Recently, I decided to start my own company to do Software Architecture and User Experience Engineering. The company needs a name, and you can help! Here are a few of the names I am considering. You may know what some of them mean, others you may not. That’s ok. I am interested in hearing your opinion on whether you like one of them better than the others, for whatever reasons you choose.

I won’t be offended if you don’t like any of them. That’s useful information, too.

Go take the anonymous survey now

Thanks for your help. If there is a clear favorite, I will announce results on briancavalier.com

Last week, I whipped up a very simple example of a custom scrolling mechanism in Javascript.  I’ve updated it to handle both horizontal and vertical scrolling, and cleaned up the code a bit more.  Check it out and feel free to reuse the ideas, or the code, or to leave suggestions on how it can be improved.  Enjoy!

Oh, and have you heard that I’m working on a name for my company?  You can help.

Lor and I both had rough days so we decided we deserved wine. A friend gave us this Lineshack Cab quite a while ago and we finally got to it.  It’s quite good–a little sweet for Cab, but very smooth.

A few years ago, Lor got me a weeping cherry for my Birthday. This
year, it looks particularly nice in near-full bloom.

I mentioned recently that I think scrollbars as we know them today need to be replaced with better metaphors. While I don’t claim to know what those should be, by coincidence, a couple of my current projects will be exploring some custom scrolling controls.

One good thing about using system-provided scrollbars is that their engineering cost is essentially zero, whereas custom scrolling typically requires writing code to handle mouse events and move the scrollable region accordingly.

How challenging that code is depends on how sophisticated your custom scrolling mechanism needs to be, and how easy or hard those things are to implement in your target environment.  For example, do you need to write code specifically to handle the mouse scroll wheel? Do you need/want acceleration? Momentum? Drag-to-scroll? “Forever” scrolling a la Google Reader?

So, about a week ago, I decided to whip up some simple custom scrolling code as a proof of concept.  It’s really not all that impressive since it acts like a system-provided scrollable area sans the system-provided scrollbar.  It would almost certainly need to be more sophisticated for a real application.  For example, I only did horizontal because that is the particular case I’m dealing with in one of my projects, and I didn’t actually implement a custom scrollbar, only the scrolling mechanism itself.

But, I think it did it’s job, which was to prove that, at least in a browser, it’s not unreasonably hard to create the guts of a custom scrolling mechanism that behaves intuitively.

Feel free to try it out, view source, reuse the ideas, and post ideas, suggestions, or code to make it better!

I didn’t know such things existed. I’m tempted to buy them just to say
I’ve had them.

We planted our Christmas tree yesterday. We’ve planted one each year
since we’ve been in the house, and 5 of those 8 have survived.

We went for a heavier duty zero-turn, because the roots and rocks in
our yard beat the crap out of our last tractor (which was basically
your standard big box lawn tractor). I’m hoping Lor lets me drive it
occasionally.