It was my first foray into Node and I have to say that event-based programming is a lot easier in the browser than it is on the server, at least for me anyways. There was still tons of fun to be had and the awesome Faye library made implementing a real-time game between many players a breeze.

Please check out the game and vote/review it if you have some free time. Also, if you want to participate next year please let me know, we were short a person this time around and we could have benefited from another set of hands.

Turns out it’s pretty easy to edit a Safari extension that you’ve downloaded. The downloaded file will have a .safariextz file extension. To extract the contents of the file, use the xar command. I’ll demonstrate with the BetterSource extension.

jerod@mbp:~/Downloads$ xar -xf BetterSource-1.0.safariextz

This will create a new directory called BetterSource-1.0.safariextension which has the plugin’s source files (plists, html, js, css, etc.). You can add this to Safari’s Extension Builder by:

1. Selecting Develop -> Extension Builder from Safari’s menu bar
2. Clicking the + button in the lower-left corner of the editor window
3. Pointing the open dialog box to the BetterSource-1.0.safariextension directory

And that’s all there is to it.

Instapaper

Instapaper’s “read later” bookmarklet will change (for the better) how you consume content online. The iOS app is exactly what you need to read the content you’ve saved and nothing more. It’s beautifully minimal.

IMDb

Just wow. The developers of this little gem have almost ensured I’ll never visit their website again.

Amazon

I was hooked the first time I made some significant purchases while traveling 80+ mph down I-80. Massive value.

Kayak

This app has tons of use cases, but the flight tracker alone makes it worth its weight in gold. Realtime updates on the status of your flights? Yes, please!

Strategery

An addictive game akin to risk.

iSSH

Best of breed SSH application. Perfect when you’re in a pinch.

Reeder (iPad)

Seriously gorgeous interface for your Google Reader feeds. I literally wait until I’m around my iPad to check my RSS now. It’s that good.

iOctocat

The best way to keep up with open-source activity on GitHub.

Dropbox

I’m sure you already know about Dropbox. Unsurprisingly, their iOS app is great too.

USA Today (iPad)

Even old people would ditch their paper versions of the USA Today if they had this application on hand. Sometimes I check up on the news just to use it.

NPR (iPad)

Peruse and listen to tons of NPR content. So good.

Twitterific (iPad)

Despite the constant Twitter API Errors, this is one of the best feeling Twitter clients I’ve ever used. It takes advantage of the iPad’s form factor in every way.

Google Earth (iPad)

This app is nothing short of amazing. It literally puts the world in your hands as you tap, pinch, and spin the world around with ease. This is future stuff, and we are fortunate to be able to use such technologies.

Sorry for no direct links, but I was too lazy to fetch all the iTunes URLs for the apps. Just run a search in the App Store and you’ll find them with no problem.

Do you have any iOS apps that you absolutely love? Please let me know as I’m always on the lookout for great software.

So there is this really cool Rack middleware written by Simon Jefford which allows you to send arbitrary messages from your Rails controllers & views directly to Firebug’s (or Web Inspector’s) console. It is great for quick debugging. If that possibility excites you, head over to my recently published article on Fuel Your Coding to read all about it.

You may be wondering, what’s up with this Fuel Your Coding stuff? Well, I’ll tell you what’s up.

I’m very happy to announce that I’ve joined the Fuel Network as co-editor of FYC! I’m excited to help improve upon an already awesome blog by cultivating more content on the technologies that I use and love. I won’t be authoring articles there too often, but will be actively seeking and promoting quality contributions (If you’d like an opportunity to write for FYC, please contact me).

What does this mean for my blog? Not too much. Like before, I’ll be writing here as inspiration hits. Which is rarely, hah!

If you enjoy my blog, I highly encourage you to subscribe to FYC’s RSS feed as I’m sure you’ll find future content there very interesting.

Cheers!

SlickGrid – A lightening fast JavaScript grid/spreadsheet. Finding a quality client-side grid tool is tough. This might just be one.

Textmate-Minimap – A minimap plugin for TextMate. So great for those overly sized source documents we all hate to admit we have.

Bundler – Gemfiles are fun. – Like it or not, this will be the de facto for managing ruby gems. Might as well embrace it.

jquery-ujs – Rails 3 has embraced unobtrusive JavaScript, and this is the official rails.js for jQuery.

quicksand – jQuery plugin. Reorder and filter items with a nice shuffling animation. GORGEOUS!

rack-codehighlighter – Rack Middleware for code highlighting. This will power my blog’s syntax highlighting when I switch platforms to toto (see below).

ruby – The Ruby Programming Language. The official git mirror.

ruby-cisco – Cisco Library for Ruby. Remote control Cisco routers with ease.

tipsy – Facebook-style tooltips plugin for jQuery. I’m using these on almost every new project.

toto – the 10 second blog-engine for hackers. So awesome. Stay tuned for more on toto in the coming weeks.

That’s it for now!

So I wrote a little script using the GitHub API to track which new projects I watch during each month. I watched 17 new projects in January. They are linked below along with their authors’ descriptions and some commentary of my own:

CPVideoKit – “Cappuccino & Objective-J wrapper for the YouTube JavaScript API.” I love all the stuff coming out of the Cappuccino community lately.

