Isofarro

Your Move for iPad Solid FICS client, with great UI Rating by Mike D: 4.5 stars Your Move by red82 Software is a FICS (Free Internet Chess Server) chess client. It doesn’t play chess against you, or analyse games, or … Continue reading →

Another November, and the third Full Frontal one-day conference took place at the Duke of York cinema in Brighton. Last year's conference was fairly interesting, if a little demo-heavy. This year's seems geared toward development tools and web applications. The headline speaker was ex-Yahoo Nicholas Zakas, but the supporting speakers were more impressive and fresh.

Most interesting talk was Jeremy Ashekenas' CoffeeScript Design Decisions - which surprised me somewhat considering my opinion on the impracticability of CoffeeScript in a real-world web development team. I was also pleasantly surprised by Rik Arends' talk about the Cloud9 IDE. Phil Hawkesworth's talk was eminently listenable, but unfortunately impossible to live blog. Eloquent JavaScript author Marjin Haverbeke was incredibly interesting, but perhaps too technical for a conference talk. The final two talks, from Brendan Dawes and Marcin Wichary were both entertaining and (more importantly) inspiring. Glenn Jones provided us a very useful look at almost-ready features of browsers as a platform for sharing data. And Zakas rolled out a two-year old talk.

I'm skeptical about CoffeeScript. A large chunk of that skepticism is the idea that compiling one language into JavaScript is introducing additional layers of complexity that lead to maintainability issues, and difficulty in debugging problematic code. It's a cognitive dissonance that distracts from the task of developing production ready code.

Jeremy Ashkenas guided tour of CoffeeScript is informative and useful in seeing what's available. Essentially, CoffeeScript's principle is "it's just JavaScript". Except it isn't, it's syntactically different, and requires a compilation step to get it transformed to JavaScript.

Chess-wise Pro for iPad Has FICS client, but crashy and needs work on UI Rating by Mike D: 2.0 stars One of the features that attracted me to Chess-wise Pro was the FICS client. As persistent socket connections were once … Continue reading →

Chess-wise Pro for iPad Has FICS client, but crashy and needs work on UI Rating by Mike D: 2.0 stars One of the features that attracted me to Chess-wise Pro was the FICS client. As persistent socket connections were once … Continue reading →

Aart Bik’s Chess for Android Weak engine, tap-only interface. Has UCI support. Rating by Mike D: 2.0 stars Aart Bik’s Chess for Android is a free app that plays chess, unfortunately the overall quality falls well short of Chess Genius. … Continue reading →

Aart Bik’s Chess for Android Weak engine, tap-only interface. Has UCI support. Rating by Mike D: 2.0 stars Aart Bik’s Chess for Android is a free app that plays chess, unfortunately the overall quality falls well short of Chess Genius. … Continue reading →

Most of the time the HTML for a site doesn’t need to change as you localise an already internationalised site for a specific locale. Though your website needs the flexibility to specify locale-specific markup, so it is well worth having a system in place that allows that. And implemented properly, a mechanism for specialising templates based on multiple dimensions (locale being just one dimension) can be a very powerful tool.

Chess Genius for Android Strong and crafty chess engine at a very low price. Unmissable. Rating by Mike D: 5.0 stars Chess Genius landed on the Android App store earlier this year. Developed by Richard Lang who has an extraordinary … Continue reading →

Chess Genius for Android Strong and crafty chess engine at a very low price. Unmissable. Rating by Mike D: 5.0 stars Chess Genius landed on the Android App store earlier this year. Developed by Richard Lang who has an extraordinary … Continue reading →