atom thoughts

I just found out that my comments were broken due to a bug
in Typo. They should now be working, so if you tried to leave a comment and failed, you should now be able to.

I am looking forward to Typo maturing to the point where it is not necessary to run off of the trunk.

The Gift Hat tour is complete. This provides a nice summary of the major features available within the Gift Hat. Please check it out.

Feedback is welcome in the comments for this post.

I am in the process of creating a demo for the GiftHat.com and I must say it is much more difficult than I would have expected. I thought I could just take some high resolution screen shots using Windows Print Screen and then shrink them down.

However, I quickly found that any text you have on your screen will be garbled to the point of ugliness when you shrink it even a small amount. I noticed that Ian over at UserScape has some great looking shots in his tour and he was kind enough to share his technique with me. He uses SnapZ Pro for the Mac and said it is very easy to use. Unfortunately, I don’t own a Mac so I ventured out to find an equivalent for Windows.

Thankfully, I found it in a great tool called SnagIt. SnagIt makes it easy to grab screen shots from just about anywhere on Windows and provides utilities for adding effects such as drop shadows and custom borders. It also flawlessly handles the scaling of text so that it looks pretty decent even at much smaller sizes than the original.

So, thanks to SnagIt you should be seeing a great demo for the GiftHat.com in the very near future.

Well, I was planning on spacing out the posts of what’s in my toolbox, but another tool in my toolbox called RadRails just won the Best Developer Tool award at EclipseCon. So, it seems like now is a good time to mention it.

RadRails was put together in an incredibly short time by a team of three developers that are in college. Very impressive. It also includes the work of several others including the Eclipse Framework, RDT plugin and Subclipse plugins.

One of the coolest new features they just introduced is a key binding to intelligently switch between your Controllers and your Views based on the Rails naming conventions. This is a great time saver. This is just one of those “Why didn’t anybody else think of that” types of features that is a welcome addition to an already wonderful tool.

Other notable features include:

• An Outline view of your ruby files
• Realtime syntax checking
• Color syntax highlighting for CSS, Javascript, HTML, RHTML and Ruby files
• An RI documentation viewer for looking up Ruby APIs
• Server management tools for starting and stopping your WEBbrick servers
• Integrated debugging tools
• Source code generator tools
• And much more…

If you haven’t checked it out, I highly recommend it. I developed The GiftHat.com entirely using this tool. Give it a try. You won’t be disappointed.

I thought it might be useful to share some of the tools that I use for software development and general computing. So, I will be posting a series of short articles detailing some of the tools I use and what I find most useful about them. I do all of my development on a Windows machine, so most of my tools are Windows-centric.

The first tool I would like to share is a Windows Explorer replacement called xplorer². Now, when I first heard of this I thought, “Why would I need a replacement for Windows Explorer?”. But let me tell you, this tool greatly increases my productivity. I am sure I hardly scratch the surface of what it can do, but the features I find most useful about it are:

• Dual explorer panes: This allows you to see two sets of files and folders simulataneously. As a result, you can work between two folders quite easily for things like copying and moving files.
• Tabbed browsing: Each of the Dual explorer panes supports multiple tabs so you can have a limitless number of folders constantly open.
• Great Shortcuts: There are some great shortcut keys for doing the things you do most often in the file system. For instance:
  • F5 - Copy files/folders from one pane to the other.
  • F6 - Move files/folders from one pane to the other.
  • F7 - Create a new file.
  • F8 - Create a new folder.

This also comes in a free version for private and academic use: http://zabkat.com/x2lite.htm.

Enjoy!

When working in a web environment, it can be difficult to know the health of your application without digging through some log files or worse, waiting for the customer to complain.

Ruby On Rails provides a nice and easy alternative for emailing you whenever an error occurs within your application.

And best of all, it is a plugin called exception_notification, which requires very little effort to roll into your application. To install the exception_notification plugin, just type the following from the root of your rails app:

> ruby script\plugin install exception_notification

And then any controller that you want to notify you of errors needs to include ExceptionNotifiable. In my case, I would like to be notified for all controllers, so I added this into my application controller:

[ruby]class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
include ExceptionNotifiable[/ruby]

Then, you just need to configure the email address to send the error notifications in your config\environment.rb file:

[ruby]ExceptionNotifier.exception_recipients =
%w(some-admin@email.com another-admin@email.com)[/ruby]

And that's it!

Note: One prerequisite to doing all of this is you must also configure your ActionMailer for sending emails.

All good things must start somewhere, and this is as good a place as any. My name is Tom Davies and I am starting this blog to share with you my thoughts on things ranging from software development to current projects that I am working on.

The first thing I would like to share is a website I developed called the GiftHat.com.

The Gift Hat is a site for storing and sharing your wishlists with your friends and family. I am currently seeking beta testers so if you have a few moments and would like to participate, please sign up.

The Gift Hat was developed using RubyOnRails. In future posts, I will expand on some of the technologies and techniques I used to develop the Gift Hat.