Cadence's new website is rather spiffy

7/16/2008 5:03 PM EDT

Since we design and implement websites for our customers here at TechBites, and as we're playing with similar high-end features (although we haven't applied them to our own site because we're too busy working on our client's projects – note to self, we must do something about this one day), I really appreciate just how much effort has gone into Cadence's new site – my hat is off to their web team.

As an aside, having said this site was rather "spiffy", I started to wonder about the origin and usage of this word. Bouncing over to one of my favorite reference sites at www.Dictionary.com I discovered that (a) around the 1850s "spiff" was used to refer to a well-dressed man and (b) the term "spiffing", meaning "excellent" was very popular in 1870s slang.

I like "spiffing" – I just know I'm going to start dropping it into conversations whenever I can (grin).

More recently, I discover that in the computing arena, programs having a pretty, clever, or exceptionally well-designed interface may be said to be "spiffy", so I think I hit the nail on the head (ha!).

Questions? Comments? Feel free to email me – Clive "Max" Maxfield – at max@techbites.com). And, of course, if you haven't already done so, don't forget to Sign Up for our weekly Programmable Logic DesignLine Newsletter.