Slashdot has linked to an article Jeff Vogel has written on developerWorks called Six ways to write more comprehensible code. It’s focused on C+ and uses variable names with underscores and global #DEFINEs etc that I personally hate, but the ideas are spot on.
Sun has introduced the JavaFX platform, which looks like a bit of fun. It’s declarative, statically typed, and uses embedded HTML, so it seems to be a lot easier to develop than Swing. The openjfx community site has some interesting examples, but none are based in the browser (all in window forms), so I’ll have to have a play. There are some demos on the main page of the community site as well.
My machine is fresh and shiny again, and I’m trying out OpenOffice.org rather than mess around with ye olde MS Office. I’ve also installed Visual C# 2005 Express and XNA Game Studio Express, and started messing around with the coolness of simple 2D and 3D game programming in managed C#, on my (now working) Radeon 9550.
I’m also using Thunderbird rather than Outlook, but it’s annoying me because it pops up an alert if there’s any unread mail, not when mail arrives like Outlook. Also there’s no way to minimize to the notification area. I just think that an email application should be like instant messaging, always on (unless you want to turn it off) but not obtrusive. I can have 15 windows open at a time just while working, I don’t want to have another tab on the bottom of the screen just on the off chance I get some blog spam. I should write my own email app (yeah right).
Microsoft has released a service pack for VS2005 under Windows Vista, so maybe I can consider Vista when I eventually upgrade my poor Athlon XP 1600+. Now I just have to get over having to go through twice as many screens to use advanced settings, mess around with an over-simplified explorer interface, buy an enormous screen to make room for the Aero Glass widgets, wait for minutes to delete a file, and the fifteen billion other annoyances that I picked up with Vista after playing for 5 minutes. Easy.
I was looking for GUI designers for Eclipse (because Sian-lee’s got me thinking about Java) and found this animated blog entry about the GridBag layout manager.