There is that period of time, usually for around 3 seconds or more, when a plane hovers just a few feet above the runway before finally making contact. During that time, if you are not already turning to match the runway curvature, you would have to improbably make wheel contact at the exact tangent point, all the while clearing the lip of the banked runway. There is no way in my view of having a safe landing without first matching the curvature before touching down.
From what I see in the documentation, the "guard let" combination is sort of the opposite of "if let". Normally you would have something like this which would both assign destinationViewController to a new constant and would check to see if the result of controller is nil:
if let controller = segue.destinationViewController {// do something with controller }
with guard you can do the opposite:
guard let controller = segue.destinationViewController else {// handle a controller that contains nil
return nil }
You can also use it to check a complete expression for errors. The following will check if someController is nil OR someController.bunchOfItems is nil OR someController.bunchOfItems.count == 0
Perhaps fine for Roman characters, not so fine if the document contains Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, Hebrew, or any of the other character sets that don't play nice with "plain text" formats. For something that you would think would be pretty straight forward, plain text character handling is surprisingly maddening to work with.
One challenge younger students have is that they have no idea what it's like to work as a professional. So they tend to be somewhat unfocused in their studies. They take classes because they are convenient to their schedule of sleeping in, or whatever, and don't focus on the classes that will get them the skills and knowledge they really need. Internships can help, but I consistently see that students coming to school after working tend to be much more focused and driven - and tend to perform better.
I went through my university's co-op program, which was the best thing I ever did in my university experience. I highly recommend trying out a job in your field of interest before graduating, it's a great tool to focus the rest of your schooling.
I think it also had a "Fix HTML from Microsoft Word" option. Word should never have gotten an export to HTML option, although I imagine that the HTML output it created back then was likely not far off from what it must have looked like in the.doc file itself. If so, that would explain a few things.
Ick, I stayed far, far away from that tool. I've worked with the markup that it's generated and it wasn't pretty. Then again, I've also worked with markup hand coded from people who weren't familiar with HTML/CSS best practices (even very recently), and it was equally painful to get the page to a level where I wouldn't cringe looking at the markup. Ultimately, whatever tool you use, it's no replacement for experience.
That's not been my experience with Dreamweaver for a long time, and I've been using it since version 3 in 1999. Back then it was one of the cleanest HTML editors out there and since then I think they've done a decent job of keeping it clean and keeping it from messing up markup you've added by hand. The issue that I see with how cruft is created in an HTML editor is from lack of familiarity with the raw HTML and CSS. For instance, if you just go ahead and start setting display properties on an element, it's going to put it inline or in a style embedded on that page. You have to at least know to set up an external stylesheet and how to link those styles to elements on that page to prevent that kind of cruft from forming. Also it makes a big difference to work in Dreamweaver's split code/design view, so that changes in one panel immediately show in the other. I've been coding by hand for a long time, but I still like having this view as it gives me confirmation that the page is structured the way I intended.
A couple of options. One, you could probably bundle the files up into an app like one created using PhoneGap, which would make everything local. Two, you could set the proxy setting to point to a server that you control, that will direct you only to an internal web server that you control. Regardless of how you do it, you will need to physically block the power and home buttons, and for non-iPad tablets, any other button that might take you home like the back button with something like a lockable case. Seems silly to block the internet, though, considering how many people in that waiting room are going to be browsing with their iPhones anyways.
This is a simplification that is not always true. What you want is a sensor size that is properly matched to the lens. In SLRs, cheaper bodies have sensors that are smaller than the total image projected onto the focal plane, so that light through the lens is wasted. If the sensor size is properly matched to the lens, you will get the best quality.
Or you could say that with the sensor smaller than the projected image you get the benefit of some extra optical zoom. You're not going to see significant degradation just because some of the light coming in is not used, there are plenty of photons coming in to get a nice sharp image from a 1:1.6 sensor. Such a sensor is still large enough that it doesn't suffer from the signal to noise issues in the very small and very high density sensors that are in many point and shoot cameras, so you are probably going to get a less noisy image in a partial frame sensor in a DSLR than you might get in a 15MP point and shoot.
