Which tests failed?
Who was committing to this build?
Which files?
What code got changed?
Which build output reports are available for this build?

In TeamCity you don’t have to leave the overview page to find the answers. Iteratively, we found the way of showing build details in a modeless way:

Before that we tried showing pop-ups on link hovering, but that required considerable time for our users to get used to.

Usually I check the “least star” reviews first, then – the “most stars”. Look - now I do not have to browse through three pages to find the one-star reviews.

These days, people often argue upon usefulness or harmfulness of Ajax possibilities in web interfaces. My experience in developing a highly-interactive web application tells: modeless web user interfaces are much more useful than traditional ones, but as there are still no interaction design rules, be ready to test and change and improve your user interfaces – many times.

It's really interesting now to look back at was called buildServer (the first two are visio drafts, not html screens):

and then TeamServer (the first real "working horse" for our team):

and then it's got its name - TeamCity - more UI enhancements and usability features, and a real web 2.0 look:

... well, we've done a lot, but it's only the first version, and we'll have to work more, including the ui. Not the graphic part of it, probably, because fruttacotta has done her best- but the ease of use and intuitiveness of the ui model. Which requires user feedback and user testing. (so if you are TeamCity user and do have anything to say regarding the tool - please, let me know :)

A cup of coffee for the brains. Really.

Recently we've re-designed the Results view, one of the most important pages of our Team Server (because software developers need to understand the reasons behind a build failure).

Now all essential information can be found on just one page:

- which tests have failed,
- whether there're any new failing tests
- when the tests start to fail (if it's not the first time)
- who has committed the changes that led to the failure

You can click on a failed test name and get full stacktrace text (in the future you'll be able to click and open it in your IDE):

Hover over the Changes link new the test name and you'll see who has commited the change, comment he wrote for this changelist and the number of changed files.

I hope we'll have it on the public server in a couple of days, so you can see who it works. And if you want to try it on your own project, we have an open Early Access Program.

About four weeks ago I switched from the JB corporate web-site development and management to the user interface design and development of a new product. The tool is called (so far) Team Server and, as you can easily conclude, it serves the nasty task of running builds, detecting problems, and reporting them to the team of developers.

Those who happend to roam through the office seeking for blood after someone's ruined a build and went home, will immediately understand the benefits:

- Team Server can run many builds for many different projects simultaneously.
- It has one single user interface where you can get an overview of what's being run on different agents.
- It shows history for each build type - changes, time, duration, etc, etc.
- It shows stacktraces (which a couple of iterations later you'll be able to click and open in IntelliJ IDEA).
- It sends notifications as soon as a problem is detected, so you don't have to wait till the build process is completed.
What I've forgot to mention?
Well, the user interface is far, far, faaar from completion. It is "under development" and will be for several months more. We are trying out all those AJAX-smajax fashion tricks, changing layouts, fonts and colors, supporting new features, etc.

And isn't it the right time to download Team Server and tell us what you think in news://news.jetbrains.com/jetbrains.teamware.eap?

Excellent book by Rick Chapman. Fun, witty and so well written that reads better than any detective story. Moreover, reading about other people mistakes makes one feel so clever... I love the feeling :)

As for the practical purposes - well, in the foreword to this book Joel Spolsky says that having at least one programmer in the top management makes the company immune to the serious marketing mistakes (and our management are three natural born programmers, so we have nothing to worry about). But still the recurrence of the silly mistakes is amazing - top software vendors've been committing same sins during 20 years: re-writing software from scratch, selling two products under one name, etc.
Would be great to have a poster with a list of the marketing blunders featured in this book printed out and posted on the wall. Just in case...

Delete pair tag by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Delete.

Very useful when you have

• long links with many attributes


• several embedded block items


• text with a lot of inline elements

Just place cursor on a tag and Ctrl+Shift+Del instead of looking for the closing tag.
And of course, it works the other way round - you can delete a starting tag by Ctrl+Shift+Deleting its closing pair.

There are two main reasons. Two features that you can't live without after you've tried them once. Features so obvious you can't believe other editors still do not have them.

1. Autosave.
I do not know any other editor who would relieve me of endless Ctrl+S'ing during work.

2. Block highlighting. Dreamweaver hightlights blocks - but only in the design mode, where I see results of my coding efforts. In IDEA you can highlight blocks in the right place - where you code:

My pick of the day: Image links
How often do you type an image name and location (or copy-paste) and then realize that either name or location was wrong and your browser shows that silly red cross instead of a picture? It used to happen to me quite often. But not now.
Now IDEA highlights all wrong image links, just like this:

Cannot resolve? But can suggest! Press CTRL-SPACE (no mouse required: it's IDEA), and you will see all the images available in the ../img/ directory:

Everything is at hand, no new dialog windows that will quite a lot of mousing or, at best, looking for accelerators, pressing tabs, etc.

Or, if you were writing the whole thing from the very beginning:

Again: no new dialogs, just CTRL-SPACE and select the file you want.

Now compare it to the Dreamweaver way:

And then... yeah, the whole dialog for selecting an image...

Leaving aside no highlighting for wrong image links.

But the more one uses IDEA, the more he wants from it. :)
And my next question, suggestion or feature requirement is � autocomplete image width and height.
Please, IDEA, spare me retrieving the image size! You know it anyway, so why don't you place it directly into my code?

   CSS Tooltip       

   Pure CSS Tooltip, based on:

   http://www.madaboutstyle.com/tooltip2.html

   and

   http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/popups/demo.html

   Usage:

   <a class="tooltip" href="">Foo<span>Foo means something

something</span></a>

Anyway. This is a lesson I should learn from. Frankly speaking, our source code leaves a lot to be desired.