Synap Software

Rails Rumble

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:46:00 EDT

Rails Rumble is a “48 hour design/develop/deploy competition”. The 2008 Rails Rumble is the weekend of October 18th and 19th (GMT) and the Rails Rumble blog is now online. The organizers explain the rumble this way.

For those of you who weren’t involved last year, the Rumble is a 48 hour design/develop/deploy competition. Basically, you get one weekend to exploit the awesome power of Ruby on Rails to create and launch the best web-based application that you can. Then, the general public gets to vote for the best by rating them in a number of different categories—design/aesthetics, completeness, uniqueness, and overall usefulness. The winners get some pretty great prizes, thanks to our sponsors (who will be announced shortly).

Oh yeah, it’s also a lot of fun . . . Really! Think of the event as a miniature startup incubator, and use it as an excuse to deliver a v1 of that idea you’ve been sitting on for 6 months. Or, if you’re new to Rails, use it as an excuse to test drive a new technology and see just how far you can get with it in a very constrained timeframe.

Find out more at their blog and stay tuned to Rails Rumble on Twitter.

Developer Notes: Mor.ph and Five Runs

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 12:49:00 EDT

Morph Labs and FiveRuns Partner

Mor.ph is a scalable cloud-computing deployment “Platform as a Service (PaaS) ” with features like backups, distributed processing, and 99.9% reliability built-in. FiveRuns “provides simple and affordable products for monitoring Rails applications and their supporting infrastructure.”

I have used both companies’ products and services and am excited to see they will be offered in one package. Right now, Mor.ph offers FiveRuns TuneUp integrated into its platform including the free developer version. Which is great because TuneUp is designed to identify performance issues during development, prior to production. TuneUp gives Rails developers insight into performance hogs in their apps. Visualize exactly which pieces of code are taking too much time so that Rails developers can efficiently focus their performance improvement efforts.

In the future, another FiveRuns product, Manage, will be available as a value-added, paid, feature. More info at the Mor.ph blog.

The cloud computing route gets more and more attractive all the time, and with partnerships such as these, the benefits of letting expert third parties build and manage the environment gets more and more attractive as well.

Developer Notes: NetBeans, ScreenFlow, and Viddler

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 12:21:00 EDT

NetBeans

Started using NetBeans for development this week. So far, so good. Things I have found useful:

Inline, real-time syntax error checking (no more missing ‘end’ statements or misspelled keywords at test or runtime – catch them while typing and in the ‘flow’ instead).
Code completion, including model attributes (was that attribute name “mac_enabled” or “mac_capable”?)
Instant, context-aware, Rails and Ruby docs and inline method parameter hints.
All of the Textmate key bindings and shortcuts included.

Some of these features are available in Textmate and the jury is still out on whether to switch. If so, a more detailed write up will follow.

ScreenFlow

All of our screen recordings are done with ScreenFlow. It’s an excellent, easy, powerful way to create video recordings from the Mac desktop and iSight camera. Everything you need to record and edit is included. Recommended.

Viddler

Viddler makes it very easy to host and embed videos in any webpage and blog. Viddler videos are high quality and have very smooth playback. Our first Viddler video is toward the bottom of this product blog entry.

This week in PlaybookIQ - NetBeans, Viddler, Screenflow, Export Lists, Live Search, Flexible CSV Import

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 10:39:00 EDT

Here is a summary of PlaybookIQ updates this week.

List Export

PlaybookIQ users can search by any contact field, by tag, and by combination of tags. The search results can then be exported as a csv file. This is a powerful way to create lists for email or postcard mailing providers such as Vertical Response.

Live Search

Live search was expanded to include first name, last name and company name. It was also made faster by some database index tweaking based on log analysis.

Flexible CSV Import

PlaybookIQ users can now specify field mappings during csv import.

As always, full details are at the product blog, http://aboutplaybookiq.com.

This week in PlaybookIQ - Export Lists, Live Search, Flexible CSV Import