Comments for Spin the Moose

Comment on 5 things to think about while you are at the office by lesley coulton

lesley coulton — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 17:06:55 +0000

wonderful to see the next generation tuned into the importance of balance, even if it is a tough act to get right. yes, it’s personal, and it’s worth it! like all skills, may require a lot of Practice!!

Comment on UI Design Patterns: let’s clean up our language by Isaac

Isaac — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:06:19 +0000

Hmmm. IMHO, the MVC, MVVM, and MVP patterns mentioned here have very little to do with UI at all, other than the fact that the UI is a component of the pattern. Really, they’re software architecture patterns. The UI has no knowledge of the underlying pattern and is merely a component of said pattern. It doesn’t care. So calling it a UI anything seems a misnomer.

I do agree completely with your distinction between using the word design versus architecture. Let’s be explicit.

Comment on UI Design Patterns: let’s clean up our language by davidalpert

davidalpert — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:13:42 +0000

I agree 100% with the value of using language that your audience understands.

The point I was making above is that the specific phrase “UI design pattern” evokes something different to designers and UX-minded people than it does to server-side or back-end developers while adding the word “architecture” does not change the meaning for those folks already expecting the pattern to be an architectural one.

Small steps to clarify our language and speak with more precision can go a long way towards building bridges between audiences.

Comment on UI Design Patterns: let’s clean up our language by Dylan

Dylan — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 05:23:42 +0000

While your terms make sense, the term design pattern is widely understood to mean what you call architectural patterns. For better or for worse, that’s it’s common usage, and I try to talk in the language that the majority of my audience understands…

Comment on 5 things to think about while you are at the office by Eric

Eric — Mon, 31 May 2010 20:53:20 +0000

David, thanks for picking up the post! I love your response to it, and agree with you that your 5 things are very important to think about. Of course, everyone has to find their own balance, which is relative to their personal needs, emotions, situations, and tolerance. It’s more of a mentality that I try to convey, and you offer a great counterbalance to mine.

Thanks again,

Eric

Comment on Google phases out support for IE6 – So what? by mendicant

mendicant — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 04:09:14 +0000

Yeah, but until someone starts to stand up, there’s really no reason for those dinosaur IT depts to get things rolling. If more sites stop working, more people complain. More people complain and stuff gets done.

Squeaky wheel and all that jazz.

Comment on Google phases out support for IE6 – So what? by davidalpert

davidalpert — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:24:59 +0000

Okay, but look at the statistics that Digg published; most of the people visiting Digg.com with IE6 (those who were willing to fill out their quick survey, anyhow) claimed that the reason they were using IE6 is that they were not allowed to upgrade. In other words, their IT department was preventing it.

Some, if not all, of those users are using IE6 in an environment where it is not possible for them to move from “I can’t upgrade” to “I don’t want to, but I’ll do it” as you suggest; they are actively prevented from upgrading by corporate IT policies.

In my experience, corporate IT is going to drag their feet when it comes to upgrading off of IE6 because they have a huge amount of time and money invested in apps that were built for and tested only in IE6. Many of those sites and apps do not work in newer browsers. In those environments, then it has moved from an individual choice to an enterprise-level choice, and the enterprise cannot necessarily see it’s way clear to invest in rebuilding those IE6-dependent apps.

While they still depend on IE6, they cannot upgrade.

And while they cannot upgrade, and they remain a core part of your business model, supporting IE6 are table stakes; dropping IE6 is not an option.

Comment on Google phases out support for IE6 – So what? by David Wesst

David Wesst — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:08:12 +0000

I suppose the question that I have is how to get the other 25% to find the alternative that they apparently don’t have. There must be _some_ way that people can upgrade from a browser that is 9 years old. Having a big player like Google take a stance might force some of those IE6 people to go from “I can’t upgrade” to, “I don’t want to, but I’ll do it”.

With that in mind, forcing your users to upgrade against what they want to do will definitely be a hit on your brand and the way that your users perceive your site/product. You will now appear as a bully.

Ultimately, I suppose it depends on the trade off between development time and how far you go to please your user. Although IE6 support is well documented, it requires time on the developer’s part learn if they were not forced to learn how to support it from day one. I, for one, am an example of someone who has never had to deal with IE6 because I started with IE7 and FF2. So, for me to support IE6 will be quite the task and I would prefer to avoid that development cost by having my users upgrade to a better browser.

Comment on Use Powershell to handle Subversion commit hooks by custom software development

custom software development — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:29:49 +0000

great post

Comment on Dreamweaver – use nested templates to refactor shared markup by davidalpert

davidalpert — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:01:55 +0000

I don’t really have any particular sites that I use for reference; Googling helps a lot, but only when you know what you’re looking for….

One place to start is in the help documentation that comes with Dreamweaver. That walks through a lot of the features and common usage scenarios and will introduce you to a lot of the relevant terminology. Then I’d turn to google and see what else you can dig up on a particular topic.