better
A collection of “better” replacements for Ruby standard libraries. i.e. “require ‘better/tempfile’.” All of the libraries are supposedly drop-in replacements.
osx-trash
Gem that allows you to manipulate the Mac OS X trash from the command line.
KeyCue – find, remember, and learn menu shortcuts
A really cool tool for learning and discovering new keyboard shortcuts. Hold down a hotkey combination and an overlay pops up with all available keyboard shortcuts.
Rotate Images and Stuff with CSS only
“Did you know you can rotate images (and all other html elements) by using nothing but CSS?” Quoting Johnny Carson, “I did not know that. That’s wild, wacky stuff”
Collecting Feedback on Your Web App
Good info from the Prefinery folks about what worked and what didn’t as they’ve tried to collect info from beta testers about their service.
clickistrano
A one-click deployment app for Capistrano deployments. Built with Sinatra.
AnythingSlider jQuery Plugin
Another jQuery slider plugin, but this one is ‘really “fully featured”.’ I’ve always used the jQuery scrollable plugin from the flowplayer folks, but might be worth looking at another option.
Telescopic Text
Just for fun. Click on the highlighted text and watch a simple statement about making tea become a very complex narrative. Brilliantly executed.
freemium
Subscription management and processing Rails plugin for SaaS / recurring billing. Looks like it only supports a couple of gateways at the moment.
A Closer Look: The Font Sizing Choice
Bottom line – if you still need to support IE6 (and you can actually figure out the crazy math), use em. Otherwise, it should be safe these days to use px.
I’ve long had a bash alias for starting up script/server for a rails process that looked something like:
alias ss="./script/server"
This has worked all well and good, but I’ve been wanting more. I often find myself switching between projects and the time and effort it takes is just exhausting. I mean, think of all those keystrokes!
Inspired by @MikeG1′s tweet pining for a script/server to kill any other process running on same port, and a desire to make the switching process easier for myself, I came up with the following function that I added to my bash profile.
Now switching between rails apps is effortless. I can start the rails app from anywhere with no worries about conflicting processes (bye bye, you’ve been terminated) or even changing to the proper directory. Ahhh, my hands feel lighter already.
Enjoy!
function ss {
if [ "$1" ]; then
# cd to the rails app directory.
cd ~/proj/repos; # (update the repository root location to suit your needs)
if [ "$1" ]; then
cd `ls|grep $1|sort|tail -1`
fi
echo $(pwd)
fi
# kill any existing rails server processes.
ps -a|grep "ruby ./script/server"|grep -v "grep"|cut -d " " -f1|xargs -n 1 kill -TERM
# start the server.
ruby ./script/server
}
pivotpro
A gem to automate interaction with Cucumber and PivotalTracker.
slickgrid – jQuery grid/spreadsheet
A JavaScript grid/spreadsheet component that focuses on being high-performance and on grid features over data manipulation (that the author feels is best left to the developer). Does indeed look slick.
CSS Dock Menu using JQuery
Nice example of a Mac-style dock using JQuery + a Fisheye Interface component.
Wrap text in Ruby
A snippet that uses regular expressions to wrap text.
ColorSuckr
Extracts color from photos to create color schemes. Great for matching colors to background images.
The UI for this thing is what’s HOT! I’m a sucker for flawless use of contrasting greyscale with minimal use of color.
The nav for this app is especially sexy. Lots of bells and whistles, but without giving up its minimalist feel. The A-Z vertical nav particularly caught my eye.
stories
Not new, but new to me. Stories auto-generates Cucumber-style human readable acceptance test output, without all the extra Cucumber hassle. Since I don’t have customers that read my acceptance tests, I’ve never gotten down with Cucumber, but this might make it into my workflow.
Practicing product minimalism On my first day of work at Microsoft as a PM six years ago, I sat down with my first manager for our first one-on-one and at the end she asked, Are there any questions? I said yes — one last one: “When do we decide to remove features?”
Great spacing. Love the large eye-catching images and the nice slider carousel effect. (and it doesn’t hurt that they are advertising my personal brand *wink*)