Flash/Flex can handle complex applications just fine. Here are some examples of applications done with Flex: http://flex.org/showcase.php
In there is a timeline-based video editor, a calendaring/email/finance app, a task manager, and a photo editor. I've also seen a PowerPoint type presentation app, a Visio-type tool for creating object relationship charts, plus I've used it myself for creating a medical reporting application for diagnostic sensor data analysis. Flex can hold it's own very nicely against Java's capabilities, and I think it's easier to develop for and has a better experience installing and running on the client.
That said, we are currently trending away from using plugins at all, due to the mobile platform. More and more will be done with HTML/JavaScript/CSS, leaving plugin-based tools as more niche products for Web development. Flex however now compiles mobile applications, so I think we will see more life in that space.
"Java is a much nicer development system than say Flash."
That's a pretty subjective statement. I would take doing development in Flash-based Flex development over Java any day. Flash Builder is a very nice development environment, and I would say that laying out a screen using Flex is a heck of a lot easier than using Spring layouts.
Those giant TVs had been working very well, and were a big part of the success of the Olympics as well in that it contributed in a big way to the atmosphere of celebration, but in a safe way. No alcohol was allowed in, beer and wine stores were closed down, and it was designed as a family friendly atmosphere. The same rules were in place for every game shown during these playoffs. The night of the riot, I saw a clip at the end of the game of a whole bunch of beer bottles being thrown towards one of the TVs. Evidently the checking for alcohol got lax, and that became part of the flashpoint.
"A "Brand" is something that requires a large scale organization to be effective."
Nonsense. A business with one single person still has a brand. Even if you have no logo, your name, your reputation, how you present yourself to customers, how you communicate, all form part of your brand identity. A brand does not equal a logo, the logo is simply a symbol that helps communicate elements of your brand identity. Many individual business people use Facebook, twitter, and blogging as a way to market themselves and contribute to that identity, sometimes very effectively.
You are better off with a better quality picture to start with, not more pixels. More pixels of a bad quality image downsampled still gives a bad quality image. In fact, increasing the density of a sensor reduces the size of the receptors, reducing the number of photons reaching the receptor and leading to noise and quality issues. It's especially apparent in the small sensors used in point and shoot cameras and in cell phone cameras. It is possible to actually make an image worse through nothing more than increasing the sensor density.
Absolutely. Even if she actually had pot or worse, a strip search is totally inappropriate. It's a violation and can cause major emotional damage. Why were the parents not called? What kind of school is this where kids are treated as criminals? How can this possibly be justified? As a parent, I would be absolutely irate to hear that a school would even consider strip searches, much less actually apply them. Kids do need rules and structure, but more than anything they need people who care and who support them and provide a safety net. This kind of act from people the kids should be looking up to utterly destroys that sense of safety.
Fabulous, thank-you, I was hoping someone would pipe up with one. I hadn't seen any mention of any Safari debuggers up to this point, this will be very helpful.
The bugs that I had were both rendering-related and JS related, and so far it has been consistently the same for me. It actually surprised me, although judging by your experience it was probably more luck that the JS issues were the same.
For me as a Web developer, even if it doesn't get much market share, it's already provided a great service (although it sure would be good to see it get market share, it's a nice browser). It has helped me significantly already in debugging Safari issues. With the site that I am currently developing, which is fairly JS/Ajax intensive, all of our Safari bugs showed up in Chrome as well. Since Chrome actually has a debugger (and a fairly decent one at that), I was able to use it to diagnose and fix the Safari issues in a fraction of the time. Of course if Apple were to release a debugger for Safari or a third party were to develop one, that would lessen the need, but Chrome currently solves a significant issue from a developer standpoint.
Response time is most definitely a UI issue. Most non-functional specs that I see that go into the user interface design process specify minimum response times at some level or another. Sub-second response (ideally 1/10th of a second or faster) is ideal for showing a response in the user interface (such as button down/over/up states). Multi-second processes need to start with feedback indicating something is in progress. The fact that the poll clerk in the article mentioned that it can take several seconds for the machine to respond suggests to me that no such feedback is present, which is unacceptable in any user interface much less one of this importance. I can totally see how people would be confused. I suspect that the issue is that people, not seeing their presses get registered, start pressing other areas to try to get a response. The last button pressed is the one that overrides the others, so they only see the results of their flailing, now inaccurate attempts to press the button they wanted.
