Boomboxed

Bender thought it'd be funny to pick me, so here is the news for this week.

A funny quote (TTT)

Just a funny quote I ran across on the internets:

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use multithreading." Now have they problems two.

Explaining Focused Controller (Murray S)

Jon Leighton released a gem called focused controller a while back. With FocusedController you have a single class per action and use inheritance to share behaviour instead of doing everything in one class and using before_filters with :only / :except. He gave a talk about his initial ideas for it at RailsBerry http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7KdY2M5l5Q&feature=BFa&list=PL036AC827C6995617. This article accompanies the 1.0 release of the gem and gives a good introduction to why you might want to try it out (he admits that the talk is a bit ranty and focuses on the wrong aspects). Anyway, I want to introduce people to it because I think it looks really interesting and I'm keen to try it out on our next new project.

Article:
http://jonathanleighton.com/articles/2012/explaining-focused-controller/

Flick Scroll (Rob P)

Apparently Simurai is not a developer, he just uses jQuery and other libraries (well, at least he said that). From time to time he comes up with some trivial but brilliant solution to problems we don't even realise they are problems until we see a great solution to them. Get your phones and tablets and give it a go!

Article:
http://simurai.com/blog/2012/09/13/flick-scrolling/

Demos:
http://simurai.com/blog/2012/09/13/flick-scrolling/
http://archive.simurai.com/lab/flick-scroll/book/

XOR Cursor patent (Matt P)

I generally have a disdain for software patents. One of the most well known ones in the developer community is the XOR cursor patent http://www.google.com/patents/US4197590 awarded to CadTrak in 1980. Lesser known but arguably wider-impacting as the series of software patents relating to password management.

Read for yourself at:
https://xato.net/passwords/want-to-block-common-passwords-sorry-that-is-patented/

USAToday.com Beta (Rob P)

The now 30 years old USA Today revamped their newspaper recently, and very soon they will release their new site. The site was designed and built by Fantasy Interactive. They haven't finished with everything, but there is a teaser demo, that actually looks pretty impressive with those sleek turning boxes and flipping pages.

Teaser video:
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10151250080289923&saved

USAToday Beta:
http://beta.usatoday.com/

S3 Pricing chart (Pawel J)

Amazon S3 pricing calculator (according to its author Amazon's solution is ass LOL):
http://s3pricing.herokuapp.com/

Redis tutorial (Pawel J)

A redis tutorial you can get through before your tea is done:
http://simonwillison.net/static/2010/redis-tutorial/

What the new iPhone 5 and iOS 6 promises for HTML5 developers (Rob P)

This is a great in-depth article about the features of the new iPhone 5. Definitely recommended.

Article:
http://www.mobilexweb.com/blog/iphone-5-ios-6-html5-developers