Mockups

I found this cool little mockup tool that is very easy to work with called Balsamiq. I generally use OmniGraffle for sketching mockups and wire frames but I found this tool to be very enjoyable to work with. When you DnD you elements to the screen you get lots of options for editing that is very intuitive. Here is a quick example of something I whipped up with this tool so you can see what you can do in 2 minutes. The images are cartoonish but I think it will resonate well with end-users when doing design meetings or technical presentations. Simple! Easy to use! Great tool!

Hudson, run a bypass

I thought I would share a pleasant experience I had with a CI (continuous integration) tool called Hudson. I have used other tools like this in the past including Anthill, CruiseControl, and TeamCity. While these tools did their job none of them seemed as easy to use as Hudson.

Hudson downloads as a self contained war file that launches from a command line:

java -jar hudson.war

That is really it to get running and there is nothing else to install. Hudson comes with a built in servlet engine called Winstone. There are no configuration files that you have to touch because you use the built-in intuitive UI to configure the Hudson server and your projects. There are tons of plugins available that can be used to extend the core functionality or you can write your own custom plugins. We run Starteam (yuck) for source control internally but I found a plugin for it and installed it from the web administration. Very simple! I was able to configure SCM checkout, setup email notifications, and execute our build script successfully in about 15 minutes without knowing the product. If you want to see what awesome open source projects look like check out Hudson.

Flex 3 Builder on Mac OSX

I ran into problems installing the Flex 3 Builder Professional edition on my Mac. This was because my current version of Java was set to 1.6.0. Before you install make sure you go in your Java Preferences (from spotlight) and make sure your Java application setting is J2SE 5.0 32 Bit by dragging it to the top of the list (temporarily). Then install Flex Builder 3 from the DMG file. You will not encounter any errors in the installation.

Finally, I needed to use the latest version of Java but Flex Builder still needs to run on the 1.5 JDK. For this I went through Finder to edit

/Applications/Adobe Flex Builder3/Flex Builder.app/Contents/MacOS/FlexBuilder.ini

From here just add these lines to the top of this file so you can use the right version of Java:

-vm
/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0
-vmargs
-Xdock:icon=../Resources/flexbuilder.icns
-Xdock:name=Flex Builder
-XstartOnFirstThread
-Xms128m
-Xmx512m
-XX:MaxPermSize=256m
-XX:PermSize=64m
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.smallFonts
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.noFocusRing

Now when Flex Builder starts it will use the right version of Java. Go back into Java Preferences and move Java SE 6 back to the top of the list if that is what you want.