Steps to avoid feature creep Create a list of features for the planned product version. Some people call this a specification. You know you can ship when the planned features are implemented and tested. Get product stakeholders approval on specified features before implementation begins. The agreement on specified features helps everybody (developers, testers, sales, marketing, customers) know what the product is supposed to do when it’s done. Create a feature wish-list to collect suggested future features. The key to avoiding feature creep is to prevent the features from...

If you need to practice on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution but don’t have the cash to play with an official Red Hat version, what are you going to do?  You’re going to look for an affordable (FREE) alternative solution.  The solution is CentOS, a distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. CentOS stands for Community Enterprise Operating System.  To find a quick overview of CentOS, visit the wikipedia CentOS site. The official CentOS website is http://www.centos.org. My initial experience with installation and configuration was very positive. The user interface was...

Sometimes we become so focused on the pursuit of a symptom of a problem that we don’t stop to ask if we are still focused on the real cause of the problem.  This happened to me recently. During the iPhone development process you have a choice of debugging the iPhone App using the iPhone emulator or using the actual hardware.  The quickest way to test out your code is to build and debug using the emulator. While developing an iPhone application for Podcast Stockton I used one of the iPhone Audio libraries. It never occurred to me that the emulator might not do everything the hardware...

Last week I was so caught up in iPhone development that I didn’t watch any of my favorite podcasts on TiVo.  This week I finally got caught up with some of them only to find out that one of my shows GeekBrief.TV had been cancelled.  I have been watching Cali Lewis for a couple of years now and was sad to see the end of the show.  To see the history behind Geek Brief TV visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeekBrief.TV After a little digging, I discovered that Cali has joined Revision 3 with a new show called GeekBeat.TV. I wanted to start following the new show.  The only problem was...