You have several very useful libraries that do most of the styling / behavior for you: iWebkit jQTouch (sencha touch) iui We chose for iWebkit, but if you desire a more native feel you might choose jQTouch. The standard browsers on iPhone, Android, palmOS and Blackberry OS6 are all Webkit based. This ensures that sites based on iWebkit will [...]

At Innovation Factory we offer our clients two solutions for hosting our Innovation Suite applications: we can host it for them as a software-as-a-service solution or they can host it on premises, i.e. in their own IT environment. This means that we have several deployments of our suite that we need to maintain. In this [...]

For the short version: check out http://github.com/lafeber/world-flags-sprite Lukas and I are working on a pet project when we’re traveling between Utrecht and Amsterdam. We’ve built a website that contains cheeses of many countries. I’ve been a fan of the famfamfam world flags for years, so it made sense to include them in the site. You quickly get [...]

This is a story about the power of Rails. It all started two days ago, when Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki blogged about Appmakr.com. It allowed you to have an app in the Appstore based on your own RSS feed. The price they ask for this is $199,- I believe that the appstore shouldn’t be polluted [...]

Last year we talked about pair programming with Obie Fernandez at Rails Underground. He was very enthusiastic about this practice, to the extent that the developers at his company Hashrocket, pair up full time. Inspired by this, we decided to try out pair programming ourselves. And we got quite excited about it too. So we [...]

It always bothered me that when you do a gem install instead of a sudo gem install you usually get the following errors: WARNING:  Installing to ~/.gem since /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8 and /usr/local/bin aren't both writable. WARNING:  You don't have /Users/martijn/.gem/ruby/1.8/bin in your PATH, gem executables will not run. Most of the times, gems are all over the place. I just want [...]

Do you want to deploy your Ruby on Rails project with Vlad the Deployer? And does your project include Git submodules? If the answer to both questions is yes, it is likely that you’ll run into trouble as Vlad does not offer support for submodules. In this post I will walk you through my solution [...]

A great thing about Git is that it is flexible enough for you to develop your own favourite workflow, rather than have it dictate to you which workflow you should use. Personally, I’ve spent quite some time finding a nice way to apply Git in my day to day workflow. The resulting workflow is pretty [...]

One of our clients needed a redesign of their website. There are a few important lessons we’ve learned from dealing with external designers, and outsourced html/css implementation. It starts with the designer creating a new Photoshop design for every page. She does so by clicking through the entire website. When you have a large website, it’s very [...]

In my previous post Metamagical class variables in Ruby I described an oddity of Ruby causing a problem in a plugin I was writing at the time. It was about class variables that were set by dynamically defined methods. After a lot of asking around the general advise was just to avoid class variables, but [...]