Monday, January 31, 2011

Software Requirements: Innovative Secrets to a Stable Business or Project

Software Requirements: Innovative Secrets to a Stable Business or Project: "
 software requirement gathering by prototyping method

Do you run a business or you are a newbie in this craft? Do you wish to maximize your time, efforts and resources? Do you want to learn more about software requirements and how these innovative specifications can help you achieve your business goals? Well, read on and realize how important relevant, reliable and effective software requirements can be specifically in meeting your business objectives.

Learning more about this system software requirements is a good practice towards the attainment of your personal and business goals. Saving hard-earned money and hundreds of dollars is indeed part of our priorities. Thus, this may seem quite impossible especially during these times that you want to invest and pay for convenience, innovation and reliability. Well, not today, when you go online and visit some reliable and unbiased pages, you would get to know the basics, the keys and the secrets on how to make it happen. When all you need is a good partner in fulfilling your dreams and meeting the demands of your business.

Revolutionizing the way many companies create software requirements, online resources can hand you the basic information you may need in order to push through with great products, services and programs. Creating the most effective, efficient and innovative system software requirements is a good start to understand what you should be doing in order to make the products as well as your entire business successful. Continuous development, professional training and product modification has been highly advised to generate more positive results and much favorable outcome.

Product designs and specifications as well as system requirements analysis can be really challenging and time-consuming especially if you are not so familiar with the best way on how to deal with it. This has actually been as critical and complicated as system requirements analysis. Such success of a development project can be based upon how you can work at your best and come up with the best tools and most innovative strategies. With this, you can somehow minimize risks and lessen weaknesses.

All business software requirements must be accordingly assessed, evaluated, documented and recorded. This is to help you track and monitor your business, your people and your products accordingly. However, getting the right people, tools and resources towards reliable and effective requirements can never happen overnight. It may take time - quality time to research and create a desirable and focused structural plan. To minimize inevitable risks, errors and mistakes, you need to, first and foremost, equip yourself with the how-to techniques and the like. Otherwise, your plan on coming up with efficient software requirements may fail or not turn out as desired and expected.

Initially, you have to obtain a good, clear, focused and organized mind as well as the good programming knowledge and necessary skills. Hence, you may assign a pool of programmers to help you pull out a more favorable and highly competitive plan on software requirements design, specification and analysis. This group of professionals can indeed provide you with a complete package of getting the best and the most reliable and comprehensive requirements for your business. After all, your primary concern is to boost the total image, financial stability and credibility of your business. And that start with a great software requirement. Good luck!
"

10 Tips for Optimizing Your Website’s Speed

10 Tips for Optimizing Your Website’s Speed: "

10 Tips for Optimizing Your Website's Speed


Web page speed and performance is very important to the user experience. If your site is too slow, you’ll not only be losing visitors, but also potential customers. Search engines like Google factor a website’s speed into account in search rankings, so when optimizing your site’s speed, you should take everything into consideration. Every millisecond counts.


Here are just a few basic and general suggestions for improving a site’s performance.



1. Defer Loading Content When Possible


Ajax allows us to build web pages that can be asynchronously updated at any time. This means that instead of reloading an entire page when a user performs an action, we can simply update parts of that page.


We can use an image gallery as an example. Image files are big and heavy; they can slow down page-loading speeds of web pages. Instead of loading all of the images when a user first visits the web page, we can just display thumbnails of the images and then when the user clicks on them, we can asynchronously request the full-size images from the server and update the page. This way, if a user only wants to see a few pictures, they don’t have to suffer waiting for all of the pictures to download. This development pattern is called lazy loading.


Ajax/web development libraries like jQuery, Prototype, and MooTools can make deferred content-loading easier to implement.


2. Use External JS and CSS Files


When the user first loads your web page, the browser will cache external resources like CSS and JavaScript files. Thus, instead of inline JavaScript and CSS files, it’s best to place them in external files.


Using inline CSS also increases the rendering time of a web page; having everything defined in your main CSS file lets the browser do less work when rendering the page, since it already knows all the style rules that it needs to apply.


As a bonus, using external JavaScript and CSS files makes site maintenance easier because you only need to maintain global files instead of code scattered in multiple web pages.


