castelaz's blog

Noted Cocoa Programmer Contemplates Switch to Java

North Pole - Claus, Inc. has announced they are exploring the cross-platform possibilities of Java. Santa, founder and CEO of Claus, Inc. was an early adopter of Apple computers beginning with VisiCalc on an Apple II.

Help maximize screen space with a small UI trick

Way back in the primordial ooze stage of our new product, it was decided that we needed a custom control rather than use the standard combobox to handle dropdown lists.

Pair programming: Everyone's favorite argument

I don’t know how it is for you, but nearly every conversation I’ve ever had about extreme programming eventually works its way to pair programming, which pretty much kills the dialog part of the conversation.

Ambiguity

I believe nearly every developer eventually creates their own metaphor for programming. Some are rather tame, such as “building bridges between users and systems”. Others can be quite aggressive.

The best laid plans

I recently started a new assignment at work to improve field validation in our primary Swing application. Like many older GUI based applications, our product relies heavily upon the lost focus event to trigger field validation.

Hesitant Acrobats

Last week, Daniel Steinberg wrote that he attended a local JUG meeting to hear Bruce Tate speak about his book “Better, Faster, Lighter Java”. I was fortunate enough to be at the same meeting.

Buried treasure can be found nearly anywhere

It started as a typical morning. I was three days behind schedule on a one day project, but hoping to finish it by late afternoon. Of course, I’d no sooner gotten into the code, trying to recapture yesterday’s flow, when the phone rang.

The Catastrophe Cycle

Are Encapsulation, Polymorphism, and Inheritance peers?

I spend most of my time as a Java developer happily writing code without explicitly thinking about encapsulation, polymorphism, and inheritance as underlying principles. I mean those things are given. It would be like noticing wheels are round each time I get in my car.

Robogrammer 2303

Predictions do little for me. If they're in the near term, they're just stating the obvious, and if they're far into the future, they seem pointless. On the other hand, it is fun to speculate. In a recent blog, James Gosling mentioned he still dips into C on occassion.