Posts from August 2009
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11 major new Snow Leopard features
MacWorld rounds up Snow Leopard’s new features. “Smart Eject” sounds like it’s going to be super useful:
When you first attempt to eject a disk, the eject manager actually sends out a signal to its own subsystems and other programs, asking them to relinquish their hold on the volume if that’s possible. If that fails because a program really is using the drive, Snow Leopard will bring up a window telling you which program doesn’t want to let you eject the disk. You can then switch to that program, quit out of it, and eject the disk.
Building a Video Portal in Rails
Nathaniel Bibler gives an excellent presentation of how EnvyLabs put together 4Kids TV, a video portal for kids’ TV shows. It’s long, but worth it, as he steps through everything it took to get the project done. It’s a great example of why you don’t necessarily need to stick to Rails’ conventions for everything, and in some cases, it’s better to think of Rails as your “glue” between many different parts.
Rebase like a boss
Nick Quaranto on why you should rebase instead of merge when using Git:
Everyone who loves Git hopefully loves branching. However, there’s a problem with branching: merging your work back in. Suprisingly enough, Git’s inflexibility makes this action quite simple. It’s my opinion that Git users should be branching frequently, and rebasing them back into the mainline when ready.
This is my basic philosophy when using Git: the cleaner you keep your history graph, the better.
HelloApp
Carsonified just rolled out a new web app for conferences, HelloApp, and it looks mighty cool. Once you’re at a conference, you tweet where you’re sitting, and you’re then able to search for other people interested in similar things near you, see the seating chart, earn badges for meeting people, and much more. For a walkthrough of the main features, definitely check out their blog.
Beanstalk will support Git
Over on the Beanstalk blog, Chris Nagele announces that Beanstalk will be supporting Git. We use Beanstalk at Viddler–it’s a superb application, and adding Git will make it even better.
The Circle of Life, er, Development
Leslie Camacho, president at EllisLab, discusses how the ExpressionEngine team works on a day-to-day basis. Most of post revolves around Scrum, a framework for project management. The video included in the post gives a great insight into how Scrum works.
Oh and did I mention how excited I am about ExpressionEngine 2.0?
How a Macworld cover is made
Excellent timelapse video of the creation of a Macworld cover, from the initial photography to the final layout.
USAA Bank Will Allow Customers to Deposit Checks by iPhone
USAA Bank customers will soon be able to deposit checks with their iPhone:
“We’re essentially taking an image of the check, and once you hit the send button, that image is going into our deposit-taking system as any other check would,” said Wayne Peacock, a USAA executive vice president.
My bank recently starting letting customers deposit checks by scanning them in–hopefully they’ll have something similar to this in the near future (when I have an iPhone, of course).
Tumblr takes over the world
Over on the Tumblr staff blog, they posted some statistics from last month. Some highlights:
- 255 million pageviews
- 650,000 posts per day
- 6 posts and 1.5 reblogs per second
Tumblr really is an fantastic product, and it’s great to see they’ve been so successful. (By the way, I’m on Tumblr)
It's only a race to the bottom if you make it one
Intelligent advice from Marco Arment on why you don’t have to price your iPhone app at 99 cents to succeed:
You can easily sell an app for more than $3 if you simply recognize that you probably won’t be on the Top 25 list. In reality, this might already be decided for you: if your app isn’t likely to appeal to an extremely wide audience, you probably won’t make the Top 25 at any price. And even if you do target a wide audience, there’s a lot of competition for those spots — statistically, you probably won’t get one.
CodeIgniter REST
A nice look at how to implement REST routes in CodeIgniter. I’ve been using CodeIgniter for a recent project, and I definitely wish I had found this before starting.
Ninjawords: iPhone Dictionary, Censored by Apple
John Gruber tells the tale of Ninjawords, a simple dictionary app for the iPhone that was given a 17+ rating by Apple:
But Ninjawords for iPhone suffers one humiliating flaw: it omits all the words deemed “objectionable” by Apple’s App Store reviewers, despite the fact that Ninjawords carries a 17+ rating.
[…]
Amazon, of course, does not restrict the sale of English dictionaries, either in print or for the Kindle. The Kindle, in fact, ships from the factory with a built-in dictionary, The New Oxford American Dictionary — the very same dictionary used by Mac OS X’s built-in Dictionary app. Like any good dictionary, it contains listing for all of the words deemed “objectionable” in Ninjawords by the App Store reviewers.
Actions like this and the Google Voice fiasco are really making me think again about buying an iPhone when it comes out on Verizon (hopefully next year).