There’s been quite a lot of attention paid to the new user interface in Windows 8, especially the Start Screen that’s replacing the Start menu, but perhaps if you’re a web developer you’ve been thinking none of this has much relevance for you.

Whether that’s actually right depends a bit on what sort of devices you’ve been targeting up until now.

The desktop environment you’re used to still exists in Windows 8 (more or less) but there’s also a new type of application called Metro-style Windows Store apps. By default, these run full screen, with much of the usual user interface hidden away so that, in the case of a web browser, almost all you see on screen is the page content.

Internet Explorer, if launched from the Start screen, will open as a Windows Store app by default, so you’ll start browsing full screen. Chrome, Firefox and Opera have each indicated that there’ll be a Windows Store versions of their browsers, so what follows will also apply to them.

Most commentary on Windows Store apps has tended to stop there, with the app running full screen, and gone on to talk about how you interact with it.

What hasn’t been commented on quite so much is what happens if you want to have more than one app on screen at once.

Although you can launch several apps and switch between them, the most you can display simultaneously is two apps side-by-side, as in the following picture, where you can see the BBC home page in Internet Explorer on the left, and a weather app “snapped” on the right, with the two separated by a black splitter bar:

You can click through the screen shots to see them full size.

Internet Explorer on the left is basically the web content, with an address bar and a few other things visible at the bottom of the screen. The weather app on the right displays the current weather and forecast weather for the next few days vertically down the side of the page. Nothing too challenging about that so far.

The weather app is a native application – not a web page – and it’s displaying in the snapped view. Internet Explorer is now displaying in the fill view, rather than full screen, but there isn’t a big practical difference between the two. Snapped view is another story though.

A window in the snapped view is a fixed 320 pixels wide – no more, no less – and runs from the top of the screen to the bottom. It can be snapped to either the right of the screen or the left. It’s only available for screen resolutions above 1366x768 – if you have a lower resolution, running Windows Store apps full screen is your only option, with no way to display them side by side. Fill view fills everything except for that 320-pixel-wide strip.

All Windows Store apps are required to support the snapped view, and as you can see the weather app does so clearly enough. As this version of Internet Explorer is also a Windows Store app, it’s require to support snapped view too. Let’s see what happens if we move the splitter bar across to the left so that IE is in snapped view and the weather app is in fill view:

Note that the weather app’s adjusted to make use of the space available to it (there are more interesting and practical examples of Windows Store apps, but I chose the weather app because the information in it’s innocuous). IE has also adapted; it’s now displaying the BBC home page 320 pixels wide.

If you’ve taken a responsive mobile-first approach to designing your site, using media queries, then your pages may appear OK. If you haven’t, you’ll get a 1024-pixel-wide rendering of your site scaled down to 320 pixels wide. Here’s how that BBC site looks, full size – not particularly usable:

Windows 8 is a game changer for web development, because it means that “mobile” design is no longer restricted to mobile devices. 320 pixels wide is narrower than many phones (though certainly not all – link via andrewducker). The Windows Store app version of IE is what your users will get by default when launching IE from the Start Screen, and even if there’s a push back against this, it can be guaranteed that some proportion of your audience will prefer to browse this way (and this will presumably become true for other browsers too in due course).

It’s true this’ll only be an issue when a Windows Store browser window’s snapped. Your users won’t be affected if the browser’s full screen, nor if it’s in fill view; and if they use the desktop version of the browser rather than the Windows Store version everything will be as it was in previous versions of Windows. Remember though that they may not think much of your site if it forces them into using their operating system in a particular way.

Think of it like this; if your site isn’t designed for mobile, you’re now accepting that some of the time it’s going to be unusable on Windows too.

Here’s some specific advice on how to start responding to this change (also pay attention to the helpful comment from Karl Dubost of Opera Software).

Sometime this month, I think I passed the milestone of 20 years of owning a PC.

I wasn’t particularly exposed to computers while I was school, nor even much at university. A friend had a BBC micro, on which I played Elite a few times, and I learned to write S-algol on the University VAXen. The closest I came to a PC was one Physics lab that required me to write a little Basic to control a stepper motor.

Then I did a conversion M.Sc. to Computer Science, and then I was unemployed.

After nearly a year of unemployment, the bright future of work as a programmer I’d hoped for looked like as though it might be escaping from me.

