Digital Media Minute

Rails Deployment

Vinsol has a nice eleven-item checklist of rails deployment best practices to follow when you are deploying your rails app to a production server.

Javascript Scroll Clock

Interesting scroll clock created Toki Woki, with Javascript /Mootools. Hey it’s Friday geeks, have some fun. Via DaringFireball.

Voice Typing Software

I’ve been using MacSpeech Dictate for a week now and I have two things to report that I didn’t know when I did my initial review of this voice activated typing software. On about day three I was sitting while holding the headset that is included with the Dictate software as I spoke into it. (I [...]

Google Image Swirl Review

As basic as images are to the Internet it’s no surprise that Google’s approach to image search, born back in 2001, continues to evolve. Good thing too because it was always pretty slow going, plodding through pages of images results that didn’t really have what you wanted. Recently they added a link to “similar images” [...]

Looking For Company Name

Have you ever played around with random business name generators? I used half an hour that I’ll never get back today looking for a company name or a graphic design company that my wife may or may not create. “Advanced Depictions” anyone? The key to creating brandable names is a word combination that is memorable, [...]

Google Thoughts

Here’s a nice overview of Google’s new language, Go, by Scott Gilbertson over at Webmonkey. Includes a 1-hr video on Go developer Rob Pike. From the Chromium blog Google announces that it has an early-stage research project for something they call SPDY (”speedy!”), the purpose of which might be to replace the HTTP protocol. Techchrunch claims to [...]

Google Toolbar Preferences

OK so I was playing around with Google toolbar preferences and realized that there is a much easier way to access lot of Google functionality that I use very regularly, without necessarily having to have Gmail open all the time so that I could hit the links in the upper left corner, or much worse, the [...]

Build An IPhone App

We hear a lot of complaints about how difficult it is to navigate the app store and distinguish quality applications from mediocre ones. There are amusing statistics on how few times lots of iPhone applications are actually used after they are downloaded, and anecdotes on how everybody and his cousin has a great idea and [...]

Google Closure, And Brando’s Last Line In ‘Apocalypse Now’

Dmitry Baranovskiy is not impressed. Via Sitepoint and Kevin Yank, we get this scathing review of Google Closure tools from the creator of the Raphaël and gRaphaël JavaScript libraries. His contention is that Closure, Google’s new javascript library, was written by Java developers who don’t really ‘get’ Javascript, and he gives us plenty of examples. [...]

AIR 2.0 New Features

How did I miss this? AIR evangelist Christian Cantrell has created a comprehensive list of new features that are planned for inclusion in AIR 2.0. Multi-touch, gestures…check it out.

Skinning Flex Applications

This tutorial will walk you through the basics of skinning your Flex or Air app from the very beginning. Very well done with plenty of code illustrations.

GUI by Microsoft-Breathtaking

Microsoft’s head of research and strategy Craig Mundie is doing the “Microsoft College Tour 09″, and here he shows a demo of a user interface being developed by Microsoft that accepts input from voice and pen, but also can interpret gestures and even eye-tracking. This video shows how eye tracking could work on an array [...]

Voice Activated Typing Software

I have never been a very fast typist (or a fascist type for that matter), in fact I operate a keyboard in a fashion that might be called “touchhunting”. Lately if I’m writing something that runs more than 300 or 400 words I feel my shoulders and neck tighten up and I get more headaches [...]

Google Treats

Here is Google’s answer to the question: How do you create and maintain efficient JavaScript code that downloads quickly and works across different browsers? The Google Closure tools package contains a Javascript compiler/optimizer, a library Java and Javascript, and template system for both as well. Totally different area: have you seen Google Dashboard yet? It’s info on all [...]

ServerSocket API In AIR 2 Demo

Christian Cantrell wrote an app called HTTPeek, to validate AIR 2 new ServerSocket APIs. It is a proxy server sitting between your browser and the network that shows HTTP request and response headers. Have a look at the demo video.