Working with Jira and a Task List

I am using Jira and MyLife Organized

The procedure I follow to ensure that all important information is captured is as follows:

• Jira - add a comment on a task
• Jira - add a Work Log entry if there is a recordable quantity done


• MyLife Organized - add any follow-up tasks etc. to the lists.

This procedure captures the work done in Jira and saves searching project tasks individually to see what the next actions are. Your daily tasks are in MyLife Organized.

I started using MyLife Organized when I came across David Allen's Getting Things Done™ methodology; speaks for itself when it comes to 'what is it'. Seems to be working well at the moment.
There is a good resource of related applications here.

DHTML Tooltip effect on blog

I am using some DHTML to generate a tooltip effect over any HTML element on the page. To do this I have used a technique described at Dynamic Drive.

Briefly, all you have to do now is add the following inside any link or page element that will contain a tooltip:

onMouseover="ddrivetip('JavaScriptKit.com JavaScript tutorials','yellow', 300)"
onMouseout="hideddrivetip()"

The key here is the function ddrivetip(); you should understand how it works:

ddrivetip('TEXT_TO_DISPLAY', 'OPTIONAL_BACKGROUND_COLOR', OPTIONAL_TIP_WIDTH)

The last two parameters are optional, and not specifying them causes the script to default to the settings within your CSS file.

Pass your mouse over the word DHTML to see what it does. Or try the code snippets above.

Unfortunately, the content of the inlined text is not read by the Blogger search tool so you won't get results in your searches for content in the Tooltips. It should just be used to get basic info about something across, saving the user a few clicks.

Worth checking out

This is a list of things worth revisitiing as I browse the web.

Item	Description
Easyclipse	A pre-packaged Eclipse with loads of plugins already installed.

Substance in NetBeans Swing not so with Eclipses SWT

You can do loads with the substance look and feel jar, which runs on top of Swing. Append it to your classpath and start playing around with laf and other custom command-line directives. This article makes a good start at showing what can be done.

Unfortunately, Eclipse cannot be made to do this because there is no literal "LAF" in Eclipse to change, as Eclipse does not use Swing, and LAF is a component of the window toolkit Swing. There are two ways to change colors / fonts / etc., the equivalent of LAF, in Eclipse:

• via Eclipse preferences


• or the host OS's display settings. Menu bar option Window -> Preferences -> General -> Appearance -> Color and Fonts can be used to individually tweak colors & fonts to each individual's likings.

The Eclipse options can be ported from installation to installation of Eclipse because preferences can be saved outside the IDE in a serialized file. These individual preferences for color, font, etc. do not need to be used, and can instead default to the OS's requested defaults. The OS display settings, when changed, apply to Eclipse automatically. This is because Eclipse is based on the native windowing toolkit SWT, and therefore respects / obeys the OS's requests for how it should display the IDE. This is opposed to Netbeans using Swing, a non-native windowing toolkit, that does not honor the requests of the OS on how the windowed application (Netbeans) should display. Therefore the proprietary display configuration, LAF, controls Netbeans.