Aaron Johnson Now with 50% less caffeine!

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Pancake People

But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available”. A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become [...]

RSS, Processing Instructions and Firefox 2.0

A couple weeks ago I posted an article that describes how you can use XML stylesheets with ROME to create RSS / Atom feeds that are ‘user friendly’ (like the ones that FeedBurner produces). Firefox 2.0, released just this past week, has a new feature which renders my article moot. The “Previewing and [...]

XSL / CSS Processing Instructions using ROME

Have you seen the way that the smart guys at FeedBurner display RSS feeds in a browser (here’s a sample if you haven’t)? If you’re like me, the first time you see a feed they manage, you’ll probably think that you’re viewing a page that contains a link to an RSS or ATOM feed, not [...]

WebWork and meaningful URLs

Personal pet peeve: meaningful URLs (which tonight I found out go by many names: pretty URLs, RESTian URLs, SES URLs, hackable URLs, etc…). At work, we use WebWork extensively but up until this point we haven’t made an effort to create meaningful URL’s. As with any well designed framework, it turns out that [...]

Transparent PNG Charts with JFreeChart

If you’re one of the 3 people in the world that need to create a transparent PNG image using JFreeChart, you’ve come to the right place:

JFreeChart chart = ChartFactory.createXYBarChart(…);
chart.setBackgroundPaint(new Color(255,255,255,0));
…
KeypointPNGEncoderAdapter encoder = new KeypointPNGEncoderAdapter();
encoder.setEncodingAlpha(true);
encoder.encode(chart.createBufferedImage(width, height, BufferedImage.BITMASK, null));

The key is that you must use the KeyPointPNGEncoderAdapter, which is slower for big charts, but is the only [...]

Adaptive Path interview with Jared Spool: how to ask questions

Great story from an interview that Adapative Path’s Peter Merholz did with the founder of User Interface Engineering Jared Spool:
PM: Any other mistakes, in terms of how tests are structured?
JS: There are many problems I see in terms of people not
understanding the effects of testing affecting results.
Here’s a simple example that we discovered. We [...]

Shallow comparison of ASP.NET to Flex

Flex seems pretty interesting when you realize how similar it is to something like ASP.NET. Look how similar this snippet of Flex:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”iso-8859-1″?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx=”http://www.macromedia.com/2003/mxml”>
   <mx:script>
   function copy() {
      destination.text=source.text
      }
   </mx:script>
   <mx:TextInput id=”source” width=”100″/>
   <mx:Button label=”Copy” click=”copy()”/>
   <mx:TextInput id=”destination” width=”100″/>
</mx:Application>

to this snippet of ASP.NET code:

<script language=”C#” runat=”server”>
   public void Copy(Object src, EventArgs e) {
      destination.Text = source.Text;
   }
</script>
<form runat=”server”>
<asp:textbox id=”source” size=”30″ runat=”server” />
<asp:button id=”copy” OnClick=”Copy” [...]

Web pages you can speak to and gesture at

Couple guys from my work are going to this W3C seminar tomorrow. If you’re in Boston, come on down, should be fascinating!
On a related note, my friend Joe worked at Lobby7 (which makes a multimodal application server) for a couple months, although I’m not sure that he was actually involved in the interface [...]

When good interfaces go crufty

When good interfaces go crufty [slashdot]