Macadamian Blog

Streamlined Product Creation Means Fast Turnaround

Make no mistake, 2011 will be a race to get the best solution out to your users before your competitors do.

User-Centered Agile Software Development

I just finished reading User-Centered Agile Methods. It is a short and well written book that attempts to paint an accurate picture of how user experience design can fit in with current Agile development processes.

It has a whole bunch of useful nuggets of information (for both UXers and developers). However, the most useful piece to me is the really cogent description of Sprint 0 (Inception sprint, Phase 0).

Sprint 0 is one of the most debated aspects of integrating UX into the Agile development cycle. Many Agile experts state that Sprint 0 is a violation of the basic principles of Agile. While others say that it is just silly to start a project without a bit of planning and architecture.

Which localization framework to use on a WPF project?

Microsoft recommends using a tool called LocBaml to localize the strings in your WPF application. We spent a lot of time trying to get LocBaml to work, and ended up dropping it, particularly because

• Documentation for the tool from Microsoft is sparse. You have to rely on blog posts and articles like this
• The tool appears to be a beta from Microsoft, and there are a number of known bugs. I haven't seen any indication of when they'll be fixed.
• Using tool is a 10+ step process, and this process needs to be repeated frequently to update the localization. It involves command line operations, generating .csv files, etc. all of which is reported to be error-prone

A project developed in 2008 (under MS public license) called Extension: WPF Localization got a lot of favorable reviews on the web, so we decided to try that instead. It is simply 4 .cs files which provides a localization framework and dynamic language switching at run-time, among other benefits. The documentation and examples are also quite good. Until we hear updates on LocBaml, this is a framework we'll definitely re-use in future projects.

Android - Theming the Unthemable

If you are relatively new to Android, we highly recommend you check out our guide: Your First Android Release - It Could Go Well (Or Really, Really Badly)

“What we've got here is... failure to theme. Some views you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last project, which is the way Android wants it... well, it gets it. I don't like it any more than you men.” – Captain, Road Prison 36

Some of you might recognize the previous paragraph as the introduction of Guns ‘N Roses’ Civil War or from the movie Cold Hand Luke starring Paul Newman. This is the feeling I get when I try to create a custom theme for an application on Android. The Android SDK does permit some level of theming, which is not really well documented to start with. Other things are hard-coded, “so you get what we had here last project”. Now, one of the things your application will most likely use is the Options menu, which is the menu you see when you press the hard menu key. It is kind of... orange. In our last project, we had to completely remove the orange in favour of our customer’s color scheme, which is on the blue side.

Android - Custom classes from XML layout

If you are relatively new to Android, I highly recommend you check out our guide: Your First Android Release - It Could Go Well (Or Really, Really Badly)

In Android, you can use a list view and define the layout for items in the list.  You can even use different layouts based on item type, each with different heights and content.