There is a world out there. It's pretty awesome. Today, I stumbled across this picture:
This makes me incredibly sad.
I did something a few months ago that has made me immensely happier day to day. I turned off all of my notifications. No Twitter, email, nothing. I have to manually check all of my apps. This is so great. No more being interrupted at dinner because someone mentioned me in something I don't care about.
You know how you feel your phone vibrate sometimes, but it was just your leg? That quit happening to me. Crazy, right?
So go outside, be present with the people you love when you're with them, or go make something. Staring at your little screen isn't doing anything for you.
I've been thinking about making this Ruby gem for awhile. It was originally called "cheddar-text", but I decided something that sounded more fun would be better. Awhile back, I was trying to rewrite this library in C and named the repo Quesadilla. It turns out, writing a C extensions that manipulates strings is really hard, so now the Ruby version is named Quesadilla.
Quesadilla is an entity-style text parser. Quesadilla was extracted from Cheddar. It's what powers all of Cheddar's text parsing. It was inspired a bit by Twitter's tweet entity.
Since Cheddar works on iOS and Mac (as well as the web), I needed something that could give me ranges for special things in the text. iOS and Mac convert this to an NSAttributedString using the indices included in each entity. Here's the source for how Cheddar for iOS does it in Objective-C.
We also use Quesadilla in Seesaw (my day job). It works really well for us there too.
Quesadilla supports extracting the following:
- Markdown (italic, bold, bold italic, strikethrough, code, and links)
- Links
- Named Emoji
- Hashtags
- User Mentions
Here's a little example of what a hashtag looks like:
Quesadilla.extract('Some #awesome text')
# => {
# display_text: "Some #awesome text",
# display_html: "Some <a href=\"#hashtag-awesome\" class=\"tag\">#awesome</a> text",
# entities: [
# {
# type: "hashtag",
# text: "#awesome",
# display_text: "#awesome",
# indices: [5, 13],
# hashtag: "awesome",
# display_indices: [5, 13]
# }
# ]
# }
You can even provide a custom user validator:
validator = lambda do |username|
# User.where('LOWER(username) = ?', username.downcase).first.try(:id)
username == 'soffes'
end
extraction = Quesadilla.extract('Real @soffes and fake @nobody', users: true, user_validator: validator)
# An entity for `soffes` will be added, but not for `nobody`
Anyway, Quesadilla does a lot of stuff. Checkout the readme for more or read the documentation. It's tested on Ruby 1.9.2, Ruby 1.9.3, Ruby 2.0.0, JRuby 1.7.2 (1.9 mode), and Rubinius 2.0.0 (1.9 mode), so it should work for you.
Hit my up on Twitter if you find this useful. Enjoy!
The wonder folks at SuperConf asked me to come to warm Miami and give a talk. I decided to talk about Building Realtime Applications.
Here are the links for everything I talked about:
I started a tradition of buying a new H&FJ font whenever I give a talk. I bought Whitney first. Then Gotham. I'm finally getting back to buying new fonts after using Gotham for a really long time. Such a great font. Anyway, I bought Landmark and Verlag to use in this talk. I took a ton of inspiration from the Landmark sample images when I was making my slides.
Hopefully you learned something or at least enjoyed seeing me have disproportional amount of fun with my new fonts. You should say hi on Twitter sometime.