Ever since Eclipse Helios (3.6) was released, I’ve been wanting to do a full clean Eclipse install. I didn’t get around to it until this weekend. During that upgrade, I also made a recap of the different plugins I had installed on my old Eclipse. This post is a short summary of the plugins I use, have used and might use.
It’s been a while since I indulged in my Flash and 3D hobby. I’ve been a longtime Sandy 3D fan, but it was about time I tried the competition. This post gives a short overview of how to set up FlashDevelop to run your first Papervision3D application.
This post goes into the different steps I’ve taken to get started with integrating PayPal in my AppEngine Java application. I couldn’t find a clear list of steps to take in the PayPal documentation, so I’m sure other developers will find the following summary very useful.
Not all web applications are created equally. Some attract millions of users, others only a handful. One major differentiator is how data and features are represented visually and how the user interacts with them. Some chase users away by their terse, technical and random screens. Others lure in even the most uninterested user by engaging them every step of the way.
But how do you get from that boring spreadsheet to an interactive user magnet?
The Design with Intent Toolkit helps by asking key questions.
The invoicing and accounting web app I’m building will require payment if it is used by larger companies. To facilitate this, I turned to the biggest online payment provider that I knew that also has integration options: PayPal. On its developer website, PayPal offers an immense amount of options with very little guidance on what to choose.
Whether you think about it from the start or not, every web application needs some kind of user monitoring. Questions such as “Do users have trouble registering?”, “Why don’t they buy product x?” need clear answers in order to move your site forward. A typical Vaadin application can not be used with some of the most popular web site analytics tools such as Google Analytics. A Vaadin application runs on one page, so it’s impossible to track users in the “old-fashioned” way.
There is however a user friendly Vaadin component that allows you to track user actions. It’s called GoogleAnalyticsTracker and this post goes into an important issue you might face when you try it out.
After releasing a very first glimpse at my Vaadin/Google AppEngine framework, I’ve been continuing development. I’m now at the point of creating my first Vaadin custom component. Vaadin’s custom components are part GWT widgets, part Java code that runs on the server. It’s a fairly intricate and advanced task, but the Vaadin book explains it well. As long as you keep the Vaadin architectural overview close by, most things will just work. But sometimes, you will want to debug your components. This requires a few leaps that aren’t very intuitive (not caused by Vaadin btw)
Every one who regularly runs or works out to music has probably thought about this. Wouldn’t it be cool to have the music change according to your training tempo? Well, Synchstep makes it possible. If you have an iPhone/iPod. It’s fairly cheap, it works with all your music and it works as advertized.
Last week I hinted at my renewed interest in JavaScript and IDEs and here’s the result a playground for the Last.fm API. I wanted to try out Last.fm’s API and what better way than write a little application. Some time ago I was really impressed with Google’s Code Playground so I wanted try my hand at it.
I think I got pretty close, but read on and judge for yourself.
The last few evenings, I’ve been rekindling with JavaScript. Up until now, my JavaScript development has been in PSPad. A great text editor, but fairly limited as far as specific formats are concerned. So I started my search for a better IDE and I think I found one.