Thought & Theory

If you’re like me, and SVN “update -t comma space trunk branch add diet coke” means a mild-migraine and a whole box of kleenex, then rejoice in Versions. Versions is delightfully “mac-like” subversion GUI that’s free… well free for now anyway. So far it’s passed the rigorous “Does Jeff like this” test, which includes the following criteria:

1. Launches in under three seconds: check
2. Sexy dock icon: star
3. Looks like iTunes: check
4. Intriguingly pressable icons: uh-huh
5. Preference pane has under 10 tabs: yup
Bonus: Domain name has the suffix “app”: bingo!

Well folks, looks like we have a winner. Check it out on the internet today!

Link: Versions

OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

Profile Information (user data)
Friends Information (social graph)
Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Hosts agree to accept the API calls and return appropriate data. Google won’t try to provide universal API coverage for special use cases, instead focusing on the most common uses. Specialized functions/data can be accessed from the hosts directly via their own APIs.

From TechCrunch

While I’m sure everyone will have an insight on this topic, I think the biggest thing to note with this press release is that Google will be providing a way to standardize your social graph, user information and activities across the web. Something that has been promised so many times before but never delivered.

Google gets to sit back and be in the middle of everything. Brilliant move.

Documentation (Goes Live on Thursday)
Sandbox Orkut

One of the major reasons I’m waiting to buy Leopard is that I have Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Subversion, Mongrel and a bunch of random gems needed to run Only Human and other apps I design for. Installing these things was a pita and having them fail on me so that I can have glossier windows is not an option.

So I’ve been doing some research and biding my time, while all my design friends im me with how awesome the new Leopard is. I feel my geek credibility slipping by the day.

Thankfully, after a couple of days I noticed Hive Logic posted a blog entry about updating his trusty install guide for Leopard. Needless to say i’m going to buy Leopard as soon as this article is published.

Thank You Hive Logic

I know I’ve been sleeping on this for a long time, but this is a great plug-in for all you Ruby on Rails guys who are looking for easier to read code. We recently have started working on a project with the guys from Atomic Object and I finally got my first taste of Haml in a production environment.

Pretty impressive to say the least.

Haml is the next step in generating views in your Rails application. Haml is a refreshing take that is meant to free us from the shitty templating languages we have gotten used to.

Haml is based on one primary principal. Markup should be beautiful.

Get Some Haml

Its still a little buggy in Safari but this new library seems very promising.

jQuery UI is a set of themable widgets and interactions, built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library, that you can use to build highly interactive web applications.

The core of the library revolves around different mouse interactions, namely drag and dropping, sorting, selecting, and resizing.

On top of the core interactions are built a number of reusable widgets, including accordions, date pickers, dialogs, sliders, table sorters, and tabs.

Finally, the library is finished off with a few effects that you can use to liven up your site, specifically magnifier and shadow.

jQuery UI