Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

What do you install after a Windows re-format?

Monday, August 27th, 2007

When I installed Vista on my laptop, I did so as an upgrade from Windows XP. Soon my computer became almost unusably slow and I was experiencing random crashes. One of our programmers had installed Vista from scratch and he had no such problems. So I did what I used ...

RUP Based Project Process

Tuesday, August 14th, 2007

The Rational Unified Process (RUP) is a good methodology to keep your projects in order. This guideline is meant to be complete; however, not all items will apply to your project. The first step should be a quick review of the entire process with respect to your project and eliminate ...

Needs Analysis for Webmasters - The Essentials

Tuesday, August 14th, 2007

As a consultant/webmaster, I have conducted many needs analysis sessions. I find that a needs analysis session is critical if you want to provide an accurate proposal. Following is the essential information you need.

Save Time With Development Templates

Saturday, August 11th, 2007

Whether I'm creating a small 10 page web site or just some documentation for myself, templates save me time. I suggest that you create your own templates based on the resources below and integrate them into your workflow.

Web 2.0 Colors CSS Template

Saturday, August 4th, 2007

When you are in the design phase, you may find that while your layout and flow is perfect, the colors still need to be tweaked.. and often. To help make that process easier, I've taken the Web 2.0 color swatches I created for Photoshop and Gimp and created a Web ...

Creating Web 2.0 Buttons in Linux with Xara Xtreme

Thursday, August 2nd, 2007

Web graphics designers running GNU/Linux seem to use the Gimp, Inkscape or Photoshop in a virtual environment. I have found the feature rich Xara Xtreme to be a good alternative for web graphics creation and editing. It is open source and you can download it here. Following is a short ...

How To Speed Up Mockup Creation With Photoshop Actions

Wednesday, August 1st, 2007

If you are practicing a RAD methodology, you should be able to iterate quickly. While during the early stages of prototyping the "looks" are not so important, it can help if you can already have some extra design flavor in your initial prototypes. One way to make that happen is ...

Eclipse Day 2 - Sync Manager - FTP remote file editing

Tuesday, July 31st, 2007

Day 2. I must admit, I am having some Dreamweaver withdrawals. I can see how they can 'vendor-lock' you in when they perfect the basic programming tasks. Improving your productivity is an investment, it is a continuous learning experience. You can't settle with just ...

Essential Tools for Web Developers

Sunday, July 29th, 2007

From a static html page to creating a Content Management System from scratch, there are certain tools that increase productivity geometrically. Here I present the tools that have greatly enhanced my own productivity and our team.

Day 1 Using Easy Eclipse - Initial reactions, compliments and gripes

Sunday, July 29th, 2007

Day One – What I have set up… I am a little overwhelmed with the amount of features in Eclipse! This is undoubtedly a great thing! I was particularly impressed with the number of features that worked right out of the box... Let me go over quickly some of ...