If found it a little difficult yesterday to figure out how to get growl notifications working until @colognerunner told me how he got it working. Figured there were others that were having problems, so I make a quick little screencast showing you what I did.
Category Archives: Applications
Objective Resource for Faster iPhone Development
I recently came across Objective Resource for developing iPhone applications that talk with a Rails backed website. According to the site,
ObjectiveResource is an Objective-C port of Ruby on Rails’ ActiveResource. It provides a way to serialize objects to and from Rails’ standard RESTful web-services (via XML or JSON) and handles much of the complexity involved with invoking web-services of any language from the iPhone.
I’ve had a chance to play with it this weekend and have found it to be pretty easy to work with. The developers of Objective Resource have created a pretty good Getting Started Guide you can follow, or you can watch a screencast of it as well. They even offer an example project for you to work with that gives you both the iPhone app (via Xcode) and the Rails app so you can see how everything works together.
One thing the example project does not include is accessing a Rails app that has authentication. Of course I was thinking I was all setup for this, but soon realized that I did not add my Active Resource functions in so that my app would work with XML/JSON requests. Luckily, while I was out in Denver, CO for iPhone Development Training (by Pragmatic Studio) I was able to get my hands on a copy of Advanced Rails Recipes by Mike Clark. I was extremely pleased that Mike graciously gave me the copy he had laying there for free. The particular recipe in the book that helped me was the Authenticate REST Clients. After I rewrote my authentication piece of my Rails app, I was getting data back and into my iPhone app. It was a very good feeling!
I thought I would include the screencast that the Objective Resource developers created. It runs about 6 minutes and is definitely worth a watch if you are looking at using Objective Resource for your next iPhone app backed by a Rails app.
Getting Started with Objective Resource from Josh Vickery on Vimeo.
iPhone App test post
Just testing the wordpress app for the iPhone. I think this is a good idea for smaller posts but I’m not sure I’d want to use this all the time on the road.
Firefox 3 is Released!!
The much anticipated release of browsers has been released! Of course, as of this post, I had to wait about 45 minutes to get the page to load, so there idea of getting a World Record of downloads in 24 hours might not be a good thing if they can stand the traffic. Regardless, I’m looking forward to getting off the RC version I’ve been playing with and will hope to see a few new changes in it.
On a separate note, I’ve been a little quiet lately here due to working on a major project at work. Well it’s wrapping up so I should have some posts about my experiences soon. Until then keep it real my friends!!
New Ruby on Rails Host Makes Awesome Entrance!
Heroku is a new Y Combinator startup that joins the growing number of Ruby on Rails hosts, however this host adds a special step of using your browser to build your apps. You can now create Rails applications inside of your browser. Or if you prefer to use your development environment you can do that as well. Heroku is built using Amazon EC2 service. You have the option to upload your own apps via a tar file, or through their gem and git.
From their website they have an awesome list of features:
- Instant Deployment
- Create and Edit Online
- Integrated Stack
- Elastic Performance
- Share and Collaborate
- Import & Export
- Full Ruby Environment
- Gems & Plugins
- Rails Console
- Generate Code
- Painless Migrations
- Rake Console
But don’t take my word for it, check out their screencasts for more information on how to get things up and going.
Heroku, part of Y Combinator startups from this winter, has been in development since June 2006 and has attracted about 2500 users with around 2000 apps.
I do hope that we start to see some new features like support for subversion, mysql databases, and capistrano based deployment. I look forward to seeing what else comes from them. Please keep these guys in your rails radar.
I’ve got my account setup and played with it for a few hours today. If you would like to give it a try, they have a small waiting list, however if you send me an email I can work on sending you an invite faster. Feel free to send me an email at ajmorris2002[at]gmail.com for an invite.
iPhone WordPress Plugin Anybody?
I had some free time today and started looking for some new sites that were iPhone friendly and saw this great plugin that can turn your WordPress blog into an iPhone friendly site. I found the instructions very simple to install and definitely worth adding to your site. Even if you have few readers, it’s always a good thing to reach out to the masses. 
I highly suggest checking it out. I hope I’ll have some free time to play around with the look of it so that I can customize it a little bit, but for a quick and simple option for making your blog iPhone friendly, it’s worth it. Perhaps I’ll even make a screencast of changing the layout/theme.
Speaking of iPhone web development I also came across this Mac only application called iPhoney that allows you to view what your site will look like in an iPhone without actually having one! The site says it’s NOT a simulator, but for all purposes of testing your web site/app inside of the 320 by 480 (or 480 by 320) screen area that the iPhone has.
The last thing I thought I would share with you is this tutorial of creating your Rails apps so that they have a different layout/theme for the iPhone, check it out here
