Day: February 26, 2012

Prepare Your App for Rails 4 and Ruby 1.9

Prepare Your App for Rails 4 and Ruby 1.9:

The Rails master branch was moved to 4.0 two months ago, almost 6 years to the date of the announcement of Rails 1.0, and the primary cited reason for doing so is to get everyone using Rails on Ruby 1.9.

[I understand the lack of migration all too well. Some codebases require a tremendous amount of work to move forward, and may not be worth the investment from a business point of view. But at some point, that app either needs to be sunset or worked on. Now’s the time to decide which category it fits into.]

Source: Union Station

Responsive Navigation Patterns | Brad Frost Web

Responsive Navigation Patterns | Brad Frost Web:

Top and left navigations are typical on large screens, but lack of screen real estate on small screens makes for an interesting challenge. As responsive design becomes more popular, it’s worth looking at the various ways of handling navigation for small screen sizes. Mobile web navigation must strike a balance between quick access to a site’s information and unobtrusiveness.

Teller Reveals His Secrets | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Magazine

Teller Reveals His Secrets | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian Magazine:

Magic is an art, as capable of beauty as music, painting or poetry. But the core of every trick is a cold, cognitive experiment in perception: Does the trick fool the audience? A magician’s data sample spans centuries, and his experiments have been replicated often enough to constitute near-certainty. Neuroscientists—well intentioned as they are—are gathering soil samples from the foot of a mountain that magicians have mapped and mined for centuries.

[Awesome.]

Giles Bowkett: Rails Went Off The Rails: Why I’m Rebuilding Archaeopteryx In CoffeeScript

Giles Bowkett: Rails Went Off The Rails: Why I’m Rebuilding Archaeopteryx In CoffeeScript:

Going back to the larger issue, Rails definitely went off the rails. Cleaner, more modular APIs are an important goal, but they’re way less important than speedy development, a modern feature set — why is Rails not staying up to date with HTML5 the way it did with Ajax? — and, above all else, programmer happiness. The Merb integration rewrite was a giant, time-wasting threadjack with only a few small payoffs, and DHH, who wrote two whole books about why you should turn down feature requests, should have nixed the whole thing. I’m still going to keep using Rails, because it’s still a terrific framework, and I still enjoy it a great deal, but I think it’s absolutely fair to say that Rails 3 is a step backwards from Rails 2, and that Bundler, although very useful, is clearly not even close to finished. They say they’re at version 1.0, but I don’t think they’re fooling anybody.

[Lots of food for thought… in the end though the ten year old in me really enjoyed this. Good one Yehuda! (And everyone, try and remember that this is a rant… it gonna be extremely one sided. I’m not endorsing anything here. Just listening to what people are saying.]