When developers first discover the wonders of test-driven development, it’s like gaining entrance to a new and better world with less stress and insecurity. It truly is a wonderful experience well worth celebrating. But internalizing the benefits of testing is only the first step to enlightenment. Knowing what not to test is the harder part of the lesson. While as a beginner you shouldn’t worry much about what not to test on day one, you better start picking it up by day two. Humans are creatures of habit, and if you start forming bad habits of over-testing early on, it will be h...

Last night a good friend of mine showed me the latest Need for Speed game on the iphone / ipad. Quite an impressive feat of rendering and a relatively good game to boot. However, the front end, wow, a classic case in UI mis-engineering. Loads of stats, pages and pages of bits and pieces to wade through – a classic case of over stimulating the player with lots of decisions they have no business making – stuff that will significantly change their game play experience but being made at a time when the user often has no experience of what changes actually mean.It got me thinking abou...

According to Japanese media, Sony may release its flagship game console PlayStation 4 in the Christmas 2013, codenamed Orbis, As the source of the message is very reliable, so the possibility of a new generation of Sony PlayStation 4 game console to the market next year is still quite large. Sony has registered the Orbis domain name, but people are still unable to obtain relevant news on the Orbis website. The release plan on the Sony PlayStation4 game console will be officially launched this spring, while the first batch of Orbis Development Kit will be successively handed over to the hands ...

Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft loves open-source. No, really! Don’t believe me? Read on: Today, Microsoft announced that it is open-sourcing all of its flagship web/cloud platform: ASP.NET MVC Web Pages (aka Razor), Web API. Importantly … these projects will be publicly hosted and that the team will continue development in the open (you’ll be able to view the repository and see the code commits as they happen) and that Microsoft will even consider code submissions, fixes, improvements & features contributed by 3rd parties. This isn’t th...

A study of how 31 popular open source code libraries were downloaded over the past 12 months found that more than a third of the 1,261 versions of these libraries had a known vulnerability and about a quarter of the downloads were tainted. The study was undertaken by Aspect Security, which evaluates software for vulnerabilities, with Sonatype, a firm that provides a central repository housing more than 300,000 libraries for downloading open source components and gets 4 billion requests per year. [ Track the latest trends in open source with InfoWorld's Open Sources blog and Technology: Open So...

I have once seen an interesting complaint written by one foreigner about Beijing South Railway Station (China) on foursquare. It says: "There is simply no way to buy a ticket at the machine unless you have a Chinese ID. What the hell they have English interface for then?"Apparently,the foreigner cannot buy ticket because he doesn’t have Chinese ID but there still presents an English interface for foreigners on the vending machine. Because of my profession, I find this awkward situation worth discussion. The complaint from foreign friends poses a typical question for Chinese software deve...

No one makes bad software on purpose. No benevolent programmer has ever sat down, planning out weeks of work, with the intention of frustrating people and making them cry. Bad software, or bad anything, happens because making things is hard, making good things doubly so.The three things that make it difficult are:Possessing the diverse skills needed not to suck.Understanding who you’re making the thing for.Orchestrating the interplay of skills, egos and constraints over the course of the time required to make the thing.Individually these challenges are significant, but combined they cre...

Matt Small, creative director at independent developer Vector Unit, thought his small studio would focus on consoles forever when it was working on Hydro Thunder Hurricane for Xbox Live Arcade.But then the smartphone and tablet market picked up, and mobile devices started to offer increasing amounts of processing power. That increase in power opened up new opportunities for the people at Vector Unit, which had years of developing for consoles.So the studio worked with Tegra chipmaker Nvidia and created the Android and iOS game Riptide GT, a jet ski racing game that took five months to develop....