Intridea - Leaders in Agile Software Development

Let's face it, iPhone interfaces are awesome, but they can only cater to a fraction of the mobile market. What are you to do if you want to satisfy the rest of the mobile world? Mobile Fu helps to make this job much easier by automatically detecting mobile devices that access your Rails application. People can access your site from a Palm, Blackberry, iPhone, Nokia, etc. and it will automatically adjust the format of the request from :html to :mobile.

Learn Mobile Fu

First off, just install the Mobile Fu plugin into your Rails application.

script/plugin install git://github.com/brendanlim/mobile-fu.git 

Start by adding this one line to your ApplicationController.

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  has_mobile_fu
end

Once this is in place, any request that comes from a mobile device will be be set as :mobile format. It is up to you to determine how you want to handle these requests by creating the .mobile.erb versions of your views that are to be requested. Also, I recommend that you setup a before_filter that will redirect to a specific page depending on whether or not it is a mobile request. How can you check this?

is_mobile_device? # => Returns true or false depending on the device

You can also determine which format is currently set in by calling the method below.

in_mobile_view? # => Returns true or false depending on current req. format

If you want the ability to allow a user to switch between ‘mobile’ and ‘standard’ format (:html), you can just adjust the mobile_view session variable in a custom controller action.

session[:mobile_view] # => Set to true if request format is :mobile and false
                           if set to :html

What About Custom Mobile Styling?

Different devices need different styling. Don’t worry though, we’ve got this baked in to Mobile Fu (thanks to Intridea's own Michael Bleigh, who created Browserized Styles for letting me modify his code). If you are including a css or sass file via stylesheet_link_tag, all you have to do is add _device to the name of one of your files to override your styling for a certain device. The stylesheet that is loaded is dependant on which device is making the request.

Supported stylesheet override device extensions at the moment are: blackberry, iphone, mobileexplorer, nokia, palm

e.g., Accessing a page from a Blackberry.

<%= stylesheet_link_tag 'mobile.css' %>  

Ends up loading mobile.css, and mobile_blackberry.css if the file exists.

Feature Requests

You can check out Mobile Fu's very own project page at Acts As Community. If you have any problems or would like me to add a certain feature, please create a ticket at http://blim.lighthouseapp.com/projects/14490-mobile-fu/. Also, feel free to fork Mobile Fu and make any enhancements you please from its GitHub location at: http://github.com/brendanlim/mobile-fu/tree/master

Ever since it's announcement at WWDC 2008, most of us have been waiting anxiously to get our hands on the new iPhone 3G. If you haven't been keeping up with the news or have just been in a coma for the past few weeks, you'd know that the second coming of the iPhone was to be released today at Apple and AT&T stores nationwide.

I arrived at the Apple Store at Lenox Mall in Atlanta, GA around five in the morning and ended up being the fifth person in line. Quite surprising, since the Apple Store in New York City had people lining up since last week. After purchasing and activating my new iPhone 3G, I had a chance to play with all of its great new features.

The first thing you'll notice is that the once silver backing has been replaced with a shiny, plastic back. The 8GB iPhone 3G ($199) only comes in black, whereas the 16GB iPhone 3G ($299) comes in either black or white. Surprisingly, the new plastic back, which has a nice curve to it, feels high quality and fits very nicely in your hand. My only gripe though, is that the black color is very prone to smudges and finger prints. Metal has replaced the old plastic volume, power, and silence switch, which also add to a sturdier feel. The recessed-headphone jack is also now no more, allowing you to ditch the clunky adapters that were needed for the first generation iPhone. Also, the chrome bezel around the edges has been pushed back, which gives off the impression that the face is larger, even though the front dimensions are exactly the same as the previous generation.

So, the iPhone 3G is named the way it is for a reason. Finally, you can get 3G speeds on AT&T's HSDPA network, which blows EDGE out of the water. I've gotten accustomed to EDGE speeds over the past year and having pages load up to 2.4x faster is a luxury I don't ever want to live without again. Now I can browse all of my favorite sites without spending so much time waiting for everything to load.

If you had a first generation iPhone, you probably didn't use the speakerphone that much because it was quite worthless. It's now quite loud. The much louder volume of the speakerphone is definitely something that I am very happy about. Now, I can hear my calls loud (very) and clear. Speaking of clarity, many have said that the incoming and outgoing voice quality has been vastly improved. I've noticed a much cleaner, crisper sound while on the phone, but nothing dramatic.

