The screen area of any smartphone is significantly smaller than that of a laptop or desktop computer. Which means much less information fits on it. Let’s look at an example of a “news feed” type application below:

The standard Helvetica font is used here. You can see that only …

Stack Overflow is a site where people go out of their way to help other people find answers to programming questions. My colleagues won’t let me lie: more than half of all questions can be solved by searching this site. The idea of creating such a site turned out …

Every self-respecting PHP programmer should know at least two PHP frameworks. This is so that, when you come onto an existing project, you can criticize the current implementation and propose redoing everything on another framework. But it’s better to know three or even four frameworks, in case other PHP …

I remember those days when a childhood friend and I, in the mid-nineties, were writing a computer adventure game for the ZX Spectrum.

The development environment was a notebook and a pen. We drew levels on paper, first drew sprites in a squared notebook, and then entered them into the …

The most important guideline when writing code is to separate method implementations with several blank lines and a comment line. Despite modern IDEs’ capabilities for searching and structuring source code, visual orientation still plays an important role.

Consider the example below. There is an implementation of a class in Objective-C …

Reader Maxim asked me to write some notes about the usability of the user interface in Eclipse.

Dear Maxim!

I haven’t yet managed to take advantage of all the benefits of the integrated development environment “Eclipse,” version 3.7.1, item M20110909-1335, because for two hours straight now I …

So I go into Windows Task Manager and see this.

Let me explain why it’s so much. 10 megabytes is the chat functions. The other 90 is the set of animated smileys.

I’ve had cases like this in my practice: you ask a programmer to make some feature, and he answers, “It’s impossible to make it.” I ask, “Why?” and he replies, “I read such-and-such documentation, looked at such-and-such example, tried doing it this way and that way, and realized …

For a long time I couldn’t figure out what the problem was, but I’ve just sorted it out and am hurrying to report back to you. I noticed that when I read documentation in MSDN, my soul somehow feels good and calm, and when I read it in …

Often, when studying a new library, you need to look at the class hierarchy or the list of methods of a particular class. Jumping from file to file via “Show Declaration” links in Visual Studio is not always convenient. There is a utility called Doxygen that parses projects written in …