For a software developer there are essentially two paths to extremely enviable positions of respect in the community: either you can be the tech genius behind a multi-billion dollar startup or you can release open source projects that thousands (not millions) of developers find useful. Guess which one is easier to accomplish?

Today I'm introducing GemNotifier.org, a web app I built to deliver timely notifications about your favorite gem updates. It's a SparkTime project at Intridea and it's something I've been working on for the last month.

Here at Presently we understand that the key to staying connected is mobility so we've been working hard to improve our applications for mobile platforms! In last week's announcement on the new Presently Desktop, we promised you an update for Presently Android, and we're here to make good on that promise! Starting today you can uninstall the old version and visit the Android App Marketplace to download the new version of Presently. We've made several critical improvements from the previous version, including:

Companies have many ways to benefit from an open source culture. While many arguments can be made about the philisophical implications of choosing to contribute to the open source community, at the end of the day philosophy isn't going to persuade any CEO to adopt open source. The real reason that open source culture is important to a business is because it's a business decision that can bring many real-world advantages over the proprietary-focused alternatives.

2012 has brought about a series of changes and updates for Presently, including an updated Chrome Extension, a slick new iPhone app, SharePoint 2010 integration and an impressive round of UI changes for the native web app. April has been our busiest month, and today we're excited to make yet another update announcement, this time concerning our new Presently Desktop app!

Intridea has taken over RefactorMyCode from Marc-André Cournoyer. We will continue to maintain the site and also will be posting an open source version to our Intridea Github account by the end of the week.