I thought I’d better do something about it, and with a loan from my parents and advice from my friends I bought a PC, to demonstrate that I was serious about these computer things. In particular I was grateful for the advice of flybynightpress, a Mac enthusiast himself, who advised me not to get a Mac but a PC, because the employment prospects were better. You tend to pay attention to advice like that!

That PC was a Viglen (pre-Lord Sugar), with a 386DX processor, 4MB of RAM, and a 125MB hard drive, with the (then) brand new Windows 3.1.

Sometime in June or July, I had a horrible experience when it stopped working. Completely. My first computer, bought with money I didn’t have, bricked. and with that horrible paranoia that maybe, oh no, maybe it was all my fault!

A technician had to come the hundred and something miles from Edinburgh to the glen where I was living with my parents on the west coast, with me liable for the several-hundred-pound cost of the callout if it really was my fault. That was not a happy wait.

Luckily, the motherboard had died of its own volition, and with a replacement fitted free of charge, that PC served me well for a fair while afterward. And a month or two later, I was employed as a programmer, albeit in a job paying only 65% of the average graduate starting salary of the time, and with the most horrible computer language in the world ever. And on a PDP-11/83, not a PC. Still, I’m sure my PC-ownership helped ;-).

Today, my Raspberry Pi arrived, both more and less powerful than that machine of twenty years ago, depending on how you look at it. Unfortunately a painful ear infection is making the thought of tinkering unappealing for me tonight; but hopefully the Raspberry Pi will be the gateway for others to follow in the career that the PC has let me enjoy.

There’s a partially justified tendency among software developers to say “Eeeewwww!” when the subject of Hungarian notation – a naming scheme for variables – comes up. It’s fair to say it has a bad name. I don’t like it either, in its most common form; but I said “partially justified” because it isn’t a simple open and shut case.

What people tend to think of as Hungarian when deriding it is Systems Hungarian; where variable names are prefixed with something identifying the type of the variable. This is how you wind up with identifiers like szName or even lpszName, where that indicates a long pointer to a zero-terminated string (piece of text) containing a name. As you can imagine, code with a lot of that sort of stuff in it can become a bit tricky to read. When the variable names are dancing before your ideas, you know it’s time to take a break. Let’s not get into what long pointers are, and use szName for our examples from here on.

It’s also a bit fragile, because if you change the underlying type (say from an int to a double, when you realise that you need to store a real number rather than an integer) and you forget to change the variable name at the same time, then your “self-documenting” code is suddenly no longer quite as helpful as it was.

The Systems Hungarian style was used by the Microsoft Windows development team, and will be recognised by anyone who’s had to deal with the Windows API.

That’s not where Hungarian notation began though. It was originally proposed while working at Xerox PARC by Charles Simonyi,  who was born Simonyi Károly in Hungary (Hungarian surnames come before given names). Simonyi later moved to Microsoft, where he became Chief Architect. You can read the content of the original, fairly short proposal in the MSDN library.

Simonyi’s version of Hungarian notation, which was used by Microsoft’s applications division, later became known as Applications Hungarian to differentiate it from the Systems Hungarian developed by the Windows development team.

Applications Hungarian takes a slightly different approach to choosing those prefixes. In Applications Hungarian, the prefix is meant to encapsulate some semantic information about the variable – it’s meant to give some idea what the purpose of the variable is, rather than exactly what type it is. For example, Applications Hungarian would prefer strName to szName, because all you need to know for most purposes is that the name is a string rather than needing to know exactly what type of string it is (many different implementations of strings exist for C/C++).

This emphasis on semantics helps to convey more information the variable and how it is expected to be used than just its type. Another example from would usName: the us prefix indicates that the variable is an unsafe string (probably user input) and that it needs to be checked carefully before it’s used.

Applications Hungarian is also a bit less fragile than Systems Hungarian, because the information its prefixes contain is less likely to be invalidated by changing the underlying type of the information. To use the name example, you could switch to a different string implementation, but you would still have a string containing a Name.

However, both Systems Hungarian and Application Hungarian share the flaw that they can be a bit cryptic and difficult to read, especially with a proliferation of prefixes. Both have fallen out of favour for this reason, and even Microsoft recommend against use of Hungarian notation when coding against the .NET framework which has been introduced since 2001.