I agree with most points, although 4) is a point of contention depending on who you ask, and actually in the Design of Everyday Things, a point is made that interfaces that present all options may actually be easier to use than those who hide functions behind modes. While the example they gave was a radio which is obviously different than a computer interface, it's still best to keep this in mind. The problem is that when one control does multiple things based on some mode, that's when modal errors take place. These errors are easy to make, and can have surprising results. The VI editor is a good example of modal issues, having an edit mode and a command mode. The difference between the two modes as is shown in the display is very subtle, but the difference in effect of doing something simple like pressing "dd" in one mode versus the other is significant. (I'm sure others can come up with far more destructive key sequences, I haven't used VI for a long time). For an example that's a bit more relevant, consider the palette controls in Photoshop. There are quite a few palettes that are available, not all of which are relevant at any particular time, however it is far easier to just have them open and laid out on the screen in a constant arrangement than it is to have them showing/hiding as needs or modes change.
I'm not saying that point 4) is wrong, I do agree with it. I'm just saying that minimal does not always mean easy, as it may take a lot more work to look for features that are hidden versus ones that are in front of you (look at Word's tabbed dialogues for a perfect example of how to make it hard to find features).
One more thing: To add one book to the pile of recommendations, I would suggest Jef Raskin's "The Humane Interface". Very good reading, and a very relevant point is "the user's data is sacred". Make sure that the user has a way out of what they are doing at all times, and ensure that when something goes wrong, any data they entered (but perhaps not "submitted" or acted upon) does not get lost.
Ok, I totally sound like a pompous ass there. Didn't mean for that, sorry. It's true that Dreamweaver makes it easier to produce crap code, but it also helps an experienced developer produce good code.
Slashdot Mirror
That is in fact what it does
There is that period of time, usually for around 3 seconds or more, when a plane hovers just a few feet above the runway before finally making contact. During that time, if you are not already turning to match the runway curvature, you would have to improbably make wheel contact at the exact tangent point, all the while clearing the lip of the banked runway. There is no way in my view of having a safe landing without first matching the curvature before touching down.
From what I see in the documentation, the "guard let" combination is sort of the opposite of "if let". Normally you would have something like this which would both assign destinationViewController to a new constant and would check to see if the result of controller is nil:
if let controller = segue.destinationViewController { // do something with controller
}
with guard you can do the opposite:
guard let controller = segue.destinationViewController else { // handle a controller that contains nil
return nil
}
You can also use it to check a complete expression for errors. The following will check if someController is nil OR someController.bunchOfItems is nil OR someController.bunchOfItems.count == 0
guard someController.bunchOfItems.count > 0 else {
throw MyError.OutOfStock
}
The guard statement is used for error management, and must transfer control using return, throw, break, or continue from within the block
From the author's bio: "He is having immense interest in psychology, human behavior and mind hacks."
Given that as well as the bad grammar, I'm pretty sure this is made up to get a reaction.
Perhaps fine for Roman characters, not so fine if the document contains Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, Hebrew, or any of the other character sets that don't play nice with "plain text" formats. For something that you would think would be pretty straight forward, plain text character handling is surprisingly maddening to work with.
One challenge younger students have is that they have no idea what it's like to work as a professional. So they tend to be somewhat unfocused in their studies. They take classes because they are convenient to their schedule of sleeping in, or whatever, and don't focus on the classes that will get them the skills and knowledge they really need. Internships can help, but I consistently see that students coming to school after working tend to be much more focused and driven - and tend to perform better.
I went through my university's co-op program, which was the best thing I ever did in my university experience. I highly recommend trying out a job in your field of interest before graduating, it's a great tool to focus the rest of your schooling.
Yep, Frontpage code was a mess, and it messed up stuff that was added by hand. So annoying.
I think it also had a "Fix HTML from Microsoft Word" option. Word should never have gotten an export to HTML option, although I imagine that the HTML output it created back then was likely not far off from what it must have looked like in the .doc file itself. If so, that would explain a few things.
