The Bird’s Eye View: Issue #4

Another week has passed and work progresses on the projects we mentioned last week.  As part of our regular weekly meetings, we discuss “interesting things” that we have found online or while developing. In this blog I’ll share some of these interesting things, but first we’ll go for a nice lunchtime cycle…

Martin, Mossy and myself went on the “Lunchtime Bike Ride” on Wednesday in the beautiful Dublin sunshine as part of National Bike week. We were among 2,500 cyclists on a 5km cycle around the city. Cyclists of all abilities took part – from experts like Mossy and Martin to those just-off-their-training-wheels like me. The route took in the Samuel Beckett Bridge, City Quay, College Green, Merrion Square, The Pepper Canister Church and part of the Premium Cycle Route along the Grand Canal. It was great fun and we really recommend the new cycle route along the canal, it’s a really beautiful ride.

Now, back to work. We’ve implemented some pretty cool mobile applications, including some iPhone apps. The most notable that comes to mind is the iPhone app that allows access to the LUAS timetable to blind users.

As part of that development we used TestFlight, an application that allows us to beta test an iOS application without having to use the App Store.

We are constantly ‘brain storming’ in Dovetail, particularly as part of the development process. We use mind mapping extensively for this, allowing us to get all the important information together for later analysis. One of Trevor’s favourite tools is Mindmeister.

Another cool tool, which I found to be a lot of fun and very useful was the Button Optimizer. This tool allows a user to design a button, and download the .CSS for the button, see below.

Regexpr is a very handy visual aid for building and examining regular expressions (and maybe give you one less problem).

Analysing Logfiles on Windows? We found BareMetalSoft to be good. The latest version of these programs are about six years old, but it’s still very very useful for searching and monitoring large files.

I’ll continue to add some more useful tools and items to the next issues of the blog, I hope you find them as interesting as I do.