3. Use Caching Systems


If you find that your site is connecting to your database in order to create the same content, it’s time to start using a caching system. By having a caching system in place, your site will only have to create the content once instead of creating the content every time the page is visited by your users. Don’t worry, caching systems periodically refresh their caches depending on how you set it up — so even constantly-changing web pages (like a blog post with comments) can be cached.


Popular content management systems like WordPress and Drupal will have static caching features that convert dynamically generated pages to static HTML files to reduce unnecessary server processing. For WordPress, check out WP Super Cache (one of the six critical WordPress plugins that Six Revisions has installed). Drupal has a page-caching feature in the core.


There are also database caching and server-side scripts caching systems that you can install on your web server (if you have the ability to do so). For example, PHP has extensions called PHP accelerators that optimize performance through caching and various other methods; one example of a PHP accelerator is APC. Database caching improves performance and scalability of your web applications by reducing the work associated with database read/write/access processes; memcached, for example, caches frequently used database queries.


4. Avoid Resizing Images in HTML


If an image is originally 1280x900px in dimension, but you need to have it be 400x280px, you should resize and resave the image using an image editor like Photoshop instead of using HTML’s width and height attributes (i.e. <img width="400" height="280" src="myimage.jpg" />). This is because, naturally, a large image will always be bigger in file size than a smaller image.


Instead of resizing an image using HTML, resize it using an image editor like Photoshop and then save it as a new file.


5. Stop Using Images to Display Text


Not only does text in an image become inaccessible to screen-readers and completely useless for SEO, but using images to display text also increases the load times of your web pages because more images mean a heavier web page.


If you need to use a lot of custom fonts in your website, learn about CSS @font-face to display text with custom fonts more efficiently. It goes without saying that you have to determine whether serving font files would be more optimal than serving images.


6. Optimize Image Sizes by Using the Correct File Format


By picking the right image format, you can optimize file sizes without losing image quality. For example, unless you need the image transparency (alpha layers) that the PNG format has to offer, the JPG format often displays photographic images at smaller file sizes.


To learn more about how to decide between JPG, PNG, and GIF, read the following guides:



Additionally, there are many tools you can use to further reduce the file weights of your images. Check out this list of tools for optimizing your images.


7. Optimize the Way You Write Code


Look around your source code. Do you really need all the tags you’re using or can you use CSS to help out on the display? For example, instead of using <h1><em>Your heading</em></h1>, you can easily use CSS to make your headings italics using the font-style property. Writing code efficiently not only reduces file sizes of your HTML and CSS documents, but also makes it easier to maintain.


8. Load JavaScript at the End of Your Document


It’s best if you have your scripts loading at the end of the page rather than at the beginning. It allows for the browser to render everything before getting started with the JavaScript. This makes your web pages feel more responsive because the way JavaScript works is that it blocks anything below it from rendering until it has finished downloading. If possible, reference JavaScript right before the closing <body> tag of your HTML documents. To learn more, read about deferring the loading of JavaScript.


9. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)


Your site’s speed is greatly affected by where the user’s location is, relative to your web server. The farther away they are, the more distance the data being transmitted has to travel. Having your content cached across multiple, strategically placed geographical locations helps take care of this problem. A CDN will often make your operating cost a little higher, but you definitely gain a speed bonus. Check out MaxCDN or Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).


10. Optimize Web Caching


Along with using caching systems, you should create websites that utilize web caching as much as possible. Web caching is when files are cached by the web browser for later use. Things that browsers can cache include CSS files, JavaScript files, and images.


Aside from the basics, such as putting CSS and JavaScript code that are used in multiple pages in external files, there are many ways to make sure that you are caching your files in the most efficient way possible.


For example, you can set HTTP response headers such as Expires and Last-Modified to reduce the need of re-downloading certain files when the user comes back to your site. To learn more, read about caching in HTTP and leveraging browser caching.


To set up HTTP Expires headers in Apache, read this tutorial on adding future expires headers.


Related Content



Raphael Caixeta is a PHP and iOS developer and co-founder of Grip’d. He likes to blog about web and iOS development at raphaelcaixeta.com. If you’d like to connect with him, you can follow him on Twitter @raphaelcaixeta and add him on Facebook (raphaelcaixeta).




