I've been doing a bit more Ruby and Ruby on Rails coding lately by virtue of silently commandeering the Intridea.com codebase. shhhh, it can be our secret.

Last month I upgraded the site from Rails 2.3 to Rails 3.1; getting up and running on the asset pipeline was a much larger project than I imagined, and while I had plans for a supremely awesome post on all the details of the upgrade, I spent less time taking notes on all the cute little steps and more time... LOST IN TIME AND SPACE with all the.... complications.

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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:

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A few months ago Intridea decided to splurge and upgrade our (already awesome) benefits package. In addition to the basic perks like amazing health insurance, hardware funds and an annual subscription to Amazon Prime, we started a new program called SparkTime. SparkTime is much like Google's 20% time – everyone spends a few hours a week working on something that they are passionate about. We record our ideas in SparkBin, team up if we want to collaborate, and then we get down to the business of impassioned creation.

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When Apple introduced the highly anticipated "Copy and Paste" feature for the iPhone, it came with a default menu editing implementation. With the release of iOS 3.2, this implementation has been updated to include configurable menus to ease the iPhone developer's job. It's simple and elegant. In addition to using UIActionSheet to provide a list of commands/actions to choose from, the UIMenuController is worth a try too.

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If you have both a car and an iPhone, then you might be as excited as we are that Car Finder 2.0 is now available in the App Store! Car Finder 2.0 is chock-full of additional features and makes finding your car easier and more accurate than ever. One of the best new features of Car Finder 2.0 is Parking Meter Notification. When you mark the location of your car, you have the choice of setting a time for when your parking meter will expire and then be alerted when your parking meter is about to run out. Also, if you don't want to use the augmented reality view to find your car, there's now an option to just view your car on a regular map.

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My first foray into Objective-C was, for lack of a better description, a sink-or-swim situation. Our lead iPhone developer had just been laid off and the boss was in my office the next day asking me how quickly I could "get up to speed". "You know Ruby", he said, "How difficult could it be?" It was time to get some books.

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The Keynote given by Steve Jobs was set to start at 10:00am PST. I decided to arrive a little early and get there around 7:30am, thinking that being nearly three hours early would yield me some great seats. I guess I underestimated just how many people would be getting there even earlier to see Steve Jobs unveil the new iPhone and announce other goodies that have been rumored. When I arrived at Moscone West, the line was wrapped all the way around the building. Read more…

Today we are excited to officially launch Grub.it, a location-based web and mobile application that enables people to find or review individual dishes at restaurants wherever they may be. Grub.it exists to help you find top notch meals wherever you are and aims to connect you with local specialties, hidden gems and exquisite dishes in general. Read more…

On the heels of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's Net Freedom speech, Intridea was delighted to receive notification Apple had approved the official iPhone application we developed for Voice of America's (VOA) Persian News Network (PNN). Read more…

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I recently spent a day hanging out with a few of the guys at Viget Labs hacking on the iPhone. Ben Scofield, the Technology Director at Viget Labs, was leading an iPhone development primer for a few of Viget's finest, and they were nice enough to let a handful of "outsiders" join the fun. Read more…

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