Ben Allfree :: Painless Programming

Some of the incredibly loyal, faithful, forgiving, and understanding AlbumPost.com users have written to me wondering why it’s down.
AlbumPost suffered a major hardware failure and we’ve been working to get things restored. I bought AlbumPost a while back (a devoted fan turned owner). Dave and Dave, the previous owners, built AlbumPost’s infrastructure when owning hardware [...]

Basecamp actually helped me get a job done on time yesterday. I like that. Here’s a little more about it.
Good:
* Reminded me of milestones coming due
* Helped me see that I had to do some work today
* Found it fun to knock out the checklist
* I presume the client was notified when the milestone was [...]

I signed up for Basecamp yesterday and plugged in all my clients and projects. The sentiment was well received, but logistical problems started immediately.
Good:
* Easy to comment on to-do items, milestones, and general engage in general discussion
* Easy to participate in discussion via email
Bad:
* Too many ways to comment, and not at all clear as [...]

I signed up for Basecamp today to attempt to wrangle some timelines. Something about Basecamp vibes me wrong, but I tried it anyway.
Immediately good:
* Easy to add milestones with dates
* Easy to add clients, projects, and get permissions set up
* Easy to assign stuff to people
Immediately bad:
* Milestones and To-do lists need to be linked [...]

Just like the pre-checks, I also have post-checks to ensure quality. Here they are:
Layout

Margins/padding match comp
Liquid layout does not introduce gaps on resize
Capitalization matches comp
Text styling matches comp
Coloring matches comp
Text leading matches comp
Proportions and relative sizes match comp
Indentical or downlevel rendering in FF3, Safari, IE7, IE6
Navigation does not wrap in small liquid layout
Status bar features [...]

Here’s a weird concept I’ve been working on. I’ve been taking note of anything that makes a project hit a snag, including simple correlations. For example, maybe projects don’t go as well if you wear red shoes. Red shoes might not be the reason, but if the correlation is strong, I put it on this [...]

PhoneGap is a clever native iPhone app written in Objective C. It exposes most of the iPhone features to JavaScript, so you actually write your app in HTML/JavaScript and bundle it with the PhoneGap bridge software. Then you ship the whole thing to Apple and the put it in the App Store like a real [...]

iUI is an HTML/JavaScript library designed to mimic the user interface of the iPhone.
At first, before I had a real iPhone, I thought it did a pretty good job. After getting an iPhone, I started to notice little inconsistencies that wound up running deep into the iUI framework.
Today, I use a very customized version of [...]

There is a tool written in Ruby called Cucumber. It parses English-like user story steps for testing. Stuff like:

User navigates to ‘/orders’
User presses ‘view orders’
User sees ‘You have 22 order’

It takes those sentences and runs them against code that actually performs the tests in the web browser. This means you can write English-like acceptance tests [...]

We’ve been doing some research into using Selenium, which is an acceptance testing tool. It ties into web browsers and simulates keyboard strokes and mouse activity, then it validates that the state of the web page is changes as expected under the conditions.
Writing testable user interfaces requires a slightly different approach to design. Fortunately, sticking [...]