you have to learn a lot of stuff which are added just now and is not sure how long they will stay.

Also Rails is not targeting the developers to be fast but is targeting to be the perfect framework.

The price for that is that almost a year and a half there is no new version while the they refactor it.

No goodies like scafolding, only enterprise stuff around.

That is my personal opinion on this framework.

As I like to say – you cant leave your followers without food for such long time.

The original code

<%= select(“city”,”kind”, t(:place_types).map.map!.each{|key, value| [value, key]}, {:include_blank => t(:chose), :selected => @city.kind}) %>

The bad code

t(:place_types).map.map!.each{|key, value| [value, key]}, {:include_blank => t(:chose), :selected => @city.kind})

the replacement

key_values = t(:place_types).collect{|key, value| [value.to_s, key.to_s, ]}

Rails.ouch.ouch.omg!

This article is talking on designers but I think most of the things there apply for coders also.

If you read it now and get it – you will be ok, else you will learn all those rules by own in the future.

Read the full article here…

http://www.onextrapixel.com/2010/08/18/10-questions-from-modern-web-designers-answered/comment-page-1/#comment-7981

The idea of the Searchlogic is to save you time and give flexibility.

The first time I saw this gem  I was very excited about it.

With only a few lines of code an you have the whole search done. I have start using it.

Once I want to apply it to a complicated search. The problem was that I have to write more code and “patches” in order to keep the Searchlogic working….

So my advice is – don’t use such boosters if you can apply your own solution. There will be aways a time when you want to extend your search and you will loose a lot of time search how to do it with the 3rd party solution.

Do it yourself.

Starting a company or a team

If you think that by hiring juniors you will save money and will get working application – you are wrong.
You will loose much more than money.

Yes they are low cost, but read the rest of the post to be not tricked. (more…)

I have recently upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 and I got this nasty rmagick gem error:

RMagick2.so: This installation of RMagick was configured with ImageMagick 6.5.5 but ImageMagick 6.5.7-8 is in use. (RuntimeError)

google for This installation of RMagick was configured with ImageMagick 6.5.5 but ImageMagick 6.5.7-8 is in use. (RuntimeError)

then found this page in mixed English/Chinees

and finally got a page in German :)

Then I decide to write this post in English and slightly modify the solution

instead of putting

RMAGICK_BYPASS_VERSION_TEST = true in the deploy.rb

I have put this in the development.rb

and all it works – this way on the production I will be forced to use real compatible library or at least check again for another solution or gem.

AUCH! This solution doesn’t work even in development I got weird core dumps :( …so here it is another try

Here is the real working  solution:

su -
git clone http://github.com/rmagick/rmagick.git
cd rmagick/
ruby setup.rb
ruby setup.rb  install

I have just finished one method and I was not happy with the code. Then I put a comment on top of the method “Far from perfect….”.

Then I read the class – it was ugly.

here is the before

def validate
 return if is_email == false
 found = InternetComunicatorType.find(:first, :conditions => {
 :is_email => true,
 })

 return unless found

 if found.id != id
 errors.add(:is_email, "We have already email type")
 return
 end
end

here is the after

def validate
  if is_email
    found = InternetComunicatorType.find(:first, :conditions => {
      :is_email => true,
    })

    if found and found.id != id
      errors.add(:is_email, "We have already email type")
    end
  end
end

The result is much far readable