Development archive at A Peek into a Mind

Archive for the 'Development' Category

Apr

MVP – Minimal Viable Product

By civax 0 Comments

Categories: Development and Technology

A collection of links into MVP, for my own reference.

Minimum Viable Product on Quora
How do you prioritize features for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)?
What is the minimum viable product? – With a video from a lecture of Mark Pinkus explaining MVP in Zynga
Also from VentureGeeks on the subject: here, here,
Minimum Viable Product: a guide – Video and presentation by Eric Ries
Approaching a Minimum Viable Product – by Kent Beck from the Three Rivers Institute blog.

What Is The Minimum Viable Product?

View more webinars from Venture Hacks

Sep

Mobile Twitter Clients

By civax 1 Comment

Categories: Development and Technology

Twitter Blog Logo I switch phones every now and then, as part of my job. I don’t always do it of good will, but cause I use a company’s device and the QA needs it every now and then.

The devices I use the most for the past couple of months are the Android G1, and an iPod Touch. Being a person that needs to be connected to twitter often, I’ve installed and tried quite a few twitter clients for these phones.

For the Android:

Continue reading ‘Mobile Twitter Clients’

May

Sections/Categories vs Tags

By civax 5 Comments

Categories: Development and Technology

This is a little different from the regular politics/security issues I usually talk about in my blog, but I’m also a technical person and sometimes I write technical stuff. The following is a post I made on the Joomla 1.5 forums, strongly going against the concept of Sections and Categories as a way of categorizing content:

I just tried Joomla 1.5 lately and was very disappointed that one of the major flaws in Joomla was not addressed at all. I’ll say it in one word: Tags.

I think that some people are completely missing out the whole concept. Tags suppose to render Sections and Categories obsolete. There is no longer need for those. The correct use of tags frees your content completely from this really stupid categorization.

The only way this categorization system works is if each article is completely unrelated to other issues covered by the site. So for each article there could be only ONE category to fit. How many such sites do you know? Does YOUR site fits that?

I hoped Joomla 1.5 will have a tags management system without any Sections/Categories restriction. I mean, if someone wants to restrict himself, he can do it by himself. Or write a plug-in to restrict himself. But why force us all to adhere to a categorization system that is unintuitive, restraining and to be honest, one of the weakest ever points in Joomla?

I’m sure all of you here, which manage a site with a lot of content, can understand me. How many times have you stared at the screen thinking “Damn, but this piece fits 2 or 3 places! What do I do?”

Sections/Categories are a really bad structure. For example, I have a development site. Lets say I cover both Java and Flash. I want each to have a news category and a tutorials category. Now, I have one 2 ways to construct this with a sections/categories system:

Section JAVA —-> Categories: NEWS, TUTORIALS.
Section FLASH —> Categories: NEWS, TUTORIALS.

Section NEWS ——–> Categories: JAVA, FLASH.
Section TUTORIALS —> Categories: JAVA, FLASH.

Both ways are very restricting. What if I have an article about integrating Flash and Java? Where do I put it? What if I want to have NEWS from both java and flash on the front page, but a different page for each with only relevant news (Java news, Flash news) ?

This gets even worse if you have more sections/categories, like most of us do.

Wouldn’t it be much easier to have that ‘Flash in Java’ article tagged Java, Flash, News ?
Then it appears as Java news AND Flash news AND news (in general).

Then I can have a dedicated page covering all items related to JAVA (which I can categorize by the other tags, with special CSS, and any tag that ever was with assigned to an item with the java tag can be present) and such a page can be available to every tag ever used.

The reason I go out against the thinking in the Joomla core, is that once you restrict your core to sections/categories, there is no way to avoid it. No extension can truly make the system free again. While if you’d based your system on Tags, it can easily handle the Sections/Categories structure.

My site runs on Joomla 1.x, with quite a few professional components I had to buy to allow Joomla to become most of what I wanted. Still, no component can go against Joomla’s basic structure therefore I feel very bad about the future of the system. I think even WORDPRESS can handle high-content-volume sites better in this respect.

So, sadly, I currently see no way in the future I’ll upgrade my site to Joomla 1.5. If I’ll make the hassle of changing my site core platform, it needs to be one that solves this content issue. I’m too frustrated to continue managing all the content the same old restrictive way. Even though I do like joomla.

Mar

Reading around

By civax 0 Comments

Categories: Development, Palastine-Israel Conflict and Politics

I’ve spent the evening reading through other people’s blogs and news posts. I’ve also tried to find how are we, Israelies, are presented in the world mainstream media, as well as reading Ant-Israeli/Pro-Palestinian blogs. I have seen quite a bit of mis information and lots of lies. But still, it was quite an interesting read.

Since I’ve noticed it takes me a lot of time to find and track these sites, I’ve set a sub-site to this blog tracking the sites that I wish to track. Not all of them, though – there were a couple of sites I didn’t find RSS feeds of (for example, Guy Behor’s site – which is an excellent read if you know Hebrew). Feel free to check it out yourself as well. If you wish to suggest new sites to track you can post them in the comments to this post.

Please notice this sub-site is mainly for my own personal use, and less of a public resource, so I’ll only add sites that are interesting read to me. Also, I would like to add more of “the other side” blogs. Yea, lies and all included…

Mar

Links I need

By civax 0 Comments

Categories: Development

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/

http://mobileindustry.biz/

http://biz.gamedaily.com/

http://www.gamedev.net/

http://www.mobile-ent.biz/

Dec

JavaSDL issues

By civax 1 Comment

Categories: Development

I’m writing the fremework for Beit Berl College GEMOLOGY program. I think it will be using javaSDL. Therefore, I collect a few links here for my personal use.

Installing javaSDL on Eclipse:

Download sdljava-0.9.1-win32-bin.zip and optionally sdljava-0.9.1-src.zip (It contains the source code for the samples, very handy).
Extract to any directory (e.g. C:\Java\sdljava-0.9.1).
Click Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Environment Variables and append C:\Java\sdljava-0.9.1\lib to the Path system variable.
Go to C:\Java\sdljava-0.9.1\bin and execute testsprite.bat – If it works, congratulations, 75% done.
Open Eclipse, create a new project, add a source file to it and paste the following into it:
import sdljava.*; import sdljava.video.*;class HelloSDL { public static void main(String[] args) { final String caption = "Hello, SDL!"; System.out.println(caption); try {
SDLMain.init(SDLMain.SDL_INIT_VIDEO);
SDLVideo.wmSetCaption(caption, caption);
SDLSurface screen = SDLVideo.setVideoMode(640, 480, 24, 0);
java.lang.Thread.sleep(2500);} catch(Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} finally {
SDLMain.quit();
}
}
}
Right click the source file and choose Run As … Run.
If there isn’t already an entry below “Java Application”, create one. Ensure that the main class is set to “HelloSDL”.
Switch to the Arguments tab and add the following to VM arguments: -Djava.library.path=C:\Java\sdljava-0.9.1\lib
Open the project properties, select Java Build Path -> Libraries and click on Add external JARs, then choose C:\Java\sdljava-0.9.1\lib\sdljava.jar and click Open.
Run the project. If it works, that’s all there is to it!