Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Lateral Thinking

it's what they call "thinking outside the box", like that provoking questions u'd hear during interviews, sometimes it's a question or maybe a little story with few details and ur asked to give some answer or explanation, it can be very tricky or very obvious u'd be tempted to think further and slip, however it can be really smart sometimes,

it's considered a measure of creativity and innovation, that can be important for designers and marketing people, many real world situations show how people find strange solutions for their really difficult problems,

i found that site that lists a heck of those questions with answers, give it a try urself...

Monday, November 26, 2007

Ext: A New JavaScript Experience

i had the chance to explore Ext during the first week of my work in EasyDialog, i was really fascinated by the widgets that looked just great, and i liked the API docs too, it's so much like the Java Docs we are used to, very tidy and accessible.

i think it's a great job, my previous experiences with JavaScript never came near this level of organization and speed, yes, things just get done quickly and the results are pleasing too, it's a new experience for the developer, and for the user too, people just love the desktop-like components that act just as they're used to,

i like that it's a new toolkit, with Ext v1.1 released on August and v2.0 just at the end of October, it's a new vision too and it's attracting many enthusiastic people, you have to see it for urself, click here.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

how to control your desktop !!!

yes, desktops need to be controlled or they'll grow beyond the screen frames, all of us face this problem from time to time and it can be really frustrating, maybe it's a bad habit or maybe it's because we are usually too busy to worry about placing each file in the proper place and you find a friend on the messenger sending you some pic or audio file so somehow after a while you find the columns increasing exponentially to cover your pretty wallpaper, you'll feel something is wrong, maybe you'll try to clean up some files, but being greedy and possessive you'll decide to keep some files 'for now' so the desktop won't restore it's beauty and the wallpaper will still be covered and you'll still be frustrated,

the quick solution is to create a nice folder called "Desktop" and throw all your desktop inside of it, well you'll feel better for sometime but you'll miss your old files and the new ones will come quickly and you'll start to worry about prioritizing your files as who gets in the "Desktop" folder and who's kept on the desktop itself !!! then maybe you'll create another "Desktop" and rename the first one to "Old Desktop" maybe you'll have many such folders and you'll forget where you put that important file while you thought you solved all your problems,

well, i've gone through this and i came to that conclusion, it's up to you to decide, either you withstand the little bearable overhead of placing the files at the properly from the start or you make a regular clean up,

the solution i'm using for now is a mixture of both, i made the "Desktop" folder but inside that folder it's not the junk you'd expect to find, i made subfolders for the common extensions i use and of course an 'Other' folder where the junk would be hidden, since having shourtcuts is important it can be placed in the quick launch, the desktop or inside the "Desktop" folder, or maybe another subfolder can be made to hold some of them. later i placed that folder in another drive and just left a nice shortcut a nice icon on the desktop, with that i can save a couple of hundred mega bytes from the C drive, and maybe i'll be able to retrieve my recent files if i had to format for any reason,

now, i can enjoy my wallpapers and the internal organization of the "Desktop" folder can help me place the files quickly and help me clean up if things get messy, i hope it works for you too,