When Insights moved from C++ to .NET development in C# in 2005, we wanted to come up with a naming convention that would comply with Microsoft’s recommendations, but also contribute to the expressiveness of our code. What we came up with was what I’ve decided to call Anthropomorphic Hungarian.

Microsoft’s recommendations for naming variables and parameters – which you can read in more detail if you wish – at their simplest boil down to:

1. Use Camel Casing
2. Don’t use Hungarian notation

Strictly speaking, Camel Casing here means lowerCamelCase, in which the the first letter in the first word of a compound variable name isn’t capitalised. Its sibling, UpperCamelCase, in which the first letter in the first word is capitalised, is used for other purposes and is referred to as Pascal Case. We’re not discussing the situations where Pascal Case should apply.

Although Hungarian notation is fairly unequivocally deprecated, lowerCamelCase has a couple of significant drawbacks. It tends to de-emphasise the first word. Using the example of lowerCamelCase itself, this is unhelpful because “lower” is actually the most significant word in the name; the one which differentiates lower camel case from upper camel case. Also, what happens when your variable name is a single word and not a compound word? The resulting variable name entirely in lower case looks a bit incongruous and out of place. Small speed bumps like this can have a surprising effect on the readability of code.

Anthropomorphic Hungarian aims to satisfy the Microsoft guidelines, provide some semantic information about variables, and improve the readability of the code.

To do this, Anthropomorphic Hungarian follows these principles:

1. It uses a very small set of approved prefixes. One of the things that can go wrong with semantic prefix schemes is that the number of prefixes expands to cover more and more unforeseen types of information, and ultimately the scheme conveys less information as the list of prefixes becomes too difficult to stay on top of.
2. Although not quite all Anthropomorphic Hungarian prefixes are made up of English words, English words are strongly preferred; sometimes the sort of words you might use if you were trying to explain the code in speech. This increases the readability of the code.
3. The prefixes should encourage developers to make the rest of the name useful, by starting with English words that can lead into something more expressive.
4. The prefixes must be short. They should add meaning and ease of reading to the code without being too onerous to type, or taking up too much space.
5. The prefixes must not contain primary information about the purpose of the variable; they’re a way of recording a small of amount of useful, but secondary, metadata. As a result, it doesn’t matter that lowerCamelCase tends to de-emphasise the prefix.
6. The prefixes are largely, though not exclusively, concerned with scope – where the variable is declared and therefore where it can be used. This is a usage of the older forms of Hungarian that developers are notably reluctant to give up with regards to prefixes for class member variables, and it is also useful in other circumstances.
7. Classes and interfaces are anthropomorphised. This is the most distinctive feature of Anthropomorphic Hungarian, and the source of the name.

Without further ado, here are Anthropomorphic Hungarian prefixes as used at Insights. As you’ll see, most prefixes are only two or three characters, with a rare maximum of four:

The prefixes for interfaces meet the Microsoft recommendation that the names of interfaces should begin with “I”, but encourage more expressive interface names. When a class implements an interface or interfaces, the interface names in its declaration form a positive statement in English on the part of the anthropomorphised class as to what contracts it satisfies.

Here are a few prefixes that were also agreed at some point, but are seldom or never used:

Much of this isn’t original. “a” has appeared as a popular prefix in SmallTalk for many years, for example, and my thanks to tobyaw and qidane for introducing me to "the"; but I think that pulling all these together into a fairly tight little convention is novel, and has proven quite successful. It’s not always immediately popular with new developers, but it seems to be something people come round to with a little experience of it.

Courtesy of kateaw. It would be interesting to know – beyond the examples given – what the scores are based on:

There’s an interesting story on the BBC web site about someone mapping the Scottish watershed – a line from north to south (or, of course, if you prefer, vice versa), on either side of which water will flow either into the Atlantic or the North Sea. One would think this would be well known geographical information in a developed country, but apparently it’s never been done before.

The BBC story contains a low-res map of the watershed.

Taking the watershed as a handy dividing line, I can say I’m probably more of an east coast person than west coast, although I’ve spent a fair bit of my life on either side. But I was born and lived in the east until the age of seven, and again for most of the time since I was eighteen. My sister, on the other hand, would be a west coast person.

Of course these facts are utterly irrelevant to everyday life for most people, but it’s cool to think that something so important to the physical geography of Scotland has only just been “discovered”.