"

5 Android Programming Books

5 Android Programming Books: "

Here are 5 Android Programming books to help you
learn how to develop and build Android mobile applications.



Android is an open source platform built by Google that includes an
operating system, middleware, and applications for the development of
devices employing wireless communications. It is really a
software platform, rather than just an OS, and will probably be used in
the future in a much wider range of devices than just smart phones. In
practical terms, Android
is an application framework on top of Linux, which facilitates its
rapid deployment in many domains. Android is open source and a
majority of the source is
licensed under Apache2, allowing adopters to add additional proprietary
value in the Android source without source distribution requirements.
Also check out my previous post on some descriptive Android
developer guides and presentations
.





The
Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development


(400 pages, 3.7mb, pdf)

This
book has it all for the Adroid Developer, how to start, a great
detailed explanation of the framework and concepts, and of course, many
coding examples that you are free to use.





Android:
A Programmer's Guide


(336 pages, 7.2mb, pdf)

This book explains and teaches
mobile device application development using the Open Handset Alliance’s
Android platform. It discusses and covers:
downloading and installing Eclipse and the Android SDK; learning the
Android SDK; writing your first program; using the command-line tools
and the Android Emulator; using intents and the phone dialer;
lists,
menus, and other views; GPS functionality; the Google API with GTalk;
writing your first application; and the Android SDK Tool Reference.





Professional
Android Application Development


(434 pages, 7.4mb, pdf)

This book will help you learn how to program and develop mobile
applications using version 1 of
the Android software development
kit. Each chapter teached new features and techniques to get the most
out of Android. It covers all the basic functionality as well as
exploring the advanced features through concise and useful examples.




Contents:

Introduction

Chapter 1: Hello, Android

Chapter 2: Getting Started

Chapter 3: Creating Applications and A ctivities

Chapter 4: Creating Use r Interfaces

Chapter 5: Intents, Broadcast Receivers, Adapters, and the
Internet

Chapter 6: Data Storage, Retrieval, and Sharing

Chapter 7: Maps, Geocoding, and Location-Based Services

Chapter 8: Working in the Background

Chapter 9: Peer-to-Peer Communication

Chapter 10 : Accessing Android Hardware

Chapter 11: Advanced Android Development





Professional
Android 2 Application Development
  (google
book)

This is the updated version of the above book, and it also takes you
through a series of
sample projects to help you learn and understand Android's new features
and
techniques. It details creating layouts and views to
produce compelling resolution independent user interfaces. It examines
Intents and content providers for sharing data, along with techniques
for
creating map-based applications and using location-based services such
as GPS. It shows you how to create and use background
services, notifications, and alarms and it demonstrates how to create
interactive
homescreen components. Finally, it reviews the Bluetooth,
telephony, and networking
APIs.



Contents:


Chapter 1 Hello Android



Chapter 2 Getting Started



Chapter 3
Creating Applications and Activities



Chapter 4 Creating User Interfaces



Chapter 5
Intents Broadcast Receivers Adapters and the Internet



Chapter 6
Files Saving State and Preferences



Chapter 7
Databases and Content Providers


Chapter
9
Working in the Background



Chapter 11
Audio Video and Using the Camera



Chapter 12
Telephony and SMS



Chapter 13
Bluetooth Networks and WiFi



Chapter 14 Sensors



Chapter 15
Advanced Android Development



Index






Professional Flash Mobile Development: Creating Android and IPhone
Applications
  (google book)

This book teaches Flash and ActionScript developers how to create
native
applications for Android mobile devices using Flash and Flash Builder.
It shows how to build a variety of apps
and integrate them with core mobile services such as Accelerometer,
GPS, and Photo Library. Learn how to port existing Flash media
to the AIR for Android platform. It provides sample code for building
native Android apps with Flash, migrating existing Flash media, testing
and debugging applications, and more. Also, how to work with
the Android OS file system and SQLite
database.