One of the coolest new features is the GPS capability. You now get 'real' GPS, unlike the cellphone tower triangulation that was used in the previous generation iPhone. You don't get voice guided, turn by turn directions out of the box, but it's really neat to see that blue, pulsating dot, smoothly move through the map, showing you exactly where you are. I had a fun time using it on the way back home from the Apple Store. It's also been confirmed that Navigon, will be producing a third-party app, available in the App Store sometime soon, that will provide real turn-by-turn navigation.

Speaking of third party applications, this is really where the new 2.0 firmware shines. The App Store allows you to purchase either paid-for or free applications, right from your new iPhone 3G. There are over 500 different applications already available during launch time. The majority of the applications now are not free, but the average price per application seems to fall between $5 and $10.

Also, anybody can develop these applications with the iPhone SDK. As the developer, you can take advantage of Multi-Touch interface, the accelerometer, GPS, real-time 3D graphics, and 3D positional audio to create some amazing applications. You can also choose to let your product be downloaded for free or you can charge a price. If you decide to charge a price, you agree to pay Apple 30% of the final purchase price. The App Store is proving itself to be a great place for developers to get their products directly to the consumer which an amazing amount of ease.

There are many other great features with the 2.0 firmware that I haven't mentioned, push integration with Exchange and MobileMe, bug fixes, and much more - to list them all, would take quite some time. The iPhone 3G is a nice upgrade from the original iPhone, and if you haven't gotten an iPhone yet, the lowered price and the great new features make it an amazing deal. Look out for some great iPhone applications from us in the future.

We had a great time this year at RailsConf 2008 in Portland, Oregon. If you were there, we hope you had a chance to try out Yoga on Rails and hopefully you had a chance to stop by our booth to meet some of us. At our booth we were showing off some of our products, such as Acts As Community, CrowdSound, SocialSpring, Scalr, and MediaPlug. We even handed out a bunch of awesome Intridea t-shirts, which no swag-bag was complete without.

The Intridea team participated in the Community Code Drive on Thursday and worked on improving some of our open source plugins, such as Acts As Taggable On, SMS Fu, and Fu Fu. The rest of the conference was filled with informative talks from prominent members of the Rails and Ruby community. Even our very own Chris Selmer gave a talk on ‘How to Build an Rails App in 48 Hours’ with Josh Owens of the Web 2.0 Show.

Thanks goes out to everybody who stopped by our booth and everyone we met throughout the event. RailsConf 2008 was a blast and we can't wait until next year when we get to do it all over again.

Having had to develop apps that relied on the ability to send text messages to members, I thought that it would be a good idea to turn some of that functionality into a plugin that would be easy to use. SMS Fu gives you the ability to be able to send text messages from your Rails app in less than five minutes. There’s no third-party gateway needed, as the phone number is converted into an e-mail address, which makes it deliverable to any phone.

Installation

git clone git://github.com/brendanlim/sms-fu.git vendor/plugins/sms_fu

Usage

Supported Carriers: Alltel, Ameritech, AT&T, BellSouth Mobility, BlueSkyFrog, Boost Mobile, Cellular South, Fido, Metro PCS, PSC Wireless, Qwest, Southern Link, Sprint, Suncom, T-Mobile (US/UK/Germany), Virgin Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Vodafone (UK,Italy,Japan)

To use SMS Fu, all you have to do is include SMS Fu in one of your controllers.

class ExampleController < ApplicationController
  include SMSFu
end

After this, go to /config/sms_fu.yml to change the default reply-to address with your own.

Phone numbers must not include any non-numeric characters, with the exception of ’+’ for International numbers. The three required parameters are the phone number, carrier, and the message itself. To find out just what you need to pass for the carrier, check the yaml file. The one line below will deliver a nice ‘Hello World!’ straight to your phone.

deliver_sms("5555555555","AT&T","Hello World!")

Since most non smart-phones only support up to 128 characters, you’re allowed to specify a limit to truncate the message delivered.

deliver_sms("5555555555","AT&T","Really long message ...", :limit => 128)

If you feel like rolling your own mailer, and not using SMS Fu to handle this, you can retrieve the the converted e-mail address for the phone number and carrier supplied.

get_sms_address("5555555555","AT&T")

That’s all there is to it! If you want to add your own carriers, just edit sms_fu.yml.