Samurai Coder

Hexagonal Close-Packed:

To package an existing Ruby on Rails application into an executable Mac OS X desktop application. This process (and the result) requires OS X 10.5 (”Leopard”) or later.

Interesting. A very detailed tutorial.

Adam Betts discusses his recent work in details. I didn’t know Adam was behind the app. Can’t wait for the Part 3. Delicious Library affects this industry quit a bit.

• Part 1: Icon & Graphic Design
• Part 2: Web Template Design
• Part 3: Not yet published.

I will simply buy an iPhone to use OmniFocus.

A desktop Mac app for making your phone numbers into alphabets. I tried, but couldn’t find any good combination. This will be worthwhile when you have a chance to pick a phone number when you purchase a new phone.

Make sure you have have MacPorts installed. Run the command to update your port command and ports available.

sudo port selfupdate
sudo port sync

Note: Run port version. As of this writing, the latest version is 1.600.

Let’s get ImageMagick using port intall.

sudo port install ImageMagick

When it’s done, run port installed and make sure you find ImageMagick. Next, we install Rmagick via gem. Run the command below:

sudo gem install rmagick

Note: It’s rmagick not Rmagick. sudo gem install Rmagick will result in ERROR: could not find Rmagick locally or in a repository.

When it’s done, check if rmagick is installed properly by running gem list. Now we are going to test if rmagick works properly. Create a file called test_rmagick.rb, and copy and paste the code below.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -wKU

# Test if rmagick is working properly or not.
# When run, this file creates a image file 'path.gif' in the same directory.

# the sample code is from http://rmagick.rubyforge.org/portfolio3.html

require 'rubygems'
require 'rmagick' # Don't use a capital 'R'.

canvas = Magick::Image.new(240, 300,
              Magick::HatchFill.new('white','lightcyan2'))
gc = Magick::Draw.new

gc.fill('red')
gc.stroke('blue')
gc.stroke_width(2)
gc.path('M120,150 h-75 a75,75 0 1, 0 75,-75 z')
gc.fill('yellow')
gc.path('M108.5,138.5 v-75 a75,75 0 0,0 -75,75 z')
gc.draw(canvas)

canvas.write('path.gif')

If you find an image file titled “path.gif” after running the script, your installation is successful.

A new del.icio.us client for Leopard. The thumnails are attracting, but I’m not entirely convinced if they are useful. May be just an eyecandy.

A new SFTP client from Extendedmac.

Flow is a stunning new FTP client built exclusively for Mac OS X Leopard. Flow streamlines both transferring and editing files by leveraging your high-speed connection, presenting a gorgeous yet tasteful user-interface, and integrating the latest and greatest of OS X technology.

A Dashboard widget to work with svn and Growl.

lab.arc90.com:

Version control is essential for collaborative development, and we do a lot of collaborative development at Arc90, so we rely heavily on our Subversion repositories. One of the things we’ve noticed is that it’s hard for developers to keep up with their repositories’ and working copies’ statuses: Is my copy out of date? Has someone committed something to the repository?

So we wrote a Dashboard widget that monitors working copies and repositories to make sure that it’s always clear what’s what. And we threw in Growl support to make the package extra appealing. It’s a great way to keep tabs on your development efforts.

Daniel Jalkut:

Software costs money, time, and resources to develop, just like many of the other products in our lives. And just like those peanuts on the bar, many companies with other things to sell you are in a good position to give away freebies that help to promote their business; to encourage you and your friends to give them money for different reasons.

But smaller companies don’t often have the variety of products and sevices that lends itself to such a complex strategy. Given a good product idea and a market to sell to, they’re forced to adopt the simplest of all strategies: pure payment. Build something brilliant, and be rewarded with money. This money translates into a great motivation for the developer, which in turn translates back into product greatness. It’s easy to understand why the majority of great products in this world do cost money to obtain.

This is a very long article, but it is worth. “It should be free” even sounds promoting piracy to me.

Speaking of Cabel and Tim, all the video except for the Cabel’s talk are out.

TED and SXSW aren’t the only good presentations.

• C4[1] Videos Available