Just got the OK from work to go to Google Developer Day at Eveleigh.   I’m quite interested in Bo Majewski’s Google Maps API talk & the newly engaged Aaron Boodman’s Building better AJAX applications should be good too.  But mostly I’m wanting to meet other developers who are working on & interested in developing the same stuff I am. 

Oh yeah, and learning new techniques that can be assimilated to the rest of our development team and to leverage our paradigms.  Or something like that… important business reasons for me to be going!

So anyway, if anyone is going to be there, let me know & we’ll meet up!

[tags]Google, Google Developer Day 2007, Sydney, Australia[/tags]

IEBlog announces that Microsoft has released the 3rd beta of the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. The biggest update seems to be to the CSS interface with the ‘Style Tracer’ to show what styles are being applied to the currently selected object.  That works nicely, but the subsequent ‘Trace Style’ and ‘CSS Selector Matches’ have no effect on my browser (IE 7 on Win2003). 

From the Internet Explorer Dev Toolbar Wiki:

UI refresh - A single button on the toolbar that opens the DOM inspector and reorganised menus
Style tracer - Find where the style is defined by right clicking on the style attribute in teh right pain
View Source - Both the generated and original source as well as the source for the selected elements.

Even without that working it’s still really good, it runs fast and does pretty much the same things that the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar does, at least all the things that I use it for anyway.

It’s nice to see this evolve into a useful developer tool, especially for people like me who need to do cross-browser development.  Remember the Developers Developers Developers!

via Gadgetopia

• Ian Olsen’s ReSharper vs. CodeRush post (and it’s subsequent follow-up). He makes some very useful points about the two programs. After my ReSharper demo licence expired recently I really empathise with this point:

  I really miss ReSharper’s usage search tools. Being able to move up and down the call graph with a keystroke or two is really nice, and very conspicuously absent from CodeRush. If you spend a fair amount of time reading other people’s code, this is huge. With everything else CodeRush does, I can’t fathom why this feature is missing. In Visual Studio 2005 it’s tolerable, because Visual Studio has its own (admittedly lame) implementation of this, but I’m thoroughly crippled in Visual Studio 2003, where I still do a fair amount of work. I could go back to ReSharper for this reason alone.

  We’ve been having discussions on ReSharper vs CodeRush at work, but from my own experience & now from reading these posts, I’m think ReSharper is for me. I really liked it’s syntax highlighting too, and the background compiling is a huge help, being stuck in VS2003 as we are. When my licence ran out it felt like I’d lost an arm.

  I also just noticed that JetBrains have launched the .NET Tools Blog which, although it is just about their software, does have some really helpful tips on how to use ReSharper well. eg: Quick-Fixes help generate switch blocks.

• Larkware. The daily grind was added to FeedDemon as soon as I found it (thanks Scoble!), there’s just so much good stuff in there, if you can stand to wade through all the ads.

• Taking the award for the most historically accurate technical analogy I’ve ever seen is Ted Neward’s essay on Object/Relational Mapping: The Vietnam of Computer Science. This is particularly interesting to me as I’m in the process of trying to come up with a more flexible O/R-M methodology using some reflection magic. This has given me something more to think about.

• And finally, while it’s got nothing at all to do with .NET, Paul Graham’s latest essay The Power of the Marginal is, as always, required reading.

At Drive we’ve just released the new Blog on drive. It’s running off a Movable Type engine, similar to the SMH blogs. There’s been a fair bit of interest already & some good discussions going. This is quite a new thing for drive, and we hope it will be of some value to people, rather than just turning into yet another lame corporate attempt to jump on the blogging bandwagon.So drop on in and add your 2 cents to whether Australian drivers are the world’s worst.

As this is a new development, we’re very open to comment/questions & suggestions. If there’s something that you think’s missing or something’s not working, please contact drive, or leave a comment here.

New promotion launched today too, win $100 worth of petrol.

Technorati tags: Blog, Corporate Blogs, Cars

Google’s new Page Creator tool has had that many traffic that they’ve shut down new signups.

Thank you for your interest in Google Page Creator! Google Page Creator has experienced extremely strong demand, and, as a result, we have temporarily limited the number of new signups as we increase capacity. In the meantime, please submit your email address and we will notify you as soon as we are ready to add new accounts. Thank you for your patience.

What does it say for the development of online tools when Google can’t handle the load?

Update: They’re back up again

The National Australia Bank, who have decided to follow KFC’s lead in turning themselves into an acronym (yes I know KFC is only an abbreviation), have also decided that confusing their internet banking customers is also a good idea.

On their homepage the links to internet banking & online trading has been moved from a large bold link up the top of the page to the right side of the page in small font. Why this was done is a mystery to me. It doesn’t really affect me, as my eyesight is fine and I’m fairly comfortable with navigating web pages. However, for the less web-savvy and those with poor eyesight it’ll be making things just that little bit more difficult. Sure, it’s not a big issue, but why make it more difficult than it needs to be. Remember the user’s mantra is “Don’t make me think!“. And making internet banking harder to find will just push more people into the branches, which is something all banks are desperately trying to avoid. I can only think that it has been moved for design reasons, that is, their designer (or agency as I assume it will be) has come up with a design that has the login box over there. It really is a strange decision, becuase as this eyetrack heatmap study shows, the top-right position is possibly the worst place to put anything as it’s the last place people look on a page.

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