I wasn’t able to attend but for those of you like me, RubyInside has a great summary of the entire thing: The Mega RailsConf 2008 Round Up.
Update: This turns out to be fake, which would help explain why no one leaves the room but they all stand around waiting for their turn to be injured. I thought maybe someone had locked all the doors. For some reason this video was made to help market the new action movie, Wanted, which has nothing to do with the content of the video at all. Makes sense, doesn’t it?
Update: And from another angle.
21 Ruby Tricks You Should Be Using In Your Own Code Great Ruby tips here. Keeping this open in a browser tab and trying to use the tips throughout the week.
XMLMate TextMate plugin: “Check XML and XHTML documents for Well-Formedness and Validity while editing them in TextMate with support for DTD, W3C XML Schema, RELAX NG, Schematron, XInclude, XML Catalog, and XPath 2.0 Visualizer.”
Elements of Design Great collection of web design elements but together by Christian Watson. Great for inspiration.
Rails Widgets Nice Rails plugins to assist in creating navigation bars, tabs, tooltips, show/hide toggling, and tableizer.
As I mentioned previously in, Everything Changes, I switched from PC to Mac about two months ago. I’m still just as excited about it every time I turn it on as the first day, so I’ve compiled a list of what I love about my Mac. By the way, I previously used linux as my sole computer for almost five years and Windows before that every year since it came out.
These are only in the order I thought of them…too hard to order them:
- Ability to use a PC keyboard seamlessly (maybe I’ll write later about why I prefer this, and I tried the Mac keyboard for a month before switching)
- Quicklook
- TextMate (have to save the wows on this for another post, too many to list – goodbye eclipse, netbeans, texteditor, notepad++, text wrangler, sql tool and wordpress blog gui)
- Adium (better than gaim, trillian, gtalk, etc)
- Auto mute when I take out my headset (just like I asked for last year)
- Mighty Mouse (best mouse I’ve ever used)
- Ability to use external monitors (love my Gateway FPD2275W, 22″ DVI-D with built-in 4 port USB 2 hub and PIP)
- Font rendering (improves the entire Internet browsing experience)
- Fluid (use this for bloglines, remember the milk, gmail)
- Unix underneath
- Running Windows on VMWare Fusion (when I unfortunately need to test something in Windows, but at least rebooting is not as painful and it seems more stable)
- Quicksilver
- Coverflow in Finder
- Finder’s 3 pane folder view (genius!)
- Dashboard
- Intel Dual Core
- Slick, streamlined case, and lightweight
- Cheap memory upgrade (through crucial.com of course)
- Firefox never crashes! (well, maybe on occasion, but it crashed consistently before)
- Hardware just works, from bluetooth devices to external usbs and hard drives
- Wifi just works (don’t get me started on Linux and wifi)
- iMovie and ease of using digital video cameras…plugged it in and iMovie sucked all the video in, with thumbnail generations, and sorted all the clips by date!
- Auto recognition of other devices on the network (lets see how do I connect to that linux server, hmm never done this, oh wait, why is it listed in the finder already…it already found it!)
- iSight, easy video chatting and recording
- the dock (love Mac’s take on this)
- Expose!
- Using external monitor as the primary and laptop screen as secondary monitor
- Running everything all at the same time while watching full screen video (on the laptop screen), running mongrel/Rails, mysql, textmate, firefox, and no problems!
- FrontRow
- Controlling my Mac with Ruby (instead of ActionScript…but haven’t actually tried it yet)
- Easy VNC with Vine Server
- Super easy installs (ugh, goodbye linux install tools, and command line builds) and uninstalls
- Small well-designed power brick, with fold out plug (don’t even need the 2nd part of the typical plug and brick)
- Being able to test my web development on all the main browsers on my laptop: IE 5 – 7, Safari on win/mac, Firefox 2/3 on Win/mac (see Running Multiple Browsers for Testing)
- The remote control
- Long battery life, excellent battery conservation when unplugged
- AppFresh
- Force quit
- Overall feeling that everything is more intuitive, more stable, and better integrated