Professionally Confused – Egor Shokurov’s blog

This week I got sick with flu and found nothing enlightening but developing a Mozilla/Chrome plugin to open Word documents online from any WebDAV server. The project is published under Mozilla License. The project is available here:

• http://code.google.com/p/npapi-msdocs/

OK, I spent a day, but why on Earthe would you need this?

If you, like me, often use Sharepoint and Confluence sites and still like Mozilla Firefox to be a default browser, you probably find it inconvenient, that when you click Word or Excel documents, they are being downloaded and opened locally, rather than start straight from WebDAV folder. So did I. I tried using IETab for all Sharepoint sites, but hey, why do I need Firefox then?

Then I tried to set up Flashgot to start Word or Excel with the document URL. I found that I not only needed to recode URL from URL-ENCODE and then from UTF-8, but also Excel did no accept URLs longer than 256 characters.

And, finally, new great browser has been released – Google Chrome. It supports NPAPI plugins, just like Firefox and Opera.

So the idea came to develop an NPAPI plugin which would find system association for a particular URL (not just Word or Excel, but pretty much anything, that has a moniker registered in Windows Registry) and start what is appropriate.

In this version the plugin only understands .doc, .xls, .docx and .xlsx files, but there is nothing to prevent it from handling other files, it is just a matter of changing .rc file and recompiling!

So if you like the idea, just download it, copy to your Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\plugins folder and enjoy!

Or if you have anything to add, check out SVN, modify and commit it back.

Software development Development

I came acroos a great GUI prototyping tool, called http://rapidrabb.it, if you are curious, just give it a try with a single click http://rapidrabb.it/en/preview

It is amasingly simple to start, and it makes not just design, but collaboration on prototypes easy as well.

Software development, Usability gui design, prototyping

I was looking for a solution for my technical department analysts and PM’s to track software requirements.
I did not look in this area since maybe 2003 and was expecting some breathtaking advances in their usability and, of course, everything now is expected to be free and Web-based.

Surprisingly my research shown not much improvement since 2003:
In addition to good old IBM Rational RequisitePro now Borland’s CaliberRM solution is quite popular, however I did not even take time to look at it, expecting some heavy weight, enterprise grade, robust (more words to come which should not be said to my mom).

The new RTM apps seemingly from the new world of Agile development, which I decided worth looking at, were:

• iRise manager
• SpeeDev
• OSRMT (Open Source Requirements Management Tool)

I also spent some time reiewing tools, which can be adopted for requirements management, namely:

• Good old Mantis
• Trac
• Jira

On my way I came across a notable thing: a set of templates for SRS and other project documents (and a very good one!): ReadySET and its commercial colleague ReadySET Pro. I will recommend those any time, since at least their requirements templates are great.

Ah, and I did not look at Basecamp, because I hate it for its simplicity

So here are my findings:
From all packages specialized on Requirements Management I would still favor RequisitePro. OSRMT would be a simple alternative, however it requires too much of pre-tuning to set up good templates and is not very stable. iRise looks great on Flash demos, it would be unbeatable, if it worked as shown, however the reality is it took me 30 minutes to create a project and I could not even add a requirement to it. SpeeDev remains untested, Web site information was enough to decide that I better switch to some issue tracking system, which will be just a little bit poorer in functions, though easier to understand. An additional benefit would be combined bug and requirements tracking.

Among issue trackers Trac takes “A” grade for its combination of Wiki, SCM and issue tracking. Jira has best usability. Mantis has just enough functions to work with.

The final decision for today was:
Given the fact we are already working with Mantis for bug tracking, I’ll probably set up proper forms and reports for guys to work on Requirements with Mantis (it has SOAP interface

If anybody out there has a tool to recommend, I would appreciate any advises.

The requirements are:

• (must have) Able to work on multiple projects with multiple components
• (must have) Able to track hierarchical requirement structure
• (must have) Web based
• (must have) Allow customizable workflow
• (must have) Assign requirements to versions, track execution
• (must have) Generate SRS documents
• (nice to have) Word import
• (nice to have) Changelog generation combining bugs fixed and enhancements in a particular version.

Software development rational, requirements, testlink

This is worth watching for anyone from IT industry.
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

Software development, Video and image processing microsoft, photosynth

Miranda GDS indexer is now available at:
http://addons.miranda-im.org/details.php?id=3026

Gadgets, Software development Development