Archives - Jun 2010

Now we've gone one step further and created a new Oil Reporter application specifically for the iPad. Oil Reporter for iPad enables you to see the latest reports as soon as they come in. You can view a detailed mapping of all of the submitted reports along with an easy-to-read list. You can even drill down and view detailed information about each individual report.

I think that Android is a very important project that came along at just the right time. It has applications far beyond mobile handsets and we’ll begin seeing Android in cars, tablets, and more in the very near future. This will mean even more work will be poured into the Android ecosystem creating greater and greater benefits for everyone from consumers to handset manufacturers. All that needs to happen to take advantage of those benefits is for Google to help handset manufacturers free themselves of the idea that they need to “make it their own”.

As our internal open source pioneer, Michael spends a lot of time focusing on creating these open source tools. But he doesn't just create open source solutions; he also points out that he uses dozens of open source projects every day. It might sounds like a high number, but Michael explains, "Anyone who develops for Rails is using a ton of open source projects. Every gem in your Rails app is someone's hard work, sweat and tears." Michael contends that more developers should make time to develop or work on open source software. "I've always wanted to give a sort of open source cheerleader talk at one of these conferences. It's so easy, there's no reason everyone can't do it."

As library authors it is our duty to try to support as large a part of the community as possible and do so in a friendly manner. To that end, today we’re releasing MultiJSON, a simple library that allows you to seamlessly provide multiple JSON backends for your library with intelligent defaulting.

The Keynote given by Steve Jobs was set to start at 10:00am PST. I decided to arrive a little early and get there around 7:30am, thinking that being nearly three hours early would yield me some great seats. I guess I underestimated just how many people would be getting there even earlier to see Steve Jobs unveil the new iPhone and announce other goodies that have been rumored. When I arrived at Moscone West, the line was wrapped all the way around the building.

This year we have three Intrideans giving presentations at RailsConf 2010 in Baltimore, MD, as well as several other teammates attending the event. We're thrilled that our developers are active members of the Rails community and we support their endeavors to share their knowledge with the larger ecosystem. If you're at RailsConf this week, be sure to say hello to one of our guys, or attend one of their presentations:

It's here! The long awaited desktop app for Presently is now available for download and is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

In a staging or production environment this involves modifying the DNS and adding a wildcard entry that points all hosts to the primary domain specified. To develop and test the subdomain aspect of a web application like this, most of the time developers just edit their hosts file locally and add an entry that piggybacks on the localhost entry. This post shows you how to do it dynamically using the DNS server BIND locally on OS X so you never have to mess with your pesky hosts file again!