About a month ago we relaunched this blog with fresh colors and a crispy new layout. On the left you can see a reminder to the old green and grey theme as it was before. Its seriousness and tediousness didn’t seem to perfectly match our attitude (allthough we are of course serious after all). Some evenings of moving around pixels and poking around in php templates (enough is enough now) finally produced this colorful spring theme.
Enjoy!
Hunting one of the strangest layout issues in IE – if you hover over an element, the input elements on the page mysteriously move down – we learned about the very strange concept of “layout” internet explorer employs: Give your elements height, width or one of the other CSS-properties that “cause an element to have layout” (I can’t help but giggle when I read this, and I have no clue what it’s supposed to mean) and many of your IE display issues will disappear. >> more…
Recently there was a public voting for Barbies next career. I didn’t grow up with that kind of toys, but obviously there are editions showing the Barbie doll in different professional roles. Today Mattel (the Barbie producer company) announced Barbies next two careers. There were four options: environmentalist, surgeon, news anchor and computer engineer. They did two surveys, one among girls and another public voting. While the girls have choosen news anchor as the preferred profession for their dolls, the public clearly voted for computer engineer. I must admit, I also did my best. Now we should be prepared for a new generation of girls, who know they can do it. I was impressed to read in the factsheet that they actually asked IT professionals what a computer engineer might wear. Although I personally disagree with the choosen colours and the pants, I think it’s a nice thing if girls around the world ask their teachers and parents about the meaning of that numbers on her shirt.
Next month, we will stop supporting IE6 in conjectPM. This means getting rid of all those “if it’s IE6 add 2 pixels to the y-position”, deleting lots of CSS hacks, throwing away all spezialized stylesheets… we’re already counting the days (great that February s such a short month) and think about having a “hooray, no more IE6!” party.
Or, to cite this month’s ThinkGeek newsletter, “Hearing the news was just like being in high school and getting a pass out of P.E.” (that was about Google stopping IE6 support for Mail and Docs)
I would love to receive on of these, some time.
While playing around with Apache’s POI library to export Excel files I was wondering what HSSF could possibly mean… maybe some technical abbreviation? Looking it up in the documentation finally showed it’s actually “Horrible Spreadsheet Format”. Having worked with it, I’d say the name was chosen wisely.
Recently out interaction designers Maria and Franzi told us about paper prototypes and how to use them when finding out what customers will like and what they won’t understand. The idea behind it is, that customers (or whoever gives you feedback) are more willing to criticize when they can guess that not too much work already went into development. On top of that, it saves the time to create “real” prototypes.
I already liked the paper prototypes very much, because there’s always one in the team acting as the computer (that means, he scrolls the paper when you tell him, lays a new “screen” in front of you when you pretend to click somewhere etc.). I actually never saw it, but I imagine it to be pretty amusing. >> more…
Since years I wanted to make a Flash game again, and when Alex from marketing came with this “we want something from you” look in his eyes I was only too happy to help them build a little Christmas game for our customers. After half an hour the very first prototype was finished and evolved within three weeks (with the help of Helga, who drew all those cute trees and mushrooms!) to a real game with multiple levels, sound effects and even a step-by-step instruction.
3 out of 4 girls working in conjectPM development have their birthdays within 2 days… that’s why we only brought 1 cake. A home made three-tier nougat cake with ourselves modelled in marzipan on top. And we’re still trying to find out who in the company ate the figures (that is, us!) – or took them home to perform some voodoo magic with them, we’re not sure.
Apart from learning about clean code the developers conference was an excellent opportunity to act out our play instinct. As a result during the conference days something cute and colorful was born, something with wings (or paddles?) that moves, reacts to its environment and now even learned to play melodies when bumping the wall. >> more…