Software travels into everything and changes anything it strikes upon. Software developers are working hard to keep going and develop better applications. Software Development is the process of developing software in a step by step and organized way. Here are the finest procedures that turn any software development process & business into a successful one.
- A thorough Market research - This helps us to pinpoint & study market needs and to find out what people want/need.
- Be choosy on Clients - When you are selective on your clients, you can do better business and get more profits.
- Gather detailed requirements - It is indeed important to interact with the client and get all three types of requirements (functional, environmental and performance requirements). While gathering requirements focus on user point of view rather than your point of view.
- Create Scope (range of the project) Document - Investigate scope of the development and create scope document. This will help you and your client to understand precisely the expectations from both sides to be encountered during the course of the project.
- Think as a user and not programmer - This thought process helps the programmer to develop user-friendly applications.
- Coding standard - Set up an ideal coding standard. You can even enhance the system by automating the coding standard.
- Simple Coding - At times Complex codes make the programmers to discard the existing code and write a new one. Hence every developer should focus on simplifying the code they produce (by using advanced technologies). This greatly reduces tons of complexities to be faced in future and increases the maintainability of the code.
- Document everything - This allows us to uphold the history of the project at various cycles which can be used in future by the maintenance people.
- Improve the software process by analyzing and measuring the complexities.
- Flexible Software architecture - Software architects with deep knowledge of the entire system should be assigned to create the architecture of the application. He/She should focus on the flexibility of the architecture and should be designed in a way to accommodate any upcoming changes.
- Reusable components - The team should likely opt for Component based software. The programmers should develop more general and reusable components so that many other programs can use them.
- Developer testing - The developers are the best white box testers for their own code. Hence the application needs to be tested by the developer itself before passing to the Quality Assurance team.
- Customer testing - This kind of testing is very important as it provides feedback on how the real users are using the system and to make the correct decisions after testing.
- Eventually make the software release process to be simple and reliable.
Piece of Software History
Years back the Computer Hardware companies offered software at free of cost bundled with their hardware. This has been changed in the 1960s as a solution for the dispute between the companies ADR and IBM. In 1965 ADR developed the first licensed software product and patented their software in 1968. ADR was competing against a free software provided by IBM. ADR accused that IBM was "retarding the growth of the independent software industry". In 1969 the US Department of Justice charged IBM with ruining businesses by bundling free software with IBM hardware. Hence IBM unbundled its software. And then software became independent from hardware product. This is a milestone behind today's multibillion dollar software industry.
WordPress is one of the well-liked online blogging platform which serves a wide diversity of bloggers for different kinds of purposes. WordPress has plenty of advanced features presented with simplicity and flexibility which elevated it better than many of the other blogging tools. Do you want to start up with WordPress?
The first stride is to sign up with wordpress.com and this allows you to create as many blogs you want to publish under a single account. Have a look at this Video before proceeding.
Go to the wordpress sign up page https://signup.wordpress.com/signup/.
Enter your
E-mail Address: Your primary email address as it is needed to activate the account and for further correspondences from wordpress.
Username: The logon name you want to use to sign in your wordpress account in future.
Password
Blog Address: This will serve as the prefix of the URL address of your blog. Consider a name that is closely related to your content and this will help you greatly in Search Engine listing of your blog.
Wordpress will do a primary validation of your details entered above and will enable the "Create Blog" button for free subscription. Click on the "Create Blog" button. An activation email will be sent to your email address given above. Login to your email and click on "Activate Blog" link available in the WordPress email.
It's all set and done now.
Here is a snap of my wordpress account landing page with significant areas highlighted.
.
Reader: This tab provides room for all of your favorite blogs (even other than wordpress blog) you follow. You can Like and Reblog your favorite posts.
Stats: Your stats page displays the data about the number of visitors, their place, the popular posts etc of your blog in the form of graphs and charts.
My Blog: This tab lists all of your blogs and you can click on each one of them to reach their individual dashboards.
Freshly Pressed: Everyday this tab brews out new blog posts with unique content to entertain us.
- Create new posts and be notified about your likes, comments and followers.
My Activity: This allows you to see the likes and comments you have made.
Recommended Blogs: List of blogs on all categories recommended by wordpress to you.
Find Friends: This helps to find your friends from Twitter, Facebook and Google who are blogging with wordpress.
This section allows you to explore the popular subjects in wordpress with recently published posts under each topic. Click "Follow" to add a topic to your reader and keep track of all the posts under the topic of your interest.
WordPress suggests these blogs for you.
Ready to make a start!
Here are few tips to personalize Windows 7 and enhance your Windows experience.
- Change the Windows theme -> Right click an empty space in the desktop and click Personalize to open the "Personalization Window".
You can download new themes from http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/themes
"Wait:" is to specify the computer idle time after which the screensaver should be appeared. Check the "On resume, display logon screen" box. This allows the system to ask for password when someone is interrupting the screensaver.
