June 2010
12 posts
2 tags
iPad sketching app review
Photo by Jamie Beck
Sketching on an iPad
When I first held an iPad I knew it would have significance to a web designer as a sketching tool. It’s portable, connected, and friendly, and with the apps that have emerged...
1 tag
This should_change your mind
There’s been a bunch of hullabaloo about our recent deprecation of the Shoulda macros should_change and should_not_change. A lot of people have asked, “why remove it?” Short answer: we don’t use it anymore. Long answer: it’s confusing and may encourage bad programming practices.
Consider this example of should_change:
context "updating a post" do
setup do
...
1 tag
Giant Robots Redesign Wallpapers
To celebrate the redesign of this very blog we’re sharing some GIANT ROBOTS themed desktop wallpaper. They’re available in a few common screen sizes for your convenience.
1440x900 1920x1200 2560x1600
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1 tag
Giant Robots Gets An Overhaul
Last week we started on a blog redesign, it’s live now in case you hadn’t noticed (get in here RSS subscribers!). It was the last of our products that needed an overhaul to get up to date with some of our current styles. First we did the Hoptoad and Widgetfinger (RIP) skins, then we did thoughtbot.com and finally our training app. Giant Robots was the last on our list and I finally had...
3 tags
factory_girl 1.3: integrating effectively with...
factory_girl has always had little Rails-specific code. It only depends on Ruby, and in order to use it in your application, it asks three things of your models:
They can be instantiated without parameters
All properties have writer methods
They respond to #save! (this is only necessary for the “create” strategy)
However, despite this simple API, there’s one feature in factory_girl that has...
1 tag
Sailing down the Hudson with RVM
We recently decided our CI server needed an overhaul. I really enjoyed Integrity as a build server, but after trying out Hudson it’s hard to say I want to go back. Hudson has several huge advantages:
Totally self contained. Integrity was a constant mashup. I don’t want to maintain the codebase for my CI server anymore.
Live console output. When your builds take 20-30 minutes, this is...
1 tag
Redesigning the toad
Over the last few weeks, we released several redesigned pages for Hoptoad. With the launch of its new Bossfrog plan, we redesigned the homepage and plans and pricing page. Yesterday, we released the redesign of the sign up form. The biggest goal for the redesign was to convert more of Hoptoad’s visitors to users. We also wanted to keep the process from the homepage to signing up to be a...
3 tags
The future of shoulda
Shoulda has long been one of our most useful and popular open source projects, and it continues to serve us well as we use it daily. However, there have been some changes over the past year in the way that we use Shoulda, and these changes have led to some decisions about its future. In our post about the Rails 3 roadmap, we briefly covered the changes we made in Shoulda 2.11 as well as our...
12 tags
The Road to Rails 3
Being at RailsConf 5 has given us the opportunity to finalize a lot of the work we’ve done to prepare our plugins and gems for Rails 3. Thankfully, for many of the most popular gems, we’ve been able to maintain both Rails 3 and Rails 2.3.x compatibility in one gem. However, we’re taking this opportunity to say goodbye to some of our less widely used plugins, and some we plan on dropping Rails...
1 tag
The mess of web font services
Over the last year, we have seen a mass adoption of the @font-face property by all of the major browser vendors. Most type foundries won’t license their typefaces to be used on the web because there is no openly supported closed font file type. They all fear that their files will be widely distributed for free and their licensing system will fail. This obstacle has lead to several font...
2 tags
See you at RailsConf
As in years past, the majority of thoughtbot will be at RailsConf this year. In addition to just attending, we’re lucky to be involved in 3 sessions:
Avoiding and Fixing Rails AntiPatterns I’ll be running (along with Tammer Saleh) a tutorial session on Monday. We’ll cover a variety of useful tips and practical advice from our in-progress Rails AntiPatterns book.
Building an...