A glossary of agile development terms for budding agile developers to swot up on, prepared by Alex Howard. Since I've bumbled my way through one or two stand-ups (even though I don't know my Ruby from my Java), let's focus on those: A stand-up is a daily progress meeting, traditionally held within a development area. Business customers may attend for the purpose of gathering information. The term "standup" ... Read full entry

A gentle introduction to Agile software and application development processes... readable from the safety of your established comfort zone. Some teams and individuals balk when a mandate to "become agile" is passed down from some "higher-up" in the organization or when some young go-getter decides to start an idealistic grassroots movement to effect change. A switch to agile often conflicts with personal goals such as maintaining the status quo, ... Read full entry

Friday 1 August is Usability Challenge 2008 day. Because the world needs a usability shake-up. And more emphasis on end user and customer testing before web or software applications are launched. Or the layout of the cheese display is finalised at the supermarket, for that matter. I'm talking about poor information architecture in the gourmet cheese section of the deli (where's the BLOODY stilton???). I'm talking about cash registers ... Read full entry

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says bad applications have had their day on the world's favourite social network. "We've made a lot of mistakes and there is a lot we have to learn," Zuckerberg said. "We haven't done enough to reward the good citizens in our ecosystem and, on the flip side, we haven't done enough to punish the applications that have been abusive." Incidentally, the "ecosystem" Zuckerberg refers to is ... Read full entry

Social networking applications can pose security risks Your Facebook profile may be set to private, and you only accept friend requests from people you actually know, but still your private data can fall into the hands of undesirables by way of... applications. While the mind boggles at what might be here, one result of application harvested personal information appears to be targeted advertising, and high precision ad targeting at that. Jonathan Gaugler, ... Read full entry

Google could be superseded, says web inventor Tim Berners-Lee talks about the rise of the Semantic web and the next phase of the web's development, which apparently doesn't leave much room for current search engine technology. "Using the semantic web, you can build applications that are much more powerful than anything on the regular web," Mr Berners-Lee said. "Imagine if two completely separate things - your bank statements and your calendar ... Read full entry

MySpace to further open site to outside developers. It seems struggling social network MySpace has determined that allowing the development of applications, which are all the rage (or mostly all the rage) at arch rival Facebook, is the way to boost its flagging fortunes. By creating a formal developers' program, MySpace plans to give programmers "deeper access" to the site and the ability to "build richer applications as ... Read full entry

How To Build A Facebook Application. What the world needs now is a couple of useful Facebook applications (if that isn't an oxymoron), so if you're up to the task Gareth Rushgrove has written a "how-to" article just for you. We're going to jump straight in to a full-blown application rather than start with a simple, but pretty useless, "Hello World" example. The application is called Birthdays Book, and ... Read full entry

Mattel in war of words over Scrabulous. Assuming Facebook stays in the headlines long enough - that is, it isn't superceded by something else next week - we're probably going to see more stories like this. Addicts of Scrabulous, an online word game played by millions of office workers on Facebook, may soon have to go cold turkey because of a looming copyright battle with the owners of Scrabble. The ... Read full entry

Where Keyboard Shortcuts Win. For the point and click generation of software developers. Just when should keyboard shortcuts be included as a feature of an application? For very common tasks, such as opening and closing files, and/or for tasks performed less frequently, though several times when they are? When you're doing the same thing over and over - not even necessarily right after each other (e.g. Paste, Paste, Paste, Paste…) but ... Read full entry