Ick, I stayed far, far away from that tool. I've worked with the markup that it's generated and it wasn't pretty. Then again, I've also worked with markup hand coded from people who weren't familiar with HTML/CSS best practices (even very recently), and it was equally painful to get the page to a level where I wouldn't cringe looking at the markup. Ultimately, whatever tool you use, it's no replacement for experience.
That's not been my experience with Dreamweaver for a long time, and I've been using it since version 3 in 1999. Back then it was one of the cleanest HTML editors out there and since then I think they've done a decent job of keeping it clean and keeping it from messing up markup you've added by hand. The issue that I see with how cruft is created in an HTML editor is from lack of familiarity with the raw HTML and CSS. For instance, if you just go ahead and start setting display properties on an element, it's going to put it inline or in a style embedded on that page. You have to at least know to set up an external stylesheet and how to link those styles to elements on that page to prevent that kind of cruft from forming. Also it makes a big difference to work in Dreamweaver's split code/design view, so that changes in one panel immediately show in the other. I've been coding by hand for a long time, but I still like having this view as it gives me confirmation that the page is structured the way I intended.
A couple of options. One, you could probably bundle the files up into an app like one created using PhoneGap, which would make everything local. Two, you could set the proxy setting to point to a server that you control, that will direct you only to an internal web server that you control. Regardless of how you do it, you will need to physically block the power and home buttons, and for non-iPad tablets, any other button that might take you home like the back button with something like a lockable case. Seems silly to block the internet, though, considering how many people in that waiting room are going to be browsing with their iPhones anyways.
This is a simplification that is not always true. What you want is a sensor size that is properly matched to the lens. In SLRs, cheaper bodies have sensors that are smaller than the total image projected onto the focal plane, so that light through the lens is wasted. If the sensor size is properly matched to the lens, you will get the best quality.
Or you could say that with the sensor smaller than the projected image you get the benefit of some extra optical zoom. You're not going to see significant degradation just because some of the light coming in is not used, there are plenty of photons coming in to get a nice sharp image from a 1:1.6 sensor. Such a sensor is still large enough that it doesn't suffer from the signal to noise issues in the very small and very high density sensors that are in many point and shoot cameras, so you are probably going to get a less noisy image in a partial frame sensor in a DSLR than you might get in a 15MP point and shoot.
Flash/Flex can handle complex applications just fine. Here are some examples of applications done with Flex: http://flex.org/showcase.php
In there is a timeline-based video editor, a calendaring/email/finance app, a task manager, and a photo editor. I've also seen a PowerPoint type presentation app, a Visio-type tool for creating object relationship charts, plus I've used it myself for creating a medical reporting application for diagnostic sensor data analysis. Flex can hold it's own very nicely against Java's capabilities, and I think it's easier to develop for and has a better experience installing and running on the client.
That said, we are currently trending away from using plugins at all, due to the mobile platform. More and more will be done with HTML/JavaScript/CSS, leaving plugin-based tools as more niche products for Web development. Flex however now compiles mobile applications, so I think we will see more life in that space.
"Java is a much nicer development system than say Flash."
That's a pretty subjective statement. I would take doing development in Flash-based Flex development over Java any day. Flash Builder is a very nice development environment, and I would say that laying out a screen using Flex is a heck of a lot easier than using Spring layouts.
Those giant TVs had been working very well, and were a big part of the success of the Olympics as well in that it contributed in a big way to the atmosphere of celebration, but in a safe way. No alcohol was allowed in, beer and wine stores were closed down, and it was designed as a family friendly atmosphere. The same rules were in place for every game shown during these playoffs. The night of the riot, I saw a clip at the end of the game of a whole bunch of beer bottles being thrown towards one of the TVs. Evidently the checking for alcohol got lax, and that became part of the flashpoint.
"A "Brand" is something that requires a large scale organization to be effective."
Nonsense. A business with one single person still has a brand. Even if you have no logo, your name, your reputation, how you present yourself to customers, how you communicate, all form part of your brand identity. A brand does not equal a logo, the logo is simply a symbol that helps communicate elements of your brand identity. Many individual business people use Facebook, twitter, and blogging as a way to market themselves and contribute to that identity, sometimes very effectively.