Contents:

Introducing
Flash Development for Mobile


Setting
Up
Your Development Environment


Building
and
Installing VanillaApp


Touch
and User Interaction


Multitouch

Coding
the Document Class


Detecting
Motion with Accelerometer


Implementing
Auto Orientation


Understanding
the Android File and Directory Structure


Working
with a
SQLite Database


Making
a SQL Query


Summary

Submitting
Your App to theApp Store


Application
Descriptor Settings


Geolocation

Service
Integration Using URL Protocols


What
You Need
to Use This Book



"

12 eBooks - Mobile, ASP .NET, C#, PHP, SQL Server

12 eBooks - Mobile, ASP .NET, C#, PHP, SQL Server: "

Here are 12
programming ebooks
as listed on a google search,
covering mobile and iPhone app development, ASP .Net, C#, dotNET, F#
 and PHP programming, as well as SQL Server and MS Access.





ebook topics
:



 - Mobile Web Programming

 - iPad and iPhone Development

 - ASP .NET and Silverlight

 - ASP .NET and MVC 2

 - dotNET Application Programming

 - F# (F Sharp) Programming

 - ASP .NET and C# for .NET 4 Framework

 - Silverlight and C# Programming

 - PHP Programming

 - SQL Server and SQL Server 2008

 - Microsoft Access 2010


"

50+ Awesome CSS3 Techniques for Better Designs

50+ Awesome CSS3 Techniques for Better Designs: "

CSS3 is gaining momentum, despite the fact that the standard hasn’t even been finalized.

There are hundreds of tutorials out there to teach designers how to use it, but unfortunately a lot of them cover the same ground.

And some of the tutorials teach designers to do things that they might not think of as useful, though the techniques can usually be adapted to fit a project perfectly.

Below are more than fifty awesome CSS3 tutorials. Many are strictly CSS and HTML  based, while others also incorporate JavaScript.

If you have a favorite technique or tutorial that’s not included below, please share it in the comments!

Using CSS3 For Imageless Illustration

Various new methods in CSS3 allow a number of very complex graphics to be created using pure CSS and no images. Here are a handful of the best examples out there.

Pure CSS iPhone Illustration

A mixture of borders, transforms and gradients to make an animated image of an iPhone.


Creating The Opera Browser Logo in CSS3

A clean illustration of the Opera logo rendered using CSS3 techniques.


Our Solar System with CSS3

A slick looking rendition of the solar system with animation effects..


Analog Clock Effect

Create a cool analog clock using only CSS3 and jquery.


Shadow Experiments

This tutorial shows how to use CSS shadows to create a variety of effects, including a Dark Side of the Moon graphic, a shadowed periodic table, and even a psychedelic “love potion”.


Creating Polaroid Style Images with Just CSS

This tutorial uses both CSS2 and CSS3 effects to add Polaroid styling to a simple list of images.


CSS3 Text, Layout and Color Effects

CSS3 can be used for a lot of different fancy animations and graphics, but it’s also great for layout, text, and color effects you might have formerly resorted to Photoshop for.

Utilitzing CSS3 Columns

Coding a clean multi-column CSS3 module.


General CSS3 Implemenation

An overview of the benefits of CSS3.


Styling Links with CSS3

Four different ways to style different types of links with CSS3


CSS3 Vertical Accordion

Gradients and transitions make this accordion menu that degrades to an ordered list on older browsers.


Super Awesome CSS3 Buttons

Colored, gradient buttons with drop-shadow that work on light or dark backgrounds and don’t require images!


Photoshop Style Buttons with CSS3

A side-by-side comparison of how to create CSS3 buttons without images and with Photoshop.


Css Gradient Text Effect

Instructions on making a unique text effect by applying a texture map to text. You can use gradients or patterns to really make text pop.


Some CSS3 Alternatives to JavaScript Effects

7 ways to replace commonly used JavaScript effects with CSS3 to get your site ready for the future.


Embossed CSS3 Text Effect

Creating an embossed text effect without Photoshop browser hacks.


Understanding CSS3 Color Values

All about the new color options available with CSS3.


Creating Rich Effects with CSS3

CSS Transitions and Transforms can be combined to make a variety of effects.


Making a CSS3 Bokeh Effect

The ability to use gradients and transparency with CSS3 makes this classic effect possible.


CSS3 Columns

A good video tutorial on the concept of using CSS3 columns for layout.


