All Blog Posts (799)

I'd like to share two random trains of thought in the area of free open source software. The first is my continued annoyance with the likes of Richard Stallman and his acolytes for their insistence that all software must be free and that commercial software vendors are somehow unethical. I hear this refrain time and time again on message boards and at geek fests around the world. What…

I recently discovered two interesting new sites for natural language learning. The first was presented by TechHui member Gabe Morris at Unconferenz last Saturday. Gabe demoed Yabla, a site that offers video content in Spanish and French from television and…

Google just added a slew of new features to their already impressive Google Docs. Perhaps the most interesting is the ability to publish presentations as AJAX widgets. File management has also improved to the point you really feel like you are using a desktop application. Google once again proves it is the king of AJAX! The fact they seem to be completely ignoring Flex is…

Introduction

You can find this little gem here. I know that we're all supposed to know how to correctly setup a solution and I know that we all have our way (and reasoning) for how we set it up. It would be nice to come up with a standard way to do this. Tree Surgeon to the rescue. This is not a tool you will use everyday, but it will become invaluable when you do.

The basics are just that. Fire up the tree surgeion GUI and…

I was finally able to fix the install of this tool and have become fairly enamoredwith it. The UI is simple and effective. The preview will only be useful until you become confident that the tool will work correctly.

There are a number of feature requests for the next version of this tool and I second most of them. For a simple utility, though, I think it is a good start.

For those interested in the install problem, I've narrowed it to two things:

1. Previous Add-in…

I was excited about this tool because I get tired of hearing FxCop telling me to replace literal with a string from the resource file. It's purpose in life is simple--just right-click any hardcoded string and automagically send it to a new or existing resource file.

So, I anxiously click on the msi to install this tool. The install went fine and I fired up Visual Studio to give it a try. I clicked Tools\Add-in Manager... to make sure the install went as well as it seemed and it…

I just ran across a new Swing L&F called Nimbus that has renewed my interest in Swing. Its the first L&F that looks as good as OSX and Vista and it is entirely vector based. This is important because the resolution indepence means it looks good on the new high definition screens.

Additionally, all the painting is done with Painter delegates which are easily reused on custom components. This has always been a pain point for swing. Its…

I've invested years of my life in Swing development, so its a little scary to even pose the question, "Is Swing Dead?" Bank of America, our largest customer, used to do a significant amount of Swing development. These days all new projects are using WinForms, WPF, or Flex. All of these technologies are very good, and have big marketing bucks behind them (Microsoft and Adobe respectively.) With Sun gasping for air and IBM backing a competing toolkit, what will happen to Swing?

Swing…

My first job in the industry was assembling Altair 8800's and Imsai 8080's at Ohio Scientific Hawaii (Jeremy Jones) above St. Louis drive-in on Waialae.