I had the opportunity to speak at RailsConf 2011 about OmniAuth, outlining some of the reasoning behind it as well as some current and upcoming features of Intridea's own "authenticate with anything" middleware. While the session wasn't video recorded, a little trick I've picked up is to run a screencasting program in the background while I present to generate a "poor man's Confreaks" version of the talk. Well, that's exactly what I've done for OmniAuth: From the Ground Up!
Read more…Intridea Blog: Technology, Design, Business
Archives - May 2011
How to use the Application object of Android
We know there is an Application class in the Android api and according to the class name, it's used for global settings or running entrance. What does it to do for an application? I will dive into it in this blog post.
In the Android reference it describes the Application class: "Base class for those who need to maintain global application state. You can provide your own implementation by specifying its name in your AndroidManifest.xml's
Introducing Socialspring: Business Software, Humanized
Socialspring is business software, humanized. The suite offers a complete set of tools for internal social collaboration, productivity, expert search and more. Unlike current social enterprise software, Socialspring is not just a dressed-up social network. We’ve re-imagined how business software can mimic real world social connections to help you be more productive and make work a more pleasurable experience overall. Socialspring apps will be united with single sign-on and although all of the apps can be used standalone, the more apps you use within the suite, the more powerful Socialspring becomes for your company.
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It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds...with ZSH
Captain Hammer told me they call it bash for a reason... don't say I didn't warn you. Of course I'm talking about my favorite superhero and the default shell in OS X respectively. Now, I'm not here to tell you that using bash is dumb and that you can only be a good developer if you use an alternate shell like ZSH, but I am here to say that when I use bash I feel dumb. Bash just seems to get in my way, probably because I never took the time to properly customize it. But now the hard work of terminal customization has been done for us by the oh-my-zsh community. A big thanks to all that have contributed!
Read more…Rails 3: Fully Loaded
It's been close to a year since Rails 3 came out and I've had the pleasure of working on several Rails 3 projects since its release. Some existing gems became irrelevant with the release of Rails 3, while others lived. Additionally, we've seen many new gems come to life. I'd like to share a stack of gems that I've been using this year. Hopefully they will give people a bit of help while developing a new Rails 3 app.
Most of these gems have good documentation on their project wiki (every great gem should be well documented, right?), so I won't go into great detail about the mechanics. Instead, my aim is to introduce you to some of the gems I find most useful and separate them into meaningful categories, as a sort of reference guide.
Read more…Presently Chrome Extension - Official Release
It's been in beta since the beginning of this year, but today it's official - we're releasing the Presently Chrome Extension as a full-fledged Presently client. We released the first version in January, and since then our developers have been adding functionality and making tweaks to give it bring functionality to the extension - so Presently users can enjoy a seamless integration of their corporate collaboration app within their Chrome browser. Now you can do almost everything you do on the native web app! In this version 0.1 you can:
Read more…Designing for High Resolution Displays: Thinking Beyond 72 DPI
It’s been nearly a year since the release of the iPhone 4, and much to the dismay of the tech community, it’s still the only product in the Apple lineup with a high pixel density ‘Retina’ display. While the much-hyped feature drew universal praise when the device was unveiled, some were wondering the following:
Read more…I Heart SASS, But HAML, I'm Just Not That In To You
Emacs vs Vim. iPhone vs Android. Of all of the nerd arguments, none hits closer to home for Ruby developers than HAML vs ERB. Proponents of HAML look at writing HTML as a dirty practice to be avoided at all costs and look down upon "mere" ERB authors. Meanwhile there's SASS, a language syntactically close kin to HAML and, until last week, one that even rode along inside the HAML gem. HAML abstracts HTML, SASS abstracts CSS. I'm not here to stop you from using HAML if you like it. Go for it. However, I'm tired of having an aesthetic choice that some developers make bandied about as if it were "the only way" to do things.
Read more…Twas Brillig, and the Slithy Code...
No matter what level of developer you are, at some point you will have the underrated joy of inheriting a legacy software project. And since we're fortunate enough to work in such a fast-paced community and ecosystem, "legacy" really encapsulates any piece of software more than a week or two old. Often though, we don't have time to appreciate how our ancestors used to write Ruby back in the days of Rails 2.3, or even (gasp) 2.1 — we need to get right to work. It's at this point that the nefarious Jabberwocky method can rear its ugly head.
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