Fancy Lists with CSS3

Cool bulleted list style using CSS3 to make fancy checkmarks.


Very Slick Imageless Infoboxes with CSS3

The techniques made possible by CSS3 make these boxes to really pop.


Speech Bubbles

Border-radius and transform pseudo-elements make these shapes possible.


Flash-Style Image Transition Effects

A clever way to use the CSS animation effect.


Recreating Tumblr’s Updating Screen with CSS3

A CSS3 design effect that degrades well for older browsers.


Subtle CSS3 Typography that You’d Swear was Made in Photoshop

This 13-minute video tutorial will show you how to create a beautiful, subtle 3D typographic effect entirely with CSS3.


Text Rotation with CSS

Here’s a slightly older technique that shows how to create cross-browser-compatible text rotated to align with a vertical axis.


Create a Letterpress Effect with CSS Text-Shadow

This Line25 tutorial will show you how to use text-shadows to create a letterpress-style effect on your website’s text.


Awesome CSS3 Lightbox Gallery with jQuery

This code creates a Polaroid-style image gallery with a drag-and-drop sharing option.


Awesome Overlays

This tutorial from Zurb shows how to create image overlays using CSS3 border properties that can then be used to display additional information about an image when hovered on.


Awesome Inline Form Labels

This tutorial shows you how to create inline form labels that don’t disappear once your visitors start typing.


CSS3 3D Effects

Animated CSS3 Cube

A unique 3D animated cube using 3D transforms styled with CSS. The cube can be rotated using the arrow keys to show the information displayed on each face.


CSS3 3D Ribbons

Give some depth to your design by using these easy CSS3 CD ribbons.


Animated 3D Poster Scroller

Displaying movie posters with captions using an astounding 3D perspective effect in CSS3.


3D CSS3 Coke Can

Dragging a scrollbar makes this virtual Coke can roll back and forth.


CSS Shadows

Creatively styling shadows by detaching them from the element.


CSS3 Animation

An Animated Rendition of Twitter’s Fail Whale with CSS3

A very elegant user of CSS3 that surprisingly degrades somewhat well in older browsers.


Parallax Starfield Background

Stars move from left to right behind your content with this classic space travel look.


Showing and Hiding Content with CSS3

Expanding and contracting trays and menu trees without javascript.


A Floating Follow Tab With CSS3

Put your navigation or contact icons in easy reach with this useful method.


CSS3 Drop-in Modal Windows

A couple of common modal windows generated using CSS3 effects and transforms.


Spinners using only CSS3

Creating loading animations using only CSS3 and no animated gifs!


Displaying Social Icons Using CSS3

A cool fading effect for displaying your social icons using pure CSS3.


CSS3 Cartoon Animation

Creating an entire flash-style animation using only CSS3 and jquery.


An Animated Landscape Using CSS3

Mountains and clouds and water all animated with CSS3.


Nice Animated Scrolling Image Captions

CSS3 Transitions allow you to do some amazing things with text captions. Here is one example.


An Elastic Thumbnail Menu

A series of images that expand and retract when hovered over.


Stacked, Dynamic Index Cards

A fantastic animation effect that could be applied to a number of designs.


A Colorful Clock with CSS & jQuery

This tutorial shows how to create a really awesome colorful clock using CSS and jQuery, consisting of three separate loading-style circles that show hours, minutes, and seconds.


Pure CSS3 At-At Walker

This is an impressive example that uses CSS3 (no JavaScript, no Flash) to create an animated At-At Walker from Star Wars. The only downside is that it’s currently only viewable in Webkit browsers (Safari and Chrome).


Create a jQuery Content Slider Using Pure CSS

Learn to create a purely CSS jQuery-style slider with this tutorial.


CSS3 Dropdown Menu

This tutorial from WebDesignerWall shows how to create a cross-browser-compatible CSS3 dropdown menu that also works in browsers that don’t support CSS3 (though with limited styling).


Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman.

If you know of other high-quality CSS3 tutorials that weren’t covered above and you’d like to share, please do so in the comments!


If you find an exclusive RSS freebie on this feed or on the live WDD website, please use the following code to download it: O1Rs1S



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