Tag: design

Programming

Application Version Numbering

By Pete O'Shea

Every program or app has some kind of version number. With Mac OS X, the X is a Roman numeral for version 10. OS X Lion relates to version 10.7 and the latest release, at the time of writing, is 10.7.1.

OK so what exactly do all these numbers mean and what is the best way to use these numbers when creating your own applications?

I am kicking off a new ‘Programming’ category today. As this is a big part of what I do for a living I thought I should use this opportunity to impart some my knowledge and/or views. To start here is an explanation of how I view version numbers and my recommendation of how to decide which numbers to use.

Read more
Lifestyle

Business Website Redesign

By Pete O'Shea

Website DesignA redesign for my business facing website, over at peteoshea.co.uk, has been on the cards for a while now.

I did try and set up a second blog with the idea of keeping more technical posts separate, at least that way the website would have some useful content.

That didn’t really work out though as I didn’t have time to come up with twice the content. In the end I thought it best to try and keep all of my content in one place anyway so I ported the handful of posts back to this site.

So once again the website on my business cards pointed somewhere that wasn’t very useful or informative…

The challenge then started to create a simple, static website to explain what I can offer.

Read more
Technology

The Importance Of Flexible Web Design

By Pete O'Shea

Goat StaringI created my first web page back in about 1994 and at that time there was no choice but to be flexible with the layout of the page. The idea was more about making information available rather than trying to create a snazzy display. Loading images over a modem could take a while and so they were kept to a minimum…

The internet has changed dramatically over the years and now some websites seem to be based purely around images. This can be quite visually pleasing but there is a down side to it, the size is pretty much fixed.

As more and more internet enabled devices are appearing with different resolutions how can a fixed width website still work?

Read more
Programming

Creating Functional Specifications

By Pete O'Shea

Flapping CootI have recently had to start writing a Functional Specification for a development project I hope to start working on soon. OK so what exactly is a Functional Specification?

Even though I have been a developer for many years now I haven’t had a great deal of experience with complete specifications. This meant that I had to go and do some background reading to find out a bit more about what exactly was involved. So I thought I would write a post to summarise my findings.

The idea of a Functional Specification is that you define the scope of the problem, design the program and describe exactly how things are supposed to work, in detail. This is meant to cover the program purely from the potential users point of view.

If you want to get into technical details of how the project is to be written then that sort of information would be provided in a second document called a Technical Specification.

Read more
Technology

Website Design

By Pete O'Shea

Color pencilsThis week I got a phonecall out of the blue from an old friend who wanted me to design a website for him. I used to love all things web and was always playing with web pages. Learning as much as I could about HTML, JavaScript, CSS and PHP.

After a while I noticed that pages were displayed differently by every browser and so things started to become a mess of special cases for each of the browsers. As I got older my priorities changed and so along with all the extra code that was being required my interest waned.

Luckily things are starting to improve. With the improvements in browsers and the languages that describe the web pages, including advances like AJAX, things are starting to become interesting again.

With my goal of improving my web presence he couldn’t have picked a better time as I was keen to dig in and (re)learn all I could about web design anyway.

Read more