I’ve used the Blueprint CSS framework on a number of projects and loved it. Recently though, I switched over to using the 960 Grid System for its more minimalist footprint. 960’s typography style-sheet contains just enough to get you started on any project, with no extra bloat. I love it.

Blueprint however, does still have a few nice plugins that I like to use. One such plugin was called Buttons, based on the work of Kevin Hale. Buttons makes use of the famfam silk icon set that Mark James released to the web community at large under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

So this weekend I built a rails plugin to incorporate ‘Buttons’ into my apps. Via a generator command, this plugin will copy the required silk icon set, styles and helper files into your app.

Let me know if you find it useful.  Get it here on Github

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Over the course of a week, my desktop folder gets pretty messy and I struggle with better ways to manage it. The bulk of my files seem to be xxxxxxx.webloc or text clippings ... for subjects I might be researching but don’t care enough about to “bookmark” forever. The clippings are often relevant for a few hours, but nothing I want to keep around long term. That would be fine enough if I could remember to throw them away after moving onto my next task. Alas, I never do ... my desktop is a disaster!

So, today while in #werenot a good buddy suggested I check out ShoveBox.

“ShoveBox catches all those little scraps of information that you can’t act on now but would rather not forget. It sits up in your menubar, waiting for you to drag in text, images, URLs, and more.” (from the site)

Fantastic ... I downloaded the demo, installed it and was left with a great first impression.

In ShoveBox, you are meant to access your scraps via a hotkeyed window ..that was quite important to me. After setting F14-F16 to good use I was glad to see how fast the organizer window loaded. What I want most from this sort of app is for it to be non interruptive, and hotkeys help to that end. Ideally, I won’t have to use the mouse at all.

ShoveBox is very simple. You just create folders to store stuff, and then ... you store stuff. You can also flag or label items as you might normally in the Finder, which is helpful. What’s best though is that’s about as complicated as it gets. I really don’t want or expect ShoveBox to do anything more. Thats not to say there aren’t additional features, but they don’t get in my way. I’ve used other apps meant to serve this purpose where that was an issue.

So I’m going to keep using ShoveBox for a bit longer. My Desktop is clean for now. I couldn’t be happier.

Anyone else tried apps of this sort? Recommendations?

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I recently built a website for a client that needed every type of content “approved” before it should appear on its public pages. I started out thinking that there may be many different states of approval and that perhaps I should use acts_as_statemachine to manage these state transitions. After a bit of thinking and frustration with how AASM saves and reloads each model after a transition, I decided I could create something much simpler for my own needs. 

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I began using git to manage the source code for my current project, a Rails app which I should hopefully be launching shortly. Yahoo! Now, I hadn’t actually been using source control for very long before I began, and wasn’t able to focus on best practices. With a wife, 2 kids and 2 jobs, I was lucky to get the coding of the apps themselves under control. That said, its funny now to look back at all my commit messages for this project.

So it wasn’t until recently I was able to focus my commits to specific features, changes to the code-base that stood on their own. More often, I found myself working “everywhere” and on “everything” all at once. I wonder how many other people start off this way.

Well, 127 commits behind me, I took a moment to browse back through the messages of my project. Its amazing to see how useless they are, time to get better at it I guess.

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I use JQuery UI a lot, but I don’t use all of it and I prefer not to install the entire library if I can help it. Its not enough to just manage the JS assets you need for a particular widget, you often have to juggle inclusion of its CSS as well. So, rather than separating out the plugins I use on each project, I thought it would be cooler (in development at least) to leave them as smaller files and just find a better way to manage which assets were needed, when they were needed!

In an effort to eliminate some development headache I’ve created Asset Dependency Manager. You can download it here:

http://github.com/CodeOfficer/asset-dependency-manager/tree/master

Basically, it lets you declare dependency lookups in your application_helper.rb file ... Then in your views you say something akin to ... assets_for :tabs, :slider, :etc ... and the resources for said lookups with be included in your layout view auto-magically, removing duplicates and paying strict attention to your intended loading order.

The README has more info on how to use it. Let me know if you find it useful or have feature requests.

And if its of interest, have a look at my other Rails helper for JQuery UI called TabsRenderer

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I created a quick fork on github of the acts_as_fulltext_indexed plugin made by Chris Heald of antiarc.net.

Acts_as_fulltext_indexed addresses a limitation of MySQL’s INNODB table format (which supports transactions but not fulltext indices) by using MySQL’s MYISAM table format (which supports fulltext indices, but not transactions). 

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I created a more official home for TabsRenderer over at github tonight, and I plan to work on additional helpers this summer in my off-time.

http://github.com/CodeOfficer/jquery-ui-rails-helpers/tree/master

Github is sweet, and I enjoy working with Git so much more lately than Subversion. I usually end up taking my laptop to coffee shops that happen to be without internet (or are charging a fortune ~blasphemy!~) ... when this is the case, its HUGELY beneficial to be able to still commit my work locally even though I do not have a connection to my main repo at home.

So, here’s to hoping I get more time to code soon!!

[codeofficer@Asimov ~/code/git/jquery-ui-rails-helpers]$ git push github master
Counting objects: 7, done.
Compressing objects: 100% (5/5), done.
Writing objects: 100% (7/7), 1.55 KiB, done.
Total 7 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To git@github.com:CodeOfficer/jquery-ui-rails-helpers.git
* [new branch] master -> master
[codeofficer@ Asimov ~/code/git/jquery-ui-rails-helpers]$

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I’m a big fan of JQuery UI and have been using the Tab plugin a lot recently.

However, I found the code to create each Tab a bit repetitious. It became especially ugly in situations where you might want to display a tab conditionally ... first displaying the tab header, then the tab body, and having to re-use the same condition in both places. yuck!

Sooo, since I had recently given a presentation at our local Ruby Users Group on Design Patterns in Ruby, I thought maybe a little template pattern would be a nice fit here. The result: TabsRenderer!!

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I found these old renders on my drive recently and thought I might share them. They date back to about 2000 when I was doing contract work for a digital graphics shop in Camden Maine. I spent most of my time modeling the interior and exterior of various buildings, but these particular renders came from just goofing off at the local coffee shop. Nothing extraordinary!

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I had the honor of presenting this week at our local Ruby Users Group. This was my first time speaking publicly and it was thrilling experience. I spoke for about an hour and despite my preconceptions, survived well beyond the first 10 minutes of my talk!

The topic I chose was Design Patterns in Ruby, largely because I had just finished reading (twice) an excellent book by the same name. Design Patterns in Ruby, by Russ Olsen, was just fantastic to read. Russ’s approach was so casual, and un-reference like ... that I rarely felt lost in the patterns being described. I’ve tried a few times to read other books on the general topic of design patterns, but usually these were written for an audience of Java or C++ programmers. As well, those other books rarely did anything other than flash a few UML diagrams at you and drop you in the middle of code that was more complex than the pattern at hand, hardly an elegant way to learn a new subject. After reading Design Patterns in Ruby I actually felt a bit like Neo from the Matrix when he said ... “I know kung fu!”

Its a couple days later but I wanted to post my factory pattern examples for those who attended. My apologies for the delay, its been a busy week. The other examples I presented on were largely unchanged from examples found in the book, so I wont publish Russ’s creation. (wait, thats me!)

Thanks again to those who were able to bare with me and withstand the awkwardness of a first presentation. Kudos to Casey Rosenthal of Port Forty Nine for convincing me to get up there. I really enjoyed myself and might be convinced to do it again. Continue reading to view the example factory patterns! 

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