AJ Morris

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.

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!!

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.

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

It’s that time of year again!!! That’s right, it’s MacHeist Bundle time!! You can get 10 great apps for a very small amount of money. This year’s lineup includes some programs that are worth getting, like CSSEdit and Pixelmator! Last year’s bundle sold 16,000 in one week and made a wave in the Mac community. This year they hope to “shatter” last year’s numbers ($200,000). Some other programs include 1password, Cha-Ching, TaskPaper, Awaken, and more! So go on over to MacHeist and order you bundle today!!

This time of year there always seems to be a slew of people asking me about what Mac software I’m using, if there’s some quality open source apps to use, etc. Since it’s Christmas/New Years time, I figured I’d put together a list software I use for a variety of tasks. So without further ado, here’s my list.

Productivity

• iWork - A suite similar to Microsoft’s Office suite, from Apple. This includes three programs: Keynote, Numbers, and Pages. Keynote is a presentation software, Numbers is a spreadsheet application, and Pages is a Word Processor. It retails for about $79 USD directly from Apple.
• Office 2008 - While this isn’t released to the public till after the New year, those of us that are fortunate to have a copy of the BETA (or know some people that will give you a free copy before it’s publicly released) are in “like” with it since it’s the first native intel app from Microsoft. It hits store shelves January 15, 2008 (opening day of MacWorld 2008).
• Anxiety - This is a great ToDo application. If you’re like me, you are always creating todo lists and either saving them on stickies (use Spotlight and type in stickies to see what I’m talking about) or writing them down. Anxiety takes these ToDo lists further. Using Leopard’s technology, Anxiety is able to sync tasks between iCal, Mail, and Anxiety. Best of all, Anxiety is free, so go get it when you’ve finished reading this article!

Imaging

• Pixelmator - If you need a lighter-weight easier to use than Photoshop application, this one is for you. With Pixelmator, you are able to make photo enhancements and design logos, images, etc. with ease. It’s still relatively new, and I’ve actually stopped using it due to having Photoshop CS3, but while I was using it during their BETA stage, it was definitely something you should check out. They offer a 30-day trial and costs about $50 USD.
• Skitch - A quality screen capturing tool that’s currently free, however,sounds like it’s going to cost something down the road. It allows for you to take screen shots and pics using your iSight. You can then add text, drawings, point out things, and then upload to your FTP server, .Mac, or Skitch.com. Skitch is from Plasq and is invite only during its private beta stage.
• Photoshop CS3 - An image editor with a lot of power. It is the best editor in the World, and if you’re okay with spending in upwords for $649 USD for it, great! Photoshop is created by Adobe.

Screen Recording

• Jing - A light-weight screen capturing/recording client from the good folks at TechSmith, makers of Camtasia Studio, (the people I work for). There are several limitations with Jing, such as saving images as .png’s and videos as .swf’s but for a quick sharing tool, it’s perfect!! It allows you to upload to Screencast.com (their hosting service), your FTP server, and FLickr (images only).
• iShowU - The godfather of screen recorders (or at least till TechSmith makes Camtasia Studio for Mac! :P)!!! This has it all! It costs $20 USD and can do just about everything you’ll ever need in a screen recorder. You’re able to record your mic and even your application audio! You can check it out here.

Web Development

• Cyberduck - An open-source FTP client. Simple to use, and FREE!! We all like free stuff, so go out and get this!
• TextMate - The king of all text editors! For code editing, specifically Ruby on Rails development, it’s perfect. TextMate provides a lot of features the average code editor doesn’t. TextMate is created by Macromates and costs $59 USD.
• CSSEdit - By the title you would assume that it’s for CSS editing. And guess what, you’re right!! The best part of it is that it allows you to extract any CSS file from any website and preview what the site would look like with your own custom CSS styles. It is available from MacRabbit and costs $29.99.
• iTerm - An open-source Terminal replacement. Allows for tabbed-instances (although the new Terminal does the same). It’s free, so if you’d like to try it out, go here.
• svnX - For those of us who work with groups developing applications. It provides a nice UI so that you can see what changes have been made and what files are going to be uploaded to the SVN.

These are the programs I use pretty much on a daily basis. I thought I’d include a few more “odd-ball” applications that I use for a few different things. I couldn’t think of a heading for them, so I’ll call them:

Miscellaneous

• Burn - A simple to use burning application that allows you to burn three kinds of images, normal disk images, cue/bin images and toc images. It also allows you to copy data disks, audio disks, and video disks. This is a great little utility that works better than Mac OS X’s built-in burning utility.
• VLC Player - A highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, etc.) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast in IP4v or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.
• Handbrake - A GPL’d multi-platform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter.
• MacTheRipper - Another DVD ripper, but this time rips the VOB files.
• Visual Hub - Yes another DVD ripper, AVI converter to DVD, do-it all type application. It is the one stop program for converting video to various formats for various devices.
• Flip4Mac - a codec needed to play WMV files on the Mac. Get it here.
• TechSmith EnSharpen - A lossless screen recording codec for the QuickTime format. Does cost $149, but is worth it if you want the lossless quality that this codec offers.
• Adium - An open-source Instant Message Client
• Colloquy - An open-source IRC client
• Transmission - An open-source bittorrent client
• VMWare Fusion - Virtual Machine application that allows you to run Windows or other OSes on your Mac.

If you have any other applications that you use, please feel free to add them as a comment below! Keep a look out after the new year for some tutorials on installing Ruby on Rails, MySQL, SVN, and some other development goodies. I’ll be getting a list together here in the coming weeks what what I’m gonna be working on. If you have ideas of something you’d like to see, let me know and I’ll see if it’s something I can’t pull together.

Mephisto seems to be hitting the rails community in full wave recently.  I’ve ran across it about 6 months ago, and have started to use it for various projects I’ve been involved with.  Besides Typo, this is the first open-source rails application I’ve enjoyed using.  While there is not a lot of quality themes (yet I hope), and definitely not as many plugins as WordPress has, it definitely ranks up there with some of the top blogging apps available in the market today.While Mephisto isn’t for everyone, especially seeing that your web host needs to support Rails, and you have to install it. The install is a bit tricky if you’ve never used rails before, so I strongly urge you to consider something else if you’re not a rails developer.  Although, I’m sure with a little help from the Rails community, you may be able to get it installed ok.Mephisto has some quality features like:

• Beautiful admin interface
• Slick Asset Management
• Flexible Liquid templating system (inspired by Django, used by Shopify
• ATOM feeds
• some tagging, some ajax, yadd yadda

They are always looking for help especially in some areas such as:

• API plugin
• Documentation
• coverters for wordpress, typo, movable type
• xml -rpc api support
• and tons! of ruby on rails code fixes

If you’re looking for ways to help, check out the Mephisto site and they should be able to get you in touch with the right people!