The Ruby Reflector

It took the median user 26.139 seconds to click on the screenshot.

Test 2: Do people know where to paste a link to add a new bitmark?

It's clear people were confused by the formerly-straightforward action of creating a bitmark. But what if we phrased the question slightly differently and opened the "Add a bitmark" entry field?

We had 83 responses to this second test, which observed if a user understood where to paste a link. In the new design, you can add a new bitmark in …

• Topics: bit.ly, Verify, Copy, Twitter, ZURB
• Global Nerdy: DemoCamp Toronto 29 Tomorrow! (June 9, 2011)
• John Resig: Easy Retweet Button
• Engine Yard Developer Blog: Win a Motorola DROID Programming Contest: "Worst App Server Technology Ever"
• The "Tech. Arch.": Implementing Ruby Camping REST Services With RESTstop
• 4 Lines of Code: Calling URL Shortener in Ruby
• Giles Bowkett: Node.js Miniapp: minim.al bit.ly

…not logged in. It's kind of like sending someone a link to a pastebin or something like that. Screenshot:

Another new feature is something I've wanted for a long time: the ability to generate a more strict, safer configuration file. There's a new page in the Wizard that lets you set a lot of sanity/safety options to prevent common problems MySQL users run into because of too-permissive MySQL behaviors. These are the kinds of things that Drizzle fixes — and should …

• Topics: MySQL, Stack, Drizzle, SQL, Baron Schwartz
• Engine Yard Developer Blog: 3 Common Rails + MySQL Mistakes
• New Relic: How do you move more than 6000 customers in 2 hours? (Hint: plan ahead)
• Signal vs. Noise: Nuts & Bolts: Database Servers
• News Feed: Implementing Your Own Caching Layer
• Scout ~ The Blog: CouchDB in production
• Intridea - Company Blog: MongoDC Recap

Screenshot below from Amir's count so that you don't say I fudged the numbers :)

Conclusion

You can build great stuff on any platform now a days. It's cool to see what "the other frameworks" are doing to see what we can learn from them. If you're a .NET dev, play with Rails and check it out!

Some links from the presentation:

Rails Demo app: http://pomodoroz.herokuapp.com/

Rails App source code: https://github.com/marcjeanson/Pomodoroz …

• Topics: Ruby on Rails, MVC, ActiveRecord, Cucumber, BDD
• A Fresh Cup: Double Shot #775
• Ruby Inside: The Last Week in Ruby: Rails 3.1.1, Sinatra Recipes, Spree Gets Funded and more
• Ruby on Rails Tutorial News: Ruby on Rails Tutorial, second edition (updated for Rails 3.2)
• Envy Labs: Rails for Zombies 2 Released!
• giant robots smashing into other giant robots: This week in open source
• Andrzej on Software: Rails is still cool

LIMBO Screenshot

For one reason or another I was stuck on my Mac tonight, not focussed enough to do "real" work. So here I was, browsing the Mac App Store, not necessarily for games. LIMBO is currently one of its " Spotlight Apps", with a full description of simply "Uncertain of his sister's fate, a boy enters LIMBO". It's a beautifully animated, puzzle and jump'n'run game with an admittedly very dark, creepy atmosphere. Think of it sort …

• Topics: .Mac, Plants vs, Television, Macintosh, App Store
• RubyLearning Blog: An Introduction to Desktop Apps with Ruby
• DigitalHobbit: Evernote: A Promising Start
• Labnotes: Rounded Corners 256 — Sharpening the saw
• Scout ~ The Blog: Embedded Customer Support With Rapportive
• Yan Pritzker: Colorful Vim Ruby Tests and Debugging
• Simone Carletti's Blog: Google Site performance tool says Google is not Gzipping any content

Bet your TextMate can't do this! Screenshot first, how-to follows :)

And now the how-to...

ConqueTerm for a color-enabled embedded vim terminal

ConqueTerm is pretty magical. It gives you an embedded shell where you can run bash, rib, rake, really..you name it. All with full ansi color support. This lets us run red green tests that actually look green and not as a bunch of ansi escape codes.

