Project planning using the time-boxing method

Time Boxing

Quite often in the lifetime of a product’s development something unexpected will happen that will throw your project plan out of the window and you will have to reorganise your resources respectively. This could be the customer changing their mind on some included functionality, adding additional requirements or the priority of requirements. In this article I will continue the development journey with project planning using a time-boxing method to make sure everyone stays on schedule, interruptions are minimised and the customer gets what is most important to them. I actually

Red eye removal and photo healing using Photoshop

Photoshop Tip

In this short article I will show you how easy it is using Adobe Photoshop to manipulate a photograph that hasn’t quite come out how you expect. Quite often cameras come with red eye removal flash built in but sometimes the subject still comes out with a red pupils rather than a black ones. Photoshop can sort this out for you in seconds. Another thing that quite often happens is that the photograph’s subject has a blemish such as a spot on the skin or other blemish that you’d rather

Location aware content in your HTML5 web page

Geolocation

I know this is not very spooky post for Halloween. Unless, of course, you were sitting there this evening thinking to yourself, I wonder how you make a web page location aware and happened across my post. Anyway, back to the subject. Using HTML 5 you can now include the user’s location within your application. The Geolocation API was included in HTML5 although not strictly as part of the HTML5 specification. You can now use the power of a location aware device to know where your user is and provide

General Availability (GA) Pricing of Top Level Domains (TLDs)

New TLD Pricing

You may be aware that many new top-level-domain (TLDs) names were put on general availability in 2014 and 2015, meaning we have hundreds of domain name extensions to choose from. This short article looks at the pricing of the domain names for the new TLDs. There can be a huge difference in the pricing model between TLD owners as they set the price themselves. However, it doesn’t end there as the pricing model for all of these new domains can vary greatly even within the same TLD with a single

Working with large data sets in Excel powered ASP.NET websites

Data Loading

Working with large amounts of data can be slow going using Microsoft Excel’s internal lookup functions which is amplified if you are publishing lookup results on the internet dynamically. In this example, I have created a large(ish) table of sales data that I want to be able to pick from using some specified criteria. All of the information in this table is dummy data and even the specified criteria are probably not what a sales manager would be looking for. The purpose of this data is to show that handling

Cookieless user data storage using HTML5 Web Storage API

Web Storage

A while back I started writing about HTML5 and wrote “a brief guide to the enhancements and new features of HTML5” as well as more detailed articles about “HTML5 Video“, drawing using the “HTML5 Canvas” and “HTML5 Canvas Animation” and also one about scaleable vector graphics (SVG) with examples using HTML5. This follows on from those subjects with an article dedicated to the “HTML5 Web Storage API”. There are two new types of web storage that are now available to web developers in HTML5 for both local and session storage.

Getting images to a specified dimension using Photoshop

Photoshop Tip

Quite often I have images that don’t quite fit what I want them for. Sometimes, it’s because they are too big and other times they require some cropping or resizing (or both) to obtain the size that I need. In this short article, I will show a couple of methods that I use in Photoshop to get the result I want. The main thing to remember when resizing is that you’ll probably need to resize to one dimension and crop the other. So, in this first example, I want a

Working with charts in Excel powered ASP.NET websites

Web Charts

Personally, I think Microsoft Excel charts are powerful and look quite good so in this article, we will use SpreadsheetGear to connect to a workbook and fetch a chart as an image to display on an APS.NET web page. Obviously websites could use a charting library or define their own chart like images using the data generated from Excel but in this example we will get the image of a chart that is generated in Excel. This article is part of a set on using SpreadsheetGear to include the power

Using text within shapes and along shape paths with InDesign

InDesign File

One of the things that we get asked to do in a design document is to get text to fill a particular shaped gap or follow a path that is not straight. In this article I will cover both of those scenarios. There could be many reasons that you need your text to follow a curved path or to fit inside a particular shape. First up we will start with the shapes and getting your text to fit inside them is really simple. You use the framing tools to set

Working with macro functions in Excel powered ASP.NET websites

Macro Enabled

In this article, we will use SpreadsheetGear to connect to a macro-enabled workbook that has one user-defined macro function and we will attach a class to the SpreadsheetGear object to replace that function at runtime. This is not just a feature of SpreadsheetGear as middle-wear between a website or application and a Microsoft Excel workbook will not support macros but some of them such as SpreadsheetGear will allow you some way of redefing them. We will populate the initial page values of an ASP.NET website from a spreadsheet, make changes