I’m a big fan of trying to use a common vocabulary to describe things, especially when working with different departments, companies etc. – the more people you have involved the more important I believe that becomes.

So I was wondering how designers (I’m talking about visual designs here, UI etc.) refer to designs, I’ve heard some of the following being used within my time (mostly with my current company):

• Design
• Design candidate
• Mock-up
• Concept

I’d like to know how do you refer to designs, especially if you work in a design shop etc.

I’m currently in the very early stages of a new personal project that we’re really excited about. It came out of an idea I had a couple of days ago when I got frustrated with a situation I was faced with in work.

Now we’re on the short road to getting something designed and built and I’m really excited. There’s not much to tell right now as it would all just be pie in the sky, but I shall be sharing as much as I can as and when things progress.

Disclaimer: I understand that this post is kind of pointless and lacking of any real substance for you, but I’m just a little giddy about this idea.

Something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time now is to create a couple of back end implementations for my JavaScript Image Cropper UI (I really need to come up with a snazzy name for that) – obviously that hasn’t happened.

I have noticed a couple of implementations appear in the comments, we are now using it at work and I have been emailed about at least one more, but I would like to formalise this a little bit to share these implementations with other users; hence my solicitation.
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I and a small team have been writing a small application in PHP using CakePHP, which we all have an ongoing love-hate relationship with.

However we have been thinking that to really get things moving forward quicker we might move to Coldfusion. We currently have a dedicated server which runs my family of sites which is a LAMP box running.
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I was called over to Stu’s desk earlier today when he asked me "Dude, have you heard of Ralio?" (which is a Java Coldfusion – CFML – interpreter or engine).

"Yes I have", I replied.

"Just imagine for a second you didn’t know about it and take a look at this", he said pointing to the Railo website open on his screen.
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A very, very generous donation I received yesterday for my JavaScript Image Cropper UI reminded me of a conversation I had with my friend Martin Laine quite a while ago during an instant messenger conversation when we both happened to get donations for our separate coding projects (him for his fantastic Audio Player Wordpress plugin and me for my JavaScript Image Cropper UI – again) at the same time.

That conversation, I feel, gives quite a concise view of what donations mean to people like me and Martin (and possibly everyone else who asks for donations to support their free projects) so I thought I would share it here to give you the view from the other side of the PayPal account.
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Ok, so before you get too excited it’s not really a fully fledged version fantastic Firebug Firefox plugin, but the lite version does go some ways to easing your cross browser development.

If you’re not aware what Firebug is, the official site quote is:

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

But that doesn’t explain just how excellent Firebug is, it is by far and away not only the most complete debugging plugin I have found for any browser, but it also seems to be one of the most complete and professionally executed Firefox plugins around.
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cross trainer

I’m currently in the middle of writing a reusable little JavaScript utility, which I’ll probably release when it’s finished, for one of my many projects and I wanted to employ unit testing as part of the development process, as I believe in the benefits of it quite strongly.

However my previous experience with unit testing JavaScript haven’t been the most pleasent, I have tried the most common nUnit variations for JS, the best of which was JSUnit. But I always found this a little cumbersome and difficult to use, however I had recently read about the unit testing available with script.aculo.us and although the only documentation I could find was the PDF available at mir.aculo.us I thought I’d give it a go.
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I don’t really get into new TV series that much, due to a few facts, the main ones are that I don’t really watch much TV outside of things I know I like so I don’t get any exposure to them and that I don’t like being tied to TV schedules e.g. having to wait for the next episode. I long for real TV on demand. I prefer TV that I can dip in and out of, usually comedies like Family Guy, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, American Dad and South Park and anything on Discovery etc. especially Mythbusters, this is TV made for my PVR, I don’t need to watch the next episode and I can watch them when I please and in any order I like.
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Last night I came home to an email from my friend Stuart with the subject line This is special.

The email simply contained 2 links to some videos on YouTube, which turned out to be (the cryptic YouTube URLs don’t reveal the contents beforehand) two videos of guitarist Andy McKee.
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