You are better off with a better quality picture to start with, not more pixels. More pixels of a bad quality image downsampled still gives a bad quality image. In fact, increasing the density of a sensor reduces the size of the receptors, reducing the number of photons reaching the receptor and leading to noise and quality issues. It's especially apparent in the small sensors used in point and shoot cameras and in cell phone cameras. It is possible to actually make an image worse through nothing more than increasing the sensor density.
The T60s and T61s still ship without cameras.
Absolutely. Even if she actually had pot or worse, a strip search is totally inappropriate. It's a violation and can cause major emotional damage. Why were the parents not called? What kind of school is this where kids are treated as criminals? How can this possibly be justified? As a parent, I would be absolutely irate to hear that a school would even consider strip searches, much less actually apply them. Kids do need rules and structure, but more than anything they need people who care and who support them and provide a safety net. This kind of act from people the kids should be looking up to utterly destroys that sense of safety.
Fabulous, thank-you, I was hoping someone would pipe up with one. I hadn't seen any mention of any Safari debuggers up to this point, this will be very helpful.
The bugs that I had were both rendering-related and JS related, and so far it has been consistently the same for me. It actually surprised me, although judging by your experience it was probably more luck that the JS issues were the same.
For me as a Web developer, even if it doesn't get much market share, it's already provided a great service (although it sure would be good to see it get market share, it's a nice browser). It has helped me significantly already in debugging Safari issues. With the site that I am currently developing, which is fairly JS/Ajax intensive, all of our Safari bugs showed up in Chrome as well. Since Chrome actually has a debugger (and a fairly decent one at that), I was able to use it to diagnose and fix the Safari issues in a fraction of the time. Of course if Apple were to release a debugger for Safari or a third party were to develop one, that would lessen the need, but Chrome currently solves a significant issue from a developer standpoint.
Response time is most definitely a UI issue. Most non-functional specs that I see that go into the user interface design process specify minimum response times at some level or another. Sub-second response (ideally 1/10th of a second or faster) is ideal for showing a response in the user interface (such as button down/over/up states). Multi-second processes need to start with feedback indicating something is in progress. The fact that the poll clerk in the article mentioned that it can take several seconds for the machine to respond suggests to me that no such feedback is present, which is unacceptable in any user interface much less one of this importance. I can totally see how people would be confused. I suspect that the issue is that people, not seeing their presses get registered, start pressing other areas to try to get a response. The last button pressed is the one that overrides the others, so they only see the results of their flailing, now inaccurate attempts to press the button they wanted.
I agree with most points, although 4) is a point of contention depending on who you ask, and actually in the Design of Everyday Things, a point is made that interfaces that present all options may actually be easier to use than those who hide functions behind modes. While the example they gave was a radio which is obviously different than a computer interface, it's still best to keep this in mind. The problem is that when one control does multiple things based on some mode, that's when modal errors take place. These errors are easy to make, and can have surprising results. The VI editor is a good example of modal issues, having an edit mode and a command mode. The difference between the two modes as is shown in the display is very subtle, but the difference in effect of doing something simple like pressing "dd" in one mode versus the other is significant. (I'm sure others can come up with far more destructive key sequences, I haven't used VI for a long time). For an example that's a bit more relevant, consider the palette controls in Photoshop. There are quite a few palettes that are available, not all of which are relevant at any particular time, however it is far easier to just have them open and laid out on the screen in a constant arrangement than it is to have them showing/hiding as needs or modes change.
I'm not saying that point 4) is wrong, I do agree with it. I'm just saying that minimal does not always mean easy, as it may take a lot more work to look for features that are hidden versus ones that are in front of you (look at Word's tabbed dialogues for a perfect example of how to make it hard to find features).
One more thing: To add one book to the pile of recommendations, I would suggest Jef Raskin's "The Humane Interface". Very good reading, and a very relevant point is "the user's data is sacred". Make sure that the user has a way out of what they are doing at all times, and ensure that when something goes wrong, any data they entered (but perhaps not "submitted" or acted upon) does not get lost.
Ok, I totally sound like a pompous ass there. Didn't mean for that, sorry. It's true that Dreamweaver makes it easier to produce crap code, but it also helps an experienced developer produce good code.