Technobrief #9

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

English

• Online Style Guides: Collection of free style guides.

Guidelines and standards

• Windows UX Interaction Guidelines: 828-page guide (PDF) for each aspect of Windows 7 user experience (UX); the first 32 pages cover the UX design principles for Windows 7, a list of inspirations for how to design a great UX, top design guide violations, and more.

Quotes

• From Don't Believe Anyone by Jurgen Appelo:

  "After eating and sleeping, disagreeing comes third on the list of basic necessities in my life. It's because I like thinking."

Jobs

• From 7 great reasons to work at Netflix (Reason #5):

  Rules Annoy Us
  Rules creep into most companies as they try to prevent errors by less-than-stellar employees. But rules also inhibit creativity and entrepreneurship, leading to a lack of innovation. Over time this drives a company to being less fun and less successful. Instead of adding rules as we grow, our solution is to increase talent density faster than we increase business complexity. Great people make great judgment calls and few errors, despite ambiguity.

Programming

• ComposedRegex: Martin Fowler explains how to write more readable regular expressions.
• Four switch oddities: Eric Lipper explains non-obvious aspects of the switch statement (I did not know any of these).
• TDD Anti-Patterns: James Carr catalogs the most common misuses of and omissions in Test-Driven Development.

Software

• AoA Audio Extractor provides you a handy tool to extract audio/sound or background music from video files.
• Copy Path is a Windows shell extension that adds the ability to copy the path, folder path, or filename within the right click shell extension; works on individual and multiple files and folders.
• GoOo is another Microsoft Office alternative based on the OpenOffice.org source code; it claims to be fster and slicker.
• Precision Helper creates and manages help projects; works natively with the Microsoft HTML Help projects format (HHP) and allows to publish resulting help to the CHM, WebHelp, PDF and the single HTML document formats.
• SmillaEnlarger increases the size of digital images while trying to retain the quality.
• SpyDLLRemover is the standalone tool to detect and delete spywares from the system.
• StyleCop analyzes C# source code to enforce a set of style and consistency rules.
• XMedia Recode is a video converter, which can cut and crop a movie, change the resolution, invert and correct the colors and do more (to change the default German interface to English, use the Optionen - Sprache menu option).

Web development

• 11 Classic CSS Techniques Made Simple with CSS3: Vasili explains how to create rounded corners, box/text shadows, use fancy fonts and opacity, define multiple backgrounds and do more using classic way and CSS3 way.
• 32 Indispensable Bookmarklets for Web Developers and Designers: A collection of bookmarklets for testing, analyzing and tweaking web pages.
• Inline Validation in Web Forms: Luke Wroblewski reports on the findings from the usability study assessing various methods of inline form validation (a must read for developers!).
• Mastering CSS, Part 2: Advanced Techniques and Tools: advanced techniques and effects you can achieve with CSS, e.g. date parts using sprites, timelines, menu lists, sequential lists, date badges, and more.
• Niceforms is a script that will replace the most commonly used form elements with custom designed ones.
• Web app theme showdown: Aristo and Ace: Comparison of web application UI themes released by two thick-client web frameworks; both look great, are licensed as Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike, and come as part of the framework or as separate assets.

Web tools

• JSON Formatter and Validator is intended to help debug JSON data.
• 25 Essential Web Services for Designers collected by Giulio Bai (by Services, Giulio might have meant tools or sites).