atom thoughts

Dr Nic just ported over all of TextMate’s Rails snippets as RadRails templates. These should definitely add a boost to your productivity as you can type most commands for Rails development in just a few keystrokes. I have been meaning to spend more time getting Eclipses templates incremented into my dev process and this is just the boost I needed.

Get your templates and read Dr. Nic’s announcement on his blog.

Just ran across this very useful AJAXified api reference while trolling through the RoR mailing list:

http://www.gotapi.com/

It has support for a ton of different languages including:
Ruby, RubyOnRails, Javascript, HTML, CSS, XML, Actionscript, Java, PHP, Perl, C, C++, and more…

I am pretty impressed with the interface from my brief experimentation. Very snappy. Check it out.

Looking for some free application icon sets? I had a hard time finding some good ones when I was first looking for some. Thankfully I happened across these two wonderful ones:

• Tango
• Silk

If you know of some good ones, let me know and I’ll add them to this list.

Before I dive into what that title means, a little background:

To provide full-text searching of gifts within the GiftHat.com, I am using a ruby gem called Ferret written by Dave Balmain.

Ferret is a port of the popular Java search engine called Lucene.

The Ferret library is excellent, but one thing it suffers from is poor Windows support due in large part to the lack of good support for Windows by ruby itself.

But it looks like that is about to change thanks to a new Apache project called Lucy. Lucy will be a direct port of the Java Lucene engine in pure C. This will provide a much more straight-forward way to integrate the Lucene searching functionality into non-Java languages such as ruby, perl, PHP and python.

This is excellent news thanks to Dave Balmain and Marvin Humphrey for making this happen.

For further reading on this news, read it straight from the source here

I just ran across this nice little site called Typetester for comparing fonts for use on websites:

http://typetester.maratz.com/

It provides a wide variety of fonts to choose from including the safe, windows and mac fonts. You can compare up to 3 at the same time.

A cool idea with a great implementation.

I just started using FeedBurner to keep track of how many people are subscribed to my blog feeds.

To be honest, I was expecting to only see myself and one or two others, but I am happy to say that there are currently 7 of you and counting! I know, not earth shaking numbers but more than I was expecting considering I am just starting out. Thanks for tuning in.

Before FeedBurner, I really didn’t have any visibility into who was reading this. So, if you are in that boat and want some visibility into your readers, I recommend checking it out.

Thankfully, I don’t usually have to play with different fonts too often. But whenever I do, I always fall back on this very useful and free font viewing tool for Windows called AMP Font Viewer. Check it out.

There are a ton of great plugins for Firefox that make Web development a whole lot better. I really don’t know how I managed without them.

My most recent addition is called FireBug, which provides a number of great features including:

• Javascript and CSS error notification.
• Inspection tools for HTML, the DOM, CSS and events.
• A Javascript command line.
• XmlHttpRequest spying (which is great for AJAX debugging).

Some of my other favorite Firefox web development extensions include:

• Web Developer – This should be in every web developer’s tool box. It provides a ton of different utilities for doing things such as disabling cookies and javascript, informational tools such as highlighting elements within your page, tools for validating your HTML and CSS, and way too much more to list.

• DevBoi – A one stop shop for all of your reference documentation needs. It includes the docs for HTML, CSS, DOM, Javascript and also has add on packs for Ruby On Rails, PHP and XUL. Be sure to install the offline version if you want to be able to access these without internet access.

• IETab – This is a great tool for viewing your page in IE from within Firefox. It will open the page in a new tab that is rendered using the IE engine. Pretty slick.

If you have any that you think I missed, I would love to hear about them.

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.