XtremeMac iPhone Sportwrap

A while back, I wrote about purchasing and using the
Belkin Sport Armband for the iPhone. It was a terrible purchase, unfortunately, but I got my money back. I then continued my quest to find a product that could hold to rigors of my physical excursions.

The answer: XtremeMac iPhone Sportwrap.

I’ve had this sportwrap for several months where I have gone jogging, bumped into walls, etc. and am happy to say that this sportwrap shows no signs of tearing or breaking down. Although it is speckled with paint now, the iPhone remains unscathed.

If you want a dependable sportwrap and protective cover for your shiny iPhone, then I recommend checking this out.

iPhone 2.0 Issues

Merlin Mann recently wrote an article recently about iPhone 2.0 Glitches. I would have to agree with that list of issues but I have a few more to add to the list:

• E-mail Evaporation - I am a heavy OmniFocus user and one of the things I find myself doing often is capturing new tasks that I need to work on when away from the office (as set via the OmniFocus mail preferences). Now, when writing a new task using the Mail app on my iPhone, the app and message will evaporate after hitting the send button. Great, now instead of making better use of time, I’m wasting it. I’ve not seen other apps do this…yet.
• Podcast/Song Resume - I easily consume over 10+ hours of news and information on a weekly basis (especially now that I have been painting on the weekends). When I’m working out on the elliptical machine in the morning, I’m watching video. When I’m doing other house tasks or tooling in the garage, I’m listing to the my podcasts. Prior to version 2.0, I could pause a song or podcast midstream and resume it later. Not any longer. I can only do that with video now. Bah!

The other issues, you can read about on Merlin Mann’s site, especially about all apps being much slower to use. I’m still using the orignal iPhone and not the 3G phone but it sounds like it doesn’t matter which phone you are using, 2.0 is much slower.

Ghostland Observatory - Paparazzi Lightning

© Ghostland Observatory: Paparazzi Lightning

Track List

1. Piano Man
2. Ghetto Magnet
3. Move With Your Lover
4. All You Rock & Rollers
5. Vibrate
6. Sad Sad City
7. Stranger Lover
8. Paparazzi Lightning
9. I’ll Be Suzy
10. Midnight Voyage

Genre

Electronic

Review

“Paparazzi Lightning” is their sophomore release and is an album that you can let run from end to end. What I find interesting about this band and the album is the fusion of electronic and disco music. It’s a bit of a throw back to older days in some sense but I like that. The music is gritty and Aaron Kyle Behrens vocals always seem to have this slight scream to them. “Piano Man” and “Midnight Voyage” are my favorite tracks. This is a great album to have around for party music.

Rating

7/10

“Piano Man” Music Video

Pulled from YouTube with a guy drawing a robot set to the music of “Piano Man”:

“Midnight Voyage” Music Video

Rails RJS Message Fades

In some cases, I have found that displaying info, warning, and error messages for five seconds in a Ruby on Rails application is long enough. I tend to like using RJS with the following setup:

• /app/views/shared/message.rjs = The JavaScript code that will render my message partial.
• /app/views/shared/_message.rhtml = The message partial that will display the message.

The RJS code looks like this:

(click to view)

The first line inserts my message partial at the top of my “content” element which, in this case, is a DIV. The rest of the code forces the page to delay for five seconds while the message is being viewed. After the five seconds is up, the message is faded for one second. The fade should be quick as I think the effect is more visually appealing when it fades fast.

The message partial code looks like this:

(click to view)

I like to initialize my partials with default values for required parameters so if things are missing the partial will still work and that is what the first two lines of code do. The last line of code simply displays the message based on the parameter values: type and message.

The resulting desired affect looks like this:

Error Message (delay for five seconds)

(click to view)

Error Message (being faded out)

(click to view)

Error Message (gone, page is back to normal)

(click to view)

As you might gather from the code, the message type determines the type of CSS used to style the message. For example: info = green, warning = yellow, and error = red.

Maximize Your Firefox Real Estate

A while back, Lifehacker wrote a great article on how to maximize the default screen real estate used by Firefox. I thought this was worth mentioning again as I have been coming across a fair amount of people who have their Firefox address and toolbar so cluttered that it amazes me that one can read the web at all. In one instance, a guy sent me a screenshot of his browser where half of the screen was toolbars and bookmarks. Oy Vey! Here is a capture of my Firefox toolbar (with a few open tabs):

(click to view)

With the context of Lifehacker article (mentioned above) in mind, here is what I have done:

1. Added only the essential icons (i.e. back, forward, refresh, new tab, etc). to the Navigation Toolbar.
2. Added the address bar to and dropped the search bar (who uses this anyway) from the Navigation Toolbar.
3. Put only my most used bookmarks on the Bookmarks Toolbar and grouped related bookmarks into folders.
4. The last row is my web tabs which can grow and shrink depending on how much content I am reading, of course.

That is all that is needed IMO. Find what works for you and reclaim your screen real estate.

Wedding Reception Registration

For those of you who have been following along, I have talked about our Elopement and plans for a Wedding Party…well, I finally completed work on a little Ruby on Rails site hosted by Heroku. The site is live and running now. So check out the site, learn more about what is happening, and R.S.V.P. today!

It’s going to be a fun time so don’t let this pass you by.

Favorite Ruby Feeds

I have been busy developing a couple different Rails applications lately and wanted to share some of my favorite Ruby feeds that I follow daily in case it is of interest to fellow Ruby developers:

• Ruby Inside - Get the inside scoop on Ruby news.
• RubyFlow - A great site for picking up new Ruby resources to add to your development repertoire.
• Talk Like a Duck - Digs into the depths of the Ruby language.
• Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots - Good development tips and tricks, mostly related to Rails.
• Rails Inside - Get the inside scoop on Rails news.
• Rails Spikes - A multi-authored site of Ruby developers discussing news, tips, code, etc.
• Ruby on Rails Security Project - A good place to read up on security issues or at least keep your mind in it.
• Rails Envy - An entertaining and informative weekly podcast dedicated to Ruby, Rails, and web framework news.
• Rails Podcasts - Ruby/Rails podcasts by Geoffrey Grosenbach of PeepCode fame.

BTW, you can find this list and more on my Ruby page. While I don’t broadcast my page updates anymore I do update that page on a weekly basis.