Homepage

Direct Download Link

Install: follow directions on homepage or just :so conque_2.3.vmb from vim and restart

• Topics: Ruby on Rails, Download, TextMate, Pry

…single graphic, guaranteeing that it wouldn't be properly indexed by search engines. Here's a screenshot:

Don't bother visiting the site . It's gone.

In September of that year, I wrote in an article titled ICT Toronto: I Know What You DIDN'T Do This Summer :

It's almost five months later, and it appears that not much has happened. I haven't seen a press release since the one for their launch party, and a Google News search for …

• Topics: Toronto, ICT, Microsoft, Bangalore, Network News Transfer Protocol
• Unspace Blog: Open Data, Open City
• RubyLearning Blog: Hampton Catlin on Haml
• Engine Yard Developer Blog: Ruby Jobs This Week
• Blog | The Working Group: The BIG Goal - TEDxToronto at TWG
• Giles Bowkett: Fast Food Marketing Drives Impatient Behavior
• Zerosum Dirt(nap): Reflections on *Camp

…attract your attention: "Got a question?" Tapping on that option will take you to the third screenshot: " Common Questions".

There aren't a lot of questions here right now: just six things that I expect people might want to know. As I get feedback from people using Ekawada "in the wild", I'll grow that list.

I'm sure that as the app gets used, deficiencies in my approach here will surface. In the end, the best anyone can do is guess until the …

• Topics: iTunes, Connect, Orleans, New, Jamis

A similar pattern of refactoring was carried out here as per the Screenshot class.

Probably the most interesting point is the way you can use Ruby to capture a block of code. In the case of the Screenshot application there are certain actions we only want to be executed when the user clicks a menu item. You can see these as code surrounded by curly braces. Alternatively they could have been written as follows: app.item('Take Screenshot') do Screenshot.capture end

Which does …

• Topics: JRuby, Java, Ruby, Name, .Mac
• RubyFlow - Search for jruby: An Introduction to Desktop Apps with Ruby
• Beyond The Type: An Introduction to Desktop Apps with Ruby
• RubyLearning Blog: Does ROR deployment deprive YOU of your sleep?
• RubyLearning Blog: Rubyists and Companies I am thankful for in 2010
• Headius: Help JRuby by Fixing RubySpecs
• Litany Against Fear: JRuby: Who What Now? Notes

…homepage lists the Raplets documentation in PDF format.

We use Ruby on Rails, so our controller logic looks something like this:

Our view generates the HTML shown in the above screenshot.

Value of Sidekick Apps

I handle a number of activities at Scout and it's great to have a sidekick app like Rapportive. It's a lightweight tool that helps me provide better support.

• Topics: Scout, XHTML, Software developer, Ruby on Rails, Andre
• Ruby on Rails Podcast: Highgroove and Scout - Ruby on Rails Podcast
• RailsTips by John Nunemaker: Multiple Domain Page Caching
• igvita.com: Cluster Monitoring with Ganglia & Ruby
• Rails Inside: Scout Improves App Monitoring for Rails Developers
• Kalzumeus Software: Building Highly Reliable Websites For Small Companies
• Ruby Inside: New Relic RPM Officially Supports Rack and Sinatra - Finally!

…event-based init daemon. The new alternative to sysvinit. Not so new chronologically, but probably new to you. If you've using God or Nagios, consider upstarting some of that.

Awesome Screenshot: Capture & Annotate. This extension ( Chrome only) makes screen capture and sharing so easy.

Incidentally, screenshot of the New revised release calendar .

• Topics: IRB, Tips, Assaf, Mac OS, Tricks
• Adventures with Ruby: Customizing IRB, 2010 edition
• Ruby Inside: awesome_print: A New Pretty Printer for your Ruby Objects
• Intridea - Company Blog: Intridea Insider: Joe Grossberg
• Comments on: blog: Link dump for July 24th through July 25th
• Opscode Blog: Chef 0.8.2 Release
• News Feed: Automatic Color Coding for script/console and irb