Cappuccino-Test-Extensions – “A group of extensions, classes, and more that aid developers in testing Cappuccino applications.”

EKImageReflection – “With EKImageReflection you can extend a regular CPImageView for displaying a reflection on it’s bottom.”

PNGSquash – “A PNG compressor app for OS X.” Great tool for pre-processing images for web use.

coffee-script – “Unfancy JavaScript.” This is easily the most active project I follow. Dude codes all day and night.

delayed_paperclip – “Process your Paperclip attachments in the background with delayed_job.” A nice implementation joining two of my favorite Rails-related gems.

has_scope – “Maps controller filters to your resource scopes.” Super-useful for filtering on index actions.

jQuery-Lint – “jQuery Lint is a simple script you can download and use with jQuery. It works over the top of jQuery and diligently reports errors and any incorrect usage of jQuery.” – I want this to support Web Inspector.

jubilator – “Browse public GitHub repos in style!” Great for when you don’t want to clone a repo just to grok its source.

makers-mark – “Syntax highlight your markdown.” Could be useful for statically generated blogging.

nested_form – “Rails plugin to conveniently handle multiple models in a single form.” ‘Nuff said.

node-mongodb-native – “Mongo DB Native NodeJS Driver.” Two technologies I’m looking for an excuse to play with.

rack-rewrite – “A web server agnostic rack middleware for defining and applying rewrite rules. In many cases you can get away with Rack::Rewrite instead of writing Apache mod_rewrite rules.”

showoff – “the best damn presentation software a developer could ever love.” Bold claim. We’ll see.

twitter-node – “node.js lib that creates a streaming connection with twitter and pushes any incoming statuses to a tweet event.” Could be a good learning tool.

webme – “Convert your README into a Website.” Uhm, yes please!

CR should feel very familiar to Rails developers. Its interface is akin to ActiveResource and it borrows heavily from the (very good) ObjectiveResource library for the iPhone.

All basic CRUD operations are supported, and you can perform advanced finds with arbitrary parameters. A brief example of fetching a record, modifying it, and saving it:

var post = [Post find:@"42"];
[post setTitle:@"Why X is Better than Y"];
[post save];

Check out the README on the project’s page on GitHub for more details and usage examples.

Live Demo

I also created a demo application which is a simplified clone of OS X’s Address Book. The demo is live on Heroku. Check it out. The source for the demo is also on GitHub.

If you’re a Rails developer waiting for a good opportunity to try out Cappuccino, there’s no better time than now.

If you’re a Cappuccino developer looking for an easy-to-use, powerful back-end for your applications, Rails might be the answer for you.

CR is a young project, but it drives one of my client applications that is production-ready (albeit not deployed), so I believe it is ready for prime time. Please try it and let me know how it goes.

Fork, report issues, et cetera.

Here is a very basic way to test if your app is posting event notifications as you expect it to. First, create an Observer class inside a test helper file, which will be included into your tests:

// this is TestHelper.j
@import <Foundation/CPObject.j>
 
@implementation Observer : CPObject
{
    CPArray postedNotifications;
}
 
- (id)init
{
    if (self = [super init])
    {
        postedNotifications   = [CPArray array];
    }
    return self;
}
 
- (void)startObserving:(CPString)aNotificationName
{
    [[CPNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self
                                             selector:@selector(notificationPosted:)
                                                 name:aNotificationName
                                               object:nil];
}
 
- (void)notificationPosted:(id)sender
{
    [postedNotifications addObject:[sender name]];
}
 
- (BOOL)didObserve:(CPString)aNotificationName
{
    return [postedNotifications containsObject:aNotificationName];
}
 
@end

This class can be configured to register for certain notifications via -startObserving and when they are posted, it stores them in an array (postedNotifications). You can then ask it at any time if a notification has been observed using the -didObserve method and it will respond with YES or NO.

So, to use this in your tests, do something like this:

// This is MyTest.j
@import "TestHelper.j"
 
@implementation MyTest : OJTestCase
 
- (void)setUp
{
    observer = [[Observer alloc] init];
}
 
- (void)testMyMethodDidPostNotification
{
    [observer startObserving:@"MyMethodDidFinishExecution"];
    // do stuff that you would expect to get the notification posted
    [self assertTrue:[observer didObserve:@"MyMethodDidFinishExecution"];
}
 
@end

You could get more fancy with this (like allowing object observing and not just name observing), but the concept doesn’t change. Hope this helps anybody thinking about how to test their Capp apps!

Rubular is only for Ruby regexes. I wish somebody would make one for JavaScript. Jubular, anyone?

In it I build a simplified version of the payment calculator from chapter 2 of Cocoa Design Patterns.

Topics covered include creating a Cib-based project, laying out an interface and binding outlets/actions to working code.

Hope it helps!

280 Atlas Introductory Screencast from Jerod Santo on Vimeo.

Related Posts:

• Learning Cappuccino: Resource List
• CappuccinoFlow