- Customize variety of items using Window color and Appearance Dialog Box.
Select the item you want to customize. Change the color of the object selected and format the text.
- Choose the right picture for your account.
- Add gadgets to your desktop.
Get more gadgets from
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/gadgets
- Change the "Mouse Pointer" scheme.
Doing these simple changes in Windows provide a great change in the look and feel of the PC.
How Facebook can be used beneficial within Workplace?
- Connect with your co-workers through Facebook. There exists a myth that it is a very bad idea to friend your co-workers on Facebook. This may be true or false to some extent. By being aware of some norms, Facebook can potentially be used in the workplace with a bunch of positive use.
- To start with, understand the security settings of your Facebook profile. This is the Facebook page with key info about the Privacy settings of your profile http://www.facebook.com/help/privacy and its mandatory to be familiar with all those access settings completely.
- "Who can see What" - We should always keep in mind that, We, the central players of the Facebook portal are the one who decide what information to share and with whom. It is absolutely under our control. We can create customized groups of friends list (a separate list for colleagues) and have the autonomy to share something to specific people or hide something from specific group.
- We have to be alert and concerned about the fact that "Many Employers are currently watching their employees through Facebook". This should be ethically and legally questionable action of employers, but it is far beyond the topic to talk over in this particular post.
- Be conscious about every single piece of info (particularly about your office politics/colleagues/clients) you share with your co-workers on Facebook. "You own your own words and their impacts".
- Company specific events like Tournaments for employees, weekend trip, pizza party etc can be hosted to maintain cooperative relations among coworkers with the help of Facebook. Create a Facebook event providing details about the event and invite your co-workers. The event can be in person or online.
- Fundraising social cause campaigns like Go Green, Book Sale, Craft show etc can be run within the workplace which is beneficial in constructing the workplace community. Facebook facilitates this process.
- You can build a powerful professional network. Facebook aids you to establish your professional identity and to collaborate with networks specific to your field of work. This can be achieved by maintaining your profile updated, complete and appropriate.
- Create Facebook Groups having members from the workplace with similar interests and passion like Writing, Walking, Yoga, Hiking etc. When you find people with similar interests within the workplace, it becomes easy to explore the passion to next level, accompanied by your workplace friends.
- Instant messaging through Facebook becomes a effective tool within the organization as it paves way to increased interaction and communication and instantaneous information sharing among the employees.
- Collaborate and learn through Facebook. Employees can learn together within networks of knowledgeable people by sharing their interests, sharing helpful videos, engaging with peers, having meaningful conversations which leads to quick learning and success.
Hence within the workplace, the employees can acquire extensive benefits from Facebook by handling it with appropriate responsibility.
We welcome you to discuss in depth on this topic by conversing in the comment section.
What is Rotating Banner?
Web banners play an immense part in today's advertising methods. While browsing in the web, you can see advertising banners that is cycling through a number of images each of them linking to specific target pages. Let us see the code to create such a rotating web banner to be used in your website and bit of understanding about the code.
I am using Dreamweaver as my HTML editor software. You can use any available editors of your choice.
- Create a new HTML file and my editor automatically provides the very basic tags embedded within the file.
- Create a top section on your web page for the banner to be displayed using <div> tag
<div>
<a href="_blank"><img src ="images/Chrysanthemum.jpg" height="200" width="1345" id="banner"/>
</a>
</div>
My first image on the rotating banner is "Chrysanthemum.jpg" placed in images folder with id attribute for <img> tag as "banner".
- Now enter into the JavaScript code within the script tags.
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
</script>
- We write a rotate() function to flip through the images with a tiny time gap. Create a variable "ad" and initialise it to "0" outside the function.
function rotate()
{
var images = new Array ("images/Chrysanthemum.jpg", "images/Desert.jpg", "images/Hydrangeas.jpg");
ad++;
if (ad == images.length)
{
ad = 0;
}
document.getElementById("banner").src = images [ad] ;
setTimeout(rotate, 2000);
}
Within the function a new array called images is created with the image files. The setTimeout function is used to call the rotate() function every 2000 milliseconds. Each time the function is called the "ad" value will be incremented and the "src" attribute of the banner element will be substituted with image from the images array with index as the current "ad" value.
- We need to add links to each image with a function named newlocation().
function newlocation ()
{
var url = new Array ("http://www.google.com","http://www.yahoo.com","http://www.bing.com");
document.location.href = url [ad];
return false;
}
Within this function a new array called url is created with the links to each image. The entire URL of the document is substituted with link from the url array with index as the current ad value.
- Its time to call the functions now as below.
document.getElementById("banner").parentNode.onclick = newlocation;
rotate();
Whenever an image is clicked the newlocation() function is called with the help of onclick event and rotate() function is called directly. This is the basic code for rotating banner and you can add any style to your banner with the help of CSS.
Download code here
