Only took me 4 days to get my mac re-situated after upgrading to Snow Leopard. Re-situated may be overstating it, actually.

• app_store
  A Ruby module for fetching information from Apple’s App Store.
• James Edward Gray II — How to become a successful rubyist
  A nice interview with Oklahoma’s very own JEG2.
• jQTouch
  A jQuery plugin for mobile development (iPhone, Android, etc) using HTML5, CSS3, and javascript.
• Tweetie-style paging with pageSlider
  A nice-looking jQuery based slider plugin.
• 7 Stages of new language keyword grief
  Amusing. Although I admit having these feelings more with C# / ASP.NET than I do with open source technologies like Rails. There may be something to that…

Finally, it ends. Longest week ever.

• better
  A collection of “better” replacements for Ruby standard libraries. i.e. “require ‘better/tempfile’.” All of the libraries are supposedly drop-in replacements.
• Table of Contents jQuery Plugin
  Plugin that can automatically build a table of contents based on website’s h1 – h6 tags.
• 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.

If it’s not clear by now, it should be. The best thing about the Rails/Merb merger is @wycats.

My Five Favorite Things About Rails 3

• 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.
• acts_as_commentable_with_threading
  A drop-in replacement for acts_as_commentable that adds threading features.
• acts_as_scribe
  I know, another “acts_as_…” plugin. This one allows you to track user activity (for a timeline, wall, etc).
• 20 Top jQuery tips & tricks for jQuery programmers
  Useful stuff.
• 5 Ways to Make Ajax Calls with jQuery
  I know I get confused about the different ways to make AJAX calls with jQuery. This clears things up.

I think we actually do need a “death panel.” For IE6 that is…

• ruby_koans
  An awesome idea! Learn Ruby by making the tests pass for short “koans” that build up your knowledge and build upon each other.
• The Brads – Alignment in Design
  Great cartoon illustration about using alignments in web design.
• punypng: crushing your images even more
  A better way to crush your pngs (and jpegs?)
• test-first-teaching
  Homework assignments for teaching ruby.
• 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.

Auto-upgrade feature of WordPress is nice when it works. Had to do a lot of chmod 777 to make it happen.

• jquery week-calendar
  A very nice looking jquery calendar plugin.
• 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.
• New Screencast: Think Geek Background Fade Technique
  An interesting background fade technique using css.
• comma_pile
  A Ruby gem for processing and aggregating CSV files.

• 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.

• What’s New in Edge Rails: Independent Model Validators
  Now you can use Validator classes to decouple complex validation logic from your models. Very nice.
• 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.
• Which Tweets Matter ?
  Mark Cuban discusses new features for icerocket’s twitter search, including reply/retweet and viewing the person’s follower count.
• deadweight
  Really cool gem for finding & eliminating unused CSS selectors.
• Pretty output of rails errors when doing AJAX with jQuery
  jnunemaker dropped this little goodie on gist for us.
• 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?”

Wish I’d had time over the weekend to participate in the Rails Bugmash. Hope to get involved next time if they do it again. Great idea.

• Throttling Interaction with jQuery
  Good tips for managing cpu usage issues from intense jQuery.
• Ruby has a new Whois library
  This one written in pure ruby with no external dependencies. sudo gem install whois.
• jQuery Link Nudge Plugin
  Plugin that nudges links on mouseover. Could be useful for a nav system.
• ruote
  A workflow engine written in ruby. Such a weird name – thought it was misspelled the first time i saw it.
• How to embed a Sinatra app inside a Rails app as a plugin (not using Rails Metal)
  Handy
• google-spreadsheet-ruby
  A ruby gem for pulling data from Google Spreadsheets.

• RubyTrends
  A good place to find popular Ruby projects and/or resources. Particularly helpful for those starting out and looking for good Ruby or Rails books.
• A Git Workflow for Agile Teams
  I’m always intrigued by the development workflows that others use. Not to mention, posts like this were invaluable to me when I was learning Git.
• Easy Google Maps with jQuery
  A nice little ditty for displaying a google map with jQuery.
• Speeding up Google Analytics load times with a jQuery plugin
  Another jQuery plugin for using Google Analytics.
• Fail Whale Pillow
  Nice. Just nice.

Wondering if my intro comments on these posts are starting to sound like garfield minus garfield.

• In-Field Labels: A Better Way + jQuery Plugin
  A nice jQuery plugin for implementing in-field labels that don’t completely disappear when the field receives focus (which is, um, helpful if you need to autofocus a particular field and you still want the user to know what the field is for)
• Build, Design, Launch an App in <40 Man Hours
  How Less Everything launched new app Less Cabin Fever in under 40 hours. Of course they started with an existing code base (http://lovdbyless.com), but still…
• wkhtmltopdf
  Convert html to pdf using webkit.
• The Rails State Machine
  Rails edge recently added built-in state machine functionality. Here’s a few examples of how you might take advantage of this feature.
• Why you don’t want to shard
  More of a “don’t” than a “why”, which basically comes down to the fact that it makes both development and continuing operations very complicated, mmkay.
• Observational: Better Observers for ActiveRecord
  Shift the responsibility of common callback functionality (like sending a welcome email to a user) out of the model where it doesn’t make sense.