ui Archives - Trisha Gee

In my day…

December 12, 2020March 3, 2014 Trisha Gee

Web development has changed a lot. I was aware that there have been many changes in the last few years, and I’ve seen maturity come to web platforms in the form of standardisation and common reusable libraries and frameworks – and I don’t mean reusable in the way we used to “reuse” stuff by nicking … Read more

CSS for Developers: Horizontal and Vertical Centring

December 17, 2020April 12, 2011 Trisha Gee

First, an apology. I will be using the British spelling for "centre", because, well, I'm British. But it gets really confusing because you have to use the American spelling in the code. And doesn't "Centring" just look wrong?

CSS for Developers: Cross Browser Table Border Behaviour

December 17, 2020January 28, 2011 Trisha Gee

One of the aims of this series is to highlight some stupid gotchas in support for CSS in the different browsers.

Today's gotcha is table borders.

Yes, yes, I said don't use tables. What I means is, don't use tables for layout. But you can use tables for, you know, tabular data. Like, for examples, lists of instruments and their bid and ask prices.

But you should know that even when you use strict mode, Internet Explorer has slightly... eccentric... rendering behaviour for tables. Actually to be specific, it's IE7 only.

CSS for Developers: Column Layout Using CSS

December 15, 2020January 25, 2011 Trisha Gee

This is a continuation of my series of CSS hints / tips / cheats for developers (and other technical-but-not-UI people).

The screenshots are in Chrome on a Mac. The originals were on Firefox on Ubuntu so I can tell you the behaviour is identical.

GWT: Why VerticalPanel is Evil

December 12, 2020January 21, 2011 Trisha Gee

At LMAX we adopted Google Web Toolkit pretty early on. One of the motivations for using it was so we only had to worry about recruiting Java guys, and then we could all work on every part of the application including the web UI. Sure, you can learn a bunch of different skills if you … Read more

CSS for Developers: The Joy of Floats

December 15, 2020January 19, 2011 Trisha Gee

As promised, the Long Awaited Follow-Up to CSS for Developers Part One! Well, long-awaited if you're as afflicted with NADD as I am.

Quick recap - the aim of this series is to provide a quick and easy how-to around the magic that is CSS. It's primarily aimed at developers, although I would hope it's comprehensible to a range of tech-savvy people.

CSS for Developers: Horizontal Layout Using CSS

December 15, 2020January 17, 2011 Trisha Gee

I'm a Java Developer. But I'm also a Web Developer. Web Developers have been so badly maligned over the last decade or so that I always feel wary (and sometimes slightly ashamed) admitting this. There's some sort of assumption that Web Developers (and Front End Developers) aren't real programmers. Similarly, "real" developers don't like to be tainted by coming into contact with that nasty "front end stuff" in case someone mistakes them for a designer.

Trust me, no-one is going to mistake a Java Developer for a designer. For a start, when designers wear geeky glasses it's ironic. Or chic. Or something.

But developers will be forced to do something around the front end at some point in their lives. Even if it's because they're sick of manually kicking off some process and want to give the users a big red button to press instead.

On the perils of Front End Design

December 15, 2020September 1, 2008 Trisha Gee

I'm reading Joel Spolsky's User Interface Design for Programmers. A thought that's struck me is about architecture. It's easy to get fooled into thinking building software is a bit like being the architect for a building. I'm not even going to go into the differences between engineering practices à la building design and good practice software design. I'm going to start from the easy point, the stuff you can see.