Technobrief #8

Summary: Recent findings of software, articles, videos, and more.

Articles

• Cannot Measure Productivity by Martin Fowler
• Emerging Trends in Web Design by Aaron Kupferberg
• Social Media Experts Are Poets, Software Developers Are Novelists by Jurgen Appelo

Blogs

• AjaxLine (resources for AJAX, jQuery, ASP.NET, and other web technologies)
• 94 Great Freeware Programs For A Freeware Only PC
• Top 200 Blogs for Developers (Q2 2009)

English

• Online Style Guide by Saint Anslem College:
  • Overview of Web style guidelines
  • Writing for the web
  • Alphabetical list of style preferences

Graphics

• 15 wonderful set of icons for web design
• Iconza (free customizable icons for a web site)

jQuery

• 15 Resources To Get You Started With jQuery From Scratch by by Jeffrey Way
• jQuery plugins by Jörn Zaefferer (includes accordion, auto-complete, password validation, tooltip, treeview, and more)
• jTruncate in Action by Jeremy Martin (jTruncate is a jQuery plugin that truncates long text entities on a web page)
• jQuery vs MooTools by Aaron Newton

Programming

• Ajax survey 2009: jQuery and MS Ajax are almost tied among .NET developers
• Hungarian Notation – Use What Works Spit Out The Bones by Dave

Quotes

• From Sphinx - text search The Pirate Bay way by Ted Dziuba:

  "Before Sphinx, the other option for text search was Apache Solr. Solr, whose name-giver understands that vowels are a scarce resource and must be used sparingly, is a server that sits on top of Lucene. Solr is popular with the enterprise crowd, who love its Java. Being a Java program, Solr includes no shortage of technology whose acronyms contain the letters J and X."

Software

• CodecInstaller detects the installed audio and video codecs, analyzes files to understand which codecs they require, and suggests which codecs need to be installed.
• Convert AVI to MP4 converts video files from various formats (AVI, DivX, Xvid, WMA, MOV, H.264, MPEG1/MPEG2) to the MP4 (MPEG4) format.
• GSpot shows information about video and audion codecs used in a media file.
• DriverBackup! backs up, restores, and removes drivers.
• JPEG Lossless Rotator rotates JPEG images without re-encoding and loss of quality.
• MPEG Streamclip video converter plays, cuts, copies, pastes, trims, exports, and converts video files (MPEG, VOB, PS, M2P, MOD,VRO, DAT, MOV, DV, AVI, MP4, TS, M2T, MMV, REC, VID, AUD, AVR, VDR, PVR, TP0, M2V, M1V, MPV, AIFF, M1A, MP2, MPA, AC3, and more).
• Postbox email client offers an alternative to the popular Outlook and Thunderbird.
• Roadkil recovers files from disks with physical damage (bad sectors, scratches, etc).
• Shrink Pic automatically reduces the size of photos sent or uploaded toemail, instant messaging, blogging, and web galleries
• Svchost Process Analyzer lists all svchost instances and checks the services they contain making it easy to uncover worms and viruses, such as Conficker.
• Zimbra Desktop is an email, which can syncs Zimbra, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail email, contacts, and calendars.
• Zortam MP3 Media Studio includes audio file organizer, ID3 tag editor, CD ripper, WAV/MP3 converter, MP3 volume normalizer, lyrics finder, batch lyrics and cover finder, playlist manager, CD burner, and more.

Videos

• Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon by Jared Spool

Web design

• 15 CSS Tricks That Must be Learned by Drew Douglass
• Common Mistakes in Web Design by Marko
• A Pattern Library for Interaction Design by Welie.com
• Visual Hierarchy in Web Design by Jarel Remick
• Web form design guidelines: an eyetracking study by Chui Chui Tan

Web tools

• Color Scheme Designer (page examples are really helpful)
• SpiderOak provides an easy, secure and consolidated free online backup, sync, sharing, access and storage solution for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux (Ubuntu, Debian & Fedora)
• Mojo Helpdesk centralizes, assigns and tracks organization requests for customer and tech support, internal tasks management, website maintenance, and so on (free edition offers 3 ticket queues and 2 support accounts)
• Path 101 provides free career services including personality test, resume analysis, and career advice
• ProjectLocker offers source control, defect tracking, document management and other services (free account supports 5 users, 500 MB of space, and unlimited number of projects)