Blog | CodeUtopia

Enso: A useful tool or a fancy gimmick?

I’ve installed an application called Enso on my laptop.

What is it? It’s an application, which turns the caps lock key into a small command prompt, which you can use to run various commands, such as calculating, opening applications, controlling windows etc.

Enso is a product of a company called Humanized, which was founded by Aza Raskin, who is the son of Jef Raskin, of Apple’s user interface fame. I’ve written before about an interesting UI used by Aza Raskin’s site Songza, so let’s see if Enso is as nice as that.

Setting up Windows as a PHP development server

Tags: DatabasesPHPTools

Install a WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) environment in 4 easy steps, one of which is optional and one of which isn’t really a step at all! ;)

These days I’ve been working on Linux servers for a long time, so when I had to install all the things necessary for PHP development on Windows, I realized it isn’t necessarily a simple task… but it can be for you, as I’ve compiled everything you need to know/do to get up and running to this post.

Tracking the user’s browsing history with PHP

Tags: PHPZend Framework

There are various reasons for tracking what an user does:

Keeping track of the refering page for forms, so they can be sent back to where they came from
Tracking usage behavior for statistics
etc.

Let’s look at how we could implement a simple user tracker in PHP with Zend Framework. I’m going to write a bit of the theory too, so this might help you even if you’re not using ZF.

Doctrine vs. Propel

Tags: PHP

An updated version of this post is available: Doctrine vs. Propel 2009 update

The two most well known ORM frameworks for PHP right now are probably Propel and Doctrine.

A lot of people are probably wondering which one should they choose for their project, just like I was. I’ve used Propel for a while, and now I decided to give Doctrine a shot.

Is Doctrine better, or will Propel propel you faster?

Fluent PHP and pooQuery revisited

Tags: PHP

pooQuery, my revolutionary fluent PHP library, has been an interesting project so far.

Don’t know what I’m talking about? Read the original post about pooQuery and the look at pooQuery internals.

It has caused some funny reactions from people, and perhaps it’s time to officially announce that pooQuery is a joke. A fully functional joke, which I’ve just updated – I uploaded some new code to the pooQuery Svn repository which enable you to do looping – Yes, looping with pQ syntax.

But what do we learn from pooQuery itself and in regards to fluent interfaces?

The human interface

Tags: User Interfaces

I apologize for the lack of posts lately. I haven’t had access to a computer or time to think about anything interesting to write lately, as I’ve been doing my civil service. Anyways, let’s post something now!

As a long time computer user, I’ve used many different user interfaces, both software and hardware.

The typical hardware you have are the keyboard and the mouse. Many have probably also used touchpads on laptops or trackballs. There are also touch screens, tablets, joysticks, pads, various 3D controllers etc.

The interfaces software provide are limited by the hardware. This is why we have icons, buttons, textfields and other things – they are easy to use with a keyboard and a mouse. And back in the day before mice, you had command prompts / shells.

The current ways of interacting with computers are limited in many ways and they don’t feel very natural either, but I think they are the best possible methods – for now…

The ultimate developer kit

Tags: Tools

I got myself a laptop, and it’s always kind of annoying to “start from scratch” – install all the applications you need, set up the browsers, set up email, install entertainment (codecs for movies, games)…

Since I didn’t have anything installed, and I kind of want to save space on the laptop as it doesn’t have gazillions of gigabytes of space like my desktop does, I was wondering what exactly do I need?