The Week The Newsletter Almost Became Purple
Robert Fall
June 14, 2012
First things first: Bender, our lovely campfire bot, now knows how to choose a newsletter author. It works on top of the existing lists api and removes you once you've been chosen. I think it's time he made an appearance in the dev chat room...
But, without further ado:
xip.io (Andrew)
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3191-announcing-pow-040-with-xipio-support
37 Signals last week released the latest version of Pow with support for xib.io, 37 Signals wildcard DNS. You can go read about xip in last weeks newsletter.
Place Kitten (Matt P)
In response to my threatening to bomb the newsletter with lolcats I received the following:
Well, since you hinted at cats, I have this one to share: http://placekitten.com/ - stock images of kittens, sizeable to whatever size you can need. Useful when mocking up a site. Like the lorem ipsum, but with images.
Kogan's IE7 Tax (Matt P)
Here's one that did the rounds on twitter yesterday: http://www.kogan.com/au/blog/new-internet-explorer-7-tax - it encourages people to use a sensible browser by inflating prices when IE7 is used. It doesn't say how it handles IE6 (or below)...
Mina (Murray)
An alternative to capistrano that, for a change, actually seems to have some benefit: http://nadarei.co/mina/
I've not actually investigated beyond the readme but it also appears to not have quite so many railsy features as capistrano, which could be a good thing if your app is non-standard or non-rails.
Angular.js (Rob F)
Angular.js has reached 1.0. It's an interesting alternative to the internet's darling Backbone and supports declaritive view binding. It comes out of google and apparently has been engineered quite well. I heard that the library earned full time development by winning a bet that an existing application that took 3 months to rebuild could be rebuilt using Angular in 3 weeks. The team won the bet and now work full time on Angular for Google. Or so I've heard...
http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/06/better-web-templating-with-angularjs-10.html
Canvas Hands On (Rob F)
I've been toying with a game idea I want to develop, and to prototype it I've turned to canvas, but I wanted some neato effects. This tutorial walks you through rendering fireworks to the canvas. It also touches on the requestAnimationFrame API which is a must for smooth animations in browsers. Watch out for my game!
http://creativejs.com/tutorials/creating-fireworks/
Javascript Garden (Rob F)
I've been doing some actual JS development this week. I'm not sure how many of us use JS for more than just $.animate, but JS Garden is a great read of all of the gotchas of Javascript and how to do things the right way.
http://bonsaiden.github.com/JavaScript-Garden/
Zed A. Shaw - The Web Will Die When OOP Dies
Thought-provoking talk by Zed Shaw given at the Web Rebels 2012 conference in Norway. Being Zed Shaw, expect profanity and controversial ideas that you probably won't agree with. Nevertheless I think there are some very good insights in there, especially in his discussion of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and how in a perfect world, we wouldn't need to work around the huge limitations of these technologies.
A Haskell Talk (Muz)
Haskell Talk: http://yow.eventer.com/events/1004/talks/1054
I know we're all mostly ruby and javascript, so we're all "Types, LOL!!!!", but this talk about Haskell is really good. It's a good historical overview of haskell and gives good reasons for why types and pure functional programming might be the way forward. I've not done any Haskell, but after this talk I'm more inclined to look into it.
It's also a good talk to watch to get some speaking tips. This guy is really charming and enthusiastic, and that can get you a long way towards taking the audience with you on a complicated journey.
Haskell Platform 2012.2.0 released (Luke R)
http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/?2012.2.0.0
For those prompted to try Haskell after Murray's submission, the good news is that a new release of the Haskell Platform (the easiest way to get started with Haskell) came out recently and has GHC 7.4.