There’s also a gallery of images from walking the watershed, and a short interview.

As postprandial conversations are wont to do, yesterday’s discussion in the pub leapt in little more than a single bound from some quite general topic to the more specific one of Minna Reverelli, the Yodelling Prima Donna.

This was my fault. My Dad had an old 78 rpm record that took my fancy, and I have it beside me as I type. It’s in an old cardboard sleeve that announces it was originally sold by Paterson, Sons & Marr Wood, Ltd (Pianoforte Makers to Their Majesties The King and Queen), of 183 Union Street, Aberdeen (with additional branches in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Paisley, Greenock, Perth and Oban).

The record itself is a Parlophone recording, D.P. 167, and apparently you can pick up your own second-hand copy – so the Internet informs me – for the princely sum of €2.

Mine is actually third-hand, as the sleeve features a hand-written inscription, “Tommy from Meg 1971”. That’s my Dad, and my great-aunt, his mother’s sister.

The track that drew me is The Cuckoo In The Wood, a song in Viennese dialect with yodelled impressions of a cuckoo. What is there not to like?

I had a quick search for it online, and struck lucky. You can hear it on YouTube (unfortunately, embedding this particular video is disabled, so click here, or on the picture).

This morning I also found a small number of additional tracks in MP3 format, and some rather sad information. Minna Reverelli was Jewish and disappeared in Vienna in 1941. Please read what little more there is and enjoy her music so that her memory can live on.

I got back to Scotland from a holiday in California visiting msinvisfem last week. I saw a lot of interesting stuff, so there’s a lot to write about, but based on previous experience – and about 12GB of photos and videos to sort through – it may be a while before it hits the blog here.

In the meantime there’s one thing it’s quite easy to write about quickly, so I’ll start with my trip to one of the first Microsoft Stores, at Mission Viejo. There are currently only four physical Microsoft Stores, all in the States, so while the chances of me buying something off the shelf were pretty slim, it was an interesting opportunity to visit and see what there was to see.

The store bears a distinct resemblance to an Apple Store, though a bit more warm and welcoming with varnished wood in place of the sterile lab look. The staff seemed interested and helpful, although being British and just there for a look, I was mostly more keen to dodge them than interact. The hardware was nice to look at, but difficult to arouse much enthusiasm for when I’m not in the market at the moment, either personally or at work, having just got a touchscreen laptop at the start of the summer.

There was one young guy I spent some time chatting to though, who was demoing something I was surprised and pleased to see: Kinect for Xbox 360. If you haven’t hear about it already, it’s due out in a couple of months and it’s a way to interact with the Xbox 360 without a hand-held controller. That’s a big deal for the Xbox, which will help it catch up with other less sedentary game machines such as the Wii, but it’s also a big deal full stop if it’s actually good; bringing sophisticated real-time computer vision into peoples’ homes (also voice control and facial recognition, though those have appeared in home devices such as phones and cameras before). That’s impressive, and – assuming it’s successful – not so much catching up as leap-frogging other consoles.

It’s an impressive technical achievement, but is it really much different in terms of play from a hand-held controller? I’m not really in a position to say definitively, but the difference is that it’s (quote) “full body play” (promotional video). You only need one controller sat in front of the TV screen, and it will track not just the position of your hands or your feet, but can follow facial expressions too. Judging by the promotional video, it can handle two players at once. I don’t know whether more are possible.

I had a quick shot at a ten-pin bowling game:

First of all, you get the machine to recognise you by positioning yourself on a red spot that appears on the “floor” on the TV screen. I had to shuffle backwards slightly to get “myself” on the spot. Once that was done, all I had to do was reach out my arm to the right to pick up a ball; and do what came naturally to bowl it.

I bowled six frames, and had no difficulty picking it up. In fact, in common with my similarly limited experience of bowling with the Wii, it might be a bit too easy; within that six frames I managed to bowl a turkey, which I’ve never heard of before and certainly never achieved in real life. However, it seems there may be room for greater finesse; the demo guy said that once you’ve practiced a bit with it you can apply spin – and all without a hand-held controller!

Six frames of bowling isn’t enough to give a comprehensive overview of Kinect, but it was fun and natural, and I’m quite excited about this development – both as an Xbox peripheral and as a significant achievement for applied computing in the home.

