The week with no ActiveSupport favourite method
Matt Peperell
Nov. 9, 2012
Lots of submissions were offered this week. Let's start with Attila's - for no reason other than he said that his submissions got overlooked last week.
Susy, the responsive grid for Compass (Attila)
http://susy.oddbird.net/ I know, I know. Now some of you keep going on and on about how CSS preprocessing is unnecessary, how bad it is, etc etc etc. Maybe it's not for everybody. But if you use SASS and Compass, this is one good addition to your toolset. Finally a good responsive grid helper that allows me to do my own sh*t. It does not design my site, does not dictate markup (thanks to CSS preprocessing power), just does the math and let's me get on with my own way:
The first beta of Phusion Passenger 4.0 is here (Attila)
You should have a look at Phusion Passenger, because it finally has eventide I/O internally and lets us use multiple different Ruby versions under a single web server without having to cope with a lot of configurational mess. Looking forward to using Rubinius at some point and all its Unix magic. Yes, it's supported out of the box. So is JRuby.
TimeAgo (Rob)
TimeAgo is a small jQuery plugin library that turns ISO8601 formatted timestamps into nice 'n time ago' formats. I used it for the Blog, if you look at the Twitter feed on the right hand, you'll see it in action :)
HTML5 Game Dev Course on Udacity (2013) - Rob
This course walks you through the major components of building a HTML5 game. Sounds great if you want to learn about standard game development techniques and HTML5 tricks. The course starts in 2013, but you can enroll today. Check out the site for other exciting courses. http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs255/
Apple iPad Mini detection problem on the rise (Rob)
The new Apple iPad Mini is apparently (according to owners and developers) the best and most intuitive tablet yet. There is a small problem with the screen: the normal size text content rendered in the browser is too small. The bigger problem is that the actual device seems absolutely undetectable... Here is the problem: http://stuffandnonsense.co.uk/blog/about/two-things-about-the-ipad-mini Here is the explanation of why all the known detection techniques fail: http://www.mobilexweb.com/blog/ipad-mini-detection-for-html5-user-agent
CSS Media Queries Test (beta) (Rob)
This guy tells you which media queries your browser is happy to support. http://mediaqueriestest.com/
Local Tunnel (Carl)
https://localtunnel.me/ A nifty node module that tunnels a local http server to an external address. Great for giving people short term access to a local checkout.
Font Awesome (Murray)
For the lazy developer-designers amongst us: http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/ - a new arrow to put in our twitter-bootstrap quiver and fire from our bow ... of ... webdesign? cough Over-stretched metaphors aside this seems good: fancy icons as vector fonts that are browser compatible to IE7 and are easily baked into twitter bootstrap.
Python-based programming game (MattP)
CheckiO is the world to traven where you will need your programming skills. Play solo or get peer reviews and improve your code.
vimack plugin (MattP)
ack is a tool like grep, optimized for programmers. vimack is a plugin to integrate ack into your vim-life.
Here are 2 last-minute submissions which came in whilst I was doing the final editing. I had to insert a missing letter 'c'. Shame indeed.
GateOne (MattF)
http://liftoffsoftware.com/Products/GateOne - a web-based terminal emulator and browser client. Mental - especially since you can use it to embed an HTML5 terminal in any page of your web application.
On motivation (MattF)
http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/10/30/what-programmers-want/ - a meditation on motivating technical team members. I can't see cat gifs mentioned anywhere though. Fail.