Dan Card

We ran into a problem recently in Outlook which has given me a new "pattern" I want to think about more. Here is the basic problem. Outlook stores the addresses from email messsages one "bucket" which it uses to autofill the TO field in new messages. There is a different "bucket" which contains all of your contacts. It makes sense that these "buckets" are seperate since you send and receive emails to and from more people than are in your contact list and it's nice to have those autofill when you are corresponding.Its like having a public area for the masses and then a subset of those emails which is private and includes friends, family and associates. There are ways of moving information from the autofill bucket to the contact bucket by right clicking on the address in the TO field and choosing ADD TO CONTACTS. This moves from public to private. It's also makes sense that your contact list should show up in the autofill. If contacts

The Emperors New Groove is  Disney Animated Movie from 2000. It's clever, witty, funny and stars the voices of David Spade, John Goodman and Evil Johnny from News Radio  (Patrick Warburton). In other words, how can you go wrong. One of the recurring gags in the movie is when Yzma, the ursurper to the throne, urges her henchman, Kronk, to "pull the lever!" in variably he, does it's the wrong lever resulting in plunging Yzma into crocodile filled waters to the shreik of "wrong level" and the invariable question of "why do we even have the lever??" Visual: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw2B9knw58U The same principle can be applied to UI. If you don't want your users to do something, don't LET them do it. If you don't want them to click buttons before they are ready, don't activate it. If there are are options that will break the app, don't present the options. If presenting a three year old with the option of playing with bloc

Last Wednesday at the Boston ColdFusion Users group a question came up that was very relevant to an approach I've been taking. The question was basically ' I have a bean (cfc). In it I have all my properties etc. as well as functions that contain my business logic about people in my org. I've also started storing some UI elements as separate functions in that same Bean as well. What are the thoughts of the group?’ I listened closely to the comments because a) I've been doing something similar and b) the room was filled with smart people more experienced than me.   Here's my current approach. We are striving to use a clean MVC pattern with each cfc modeling a table in our DB. One of these deals with addresses, say addr.cfc which has all of our logical functions in it to keep them separate from the cfms. In order to comply with our business processes, we have developed an "edit address" form which uses AJAX to communicate with UPS for zip code verificat