Here are a couple of interesting and entertaining videos about motivation and positive thinking that may not be what you’re expecting, having read the first half of this sentence.

Well, the first legal case in which I’ve had a financial interest has so far had a disappointing outcome. However, I have no regrets about spending the money. I still see it as not just right, but essential to challenge the exclusion of selected major parties from debates that were always going to be the focus of the election campaign, even if the extent of their effect was unexpected. I stand by the case I made a few days ago.

Since getting home, I’ve searched for and read Lady Smith’s opinion, since the various news reports are not particularly helpful in understanding what happened.

In a nutshell, the emphasis was placed on a different part of the BBC Editorial Guidelines than the one I quoted, and the SNP weren’t aggressive enough in pursuing their case earlier. There was also an emphasis on viewing the debates as being essentially a series which must be completed, for reasons of freedom of speech and contractual obligations.

The part of the BBC Editorial Guidelines that was referred to advised basing impartiality decisions on the voting record from the preceding election at the same level (i.e. the 2005 UK General Election in this case). That is one reasonable basis for decision-making, and I can’t object to it per se, but it does seem at odds with the section I quoted previously, which is also fair – in a different way. I couldn’t see Lady Smith’s justification for preferring one over the other. Obviously my opinion of the relative importance of these conflicting pieces of advice differs from Lady Smith’s.

I am less surprised by the judgment that the SNP were not aggressive enough in pursuing legal action. Seeking a reasonable negotiated solution appeals to me as being the right way to do things (especially if you don’t really have the spare cash to go to court), but if you don’t put the boot in early it can look as if you’re accepting the situation and accept that the opposition’s case have merit. If you’re not serious about defending yourself, why should the court? Reasonable though it may have been to work through all the complaint procedures, allowing the ITV and Sky debates to go ahead before going to court was a tactical error.

I have little sympathy for the simile that the three debates are like a three-act play or a three-round boxing match that must be allowed to run their course. If they’re not fair, they should be stopped; and if they can’t be practically stopped within Scotland only then they should be stopped at the UK level. Sorry, but if they’d followed the model used in other countries such as Canada or New Zealand, there would be no problem. The leaders’ debates may be popular but they’re not necessary for free speech – we managed elections fine without them before.

Finally, another reason for rejecting the interim interdict was that the SNP proposal for a solution was not detailed enough – they left room for negotiation on details such as who should represent them on the debate, what proportion of time they should receive, and so on. Reasonable, maybe, but Lady Smith was of the opinion that this lack of detail would have left the BBC unable to be certain of meeting the requirements of the interdict, and therefore it could not be granted.

I don’t believe this outcome is fair, but justice isn’t necessarily about fairness; just about whether the rules have been satisfied. Personally, I’m not even sure about that, but have to accept Lady Smith’s opinion.

Indications are that a favourable outcome to the judicial review in June is not certain either. If that’s the case, I’m not sure where we go from there, but I don’t believe this is an acceptable way to run or report an election and I’ll be looking for further ways that I can contribute to the prevention of this sort of imbalance in future.

25 years ago, I came to St. Andrews and joined WARSoc, the Wargaming And Role-playing Society at the University. I fancied giving wargaming a try, but everyone seemed to be involved in role-playing games instead. I was pointed at one particular group who were using miniatures, because that was about as wargamy as it got.

For the next five years, until he drew it to a close, I played in flybynightpress's historical fantasy game, New Jerusalem. NJ was a town on the border between eastern Germany and Færie, probably somewhere in what is now modern Poland. The inhabitants were godly puritans who stood fast against the encroachments of witches, Papists and particularly the abominations in the wilderness that surrounded the town (i.e. creatures of the Devil such as goblins, hobgoblins, trolls, giants, etc.).

It was a fantastic introduction to role-playing. The town of New Jerusalem was a classic Base Under Siege, and player characters had to deal with paranoia (their own and that of other citizens, PC and NPC) and issues of faith. Whether your character really believed or not, the appearance of belief was not optional. There was an ever-present threat of being burnt at the stake if you were found to be ungodly. Characters who did believe had to deal with shades of grey; when you went out into the wilderness you tended to discover that while the “abominations” might sometimes have interests that were inimical to yours, they were sometimes nicer people than the adventurers… Definite anti-hero territory.