Can You Digg It

Are you ready for this week's feature filled fiasco? I know I am! So fasten your seat belts, tie your hair back and prepare for an emotional roller coaster of developer developments.

Diggsaster (Chris P)

Digg sells for half a million dollars (reportedly). They should have cashed in on the $200 million Google offered them in 2008.

http://gizmodo.com/5925586/digg-sells-itself-for-pathetic-pocketchange-500000

Clandestine communication (Chris P)

"I bumped into a raggedy dressed man as we got on [the subway] and he shot me a quick smile. I [thought] nothing of it until he went to get off at 14th street and he handed me a $50 bill along with a note. Before I could even open my mouth to ask him a question, he was gone."

http://mashable.com/2012/07/11/reddit-subway-code

Bender, bend to my will (Chris P)

Our friendly campfire bot has been misbehaving this week. I wrote some (hacky) code that allows arbitrary chunks of ruby to evaluated. This has led to a very noisy developer room (apologies for that).

If you're interested in how this works, or would like to get an idea of how to add new actions to our bot, this commit might be of interest.

https://github.com/unboxed/unbot/commit/3f008d232b4330a0bbff9414d64f291884c540cf

Retinafying websites (Murray)

A flowchart about how to retinafy websites (not just images). Seems comprehensive and probably useful.

http://mir.aculo.us/2012/06/26/flowchart-how-to-retinafy-your-website/

Audio Experimentation (Robert F)

I've been dabbling in low level audio processing for iOS and stumbled upon this: https://github.com/alexbw/novocaine

It's a wrapper around Audio Unit Hosting using Core Audio. Essentially, it makes getting raw audio from the microphone simple and FAST!

Also, I've been very prolific with regards to speaking at events recently, so I have two slid decks to punt.

A story about the ethos of Resque and when to use it: https://speakerdeck.com/robertfall/resque-the-journey

As well as:

iOS Web Apps and how to make them look native: https://speakerdeck.com/robertfall/ios-web-apps-the-journey

You'll see common thread between the two talks. Perhaps I should expand it into a series of "The Journey".

Another thing: https://github.com/petejkim/underscore.objc/

It's a port of the underscore.js library to Obj-C. It's particularly useful in iOS development where you have to do almost everything by hand.

HTML5 Sortable (Robert P)

https://github.com/farhadi/html5sortable

Nice and easy to use sorting jQuery plugin with IE8 support

Bootstrap Tour (Robert P)

https://github.com/pushly/bootstrap-tour

With some nice animations it could be very powerful and useful - even for cookie notifications.

CSS Transforms and IndexedDB unprefixed in Firefox (Robert P)

The unprefixing starts and it's great, because it means that the css3 transform implementations are now in a final stage. They also removed the prefix from indexedDB, which is quite cool and shows that they want to stick with it..

http://paulrouget.com/e/transformsunprefixed/

Adobe Shadow (Robert P)

This is another tool from Adobe (boo), which actually makes sense. Download the app, get the iPhone (or Android) app and the Chrome extension. The apps make a bridge across your phone and the computer and whatever you're browsing in Chrome you instantly see it on your phone. Very promising stuff if you're into mobile optimisation and responsive testing.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/shadow/

That's it...

Not the longest newsletter this week, probably due to this developer day. Have a great weekend guys.