OnRails.org

I received a couple of comments and emails about my non-Rails related entries, more specifically about the iPhone related entries. So from now on I will move these type of entries to my new "private" blog http://blog.wanja.com. As I am starting the development of a new iPhone app and will report about it over there. I am still doing quite some Rails related work and will keep posting about it here (http://onrails.org). I am also experimenting with MacRuby, which is so cool, and will report about it here unless it's specific to iPhone development. I short if you are only interested in Rails or Ruby keep ready this blog, if you are interested in the other "stuff" I play with, such a iPhone, games, Wii, PS3, programming the Wii Remote, and any other geek stuff, check out http://blog.wanja.com

I was checking out different sites to deploy the Rails apps we presented with Tony at RailsConf for our Powering AIR with Rails tutorial and the easiest and fastest way is still heroku.com. So for the 3rd app, TwitterFriends, I make this little video showing how I deployed the Rails to heroku using the heroku gem and git:
Rails Deployment On Heroku Using Git from daniel wanja on Vimeo. Note flexonrails.com is still "under constructions" and I am adding stuff for the launch of the book...which is now set to shortly after December 19th. Yea!

This week I was playing with Flexcover a test coverage tool for Flex…and it’s really cool. If you you to determine how much test coverage you have in your Flex application then check out this screencast…maybe skip to the end where you will see flexcover in action. The first part is how to assemble the Flexcover SDK to use with FlexBuilder. Again this is a non-scripted screencast with several “oops” and a big Swiss-French accent which I hope you will find useful.

The key here is if you do Flex, write unit tests and use this test coverage tool.

Setting up Flexcover as test coverage tool for your Flex applications. from daniel wanja on Vimeo.

Enjoy, Daniel.

It’s hard to imaging writing a Rails application without using rcov and get that fuzzy feeling you tested most if not all you application. Or at least get a good idea of what’s tested. I heard way back that Alex Uhlmann was working on some test coverage tools, but I didn’t see anything coming out from Adobe. I haven’t used test coverage for my Flex apps, but want to start. Any body has any good hints, stories, frameworks they use for test unit coverage in Flex? A quick google search pointed me to this article describing Flexcover, just what I was looking for. Please share your experience.

Thanks! Daniel.

UPDATE: I am playing with FlexCover and just saw this “Flexcover is a joint effort with Alex Uhlmann of Adobe Consulting, who has been working on a related set of ideas.”. So I guess this is really Alex’s work that Steven was referring to which is now open source under the MIT license. Cool!

UPDATE: today (10/01/2008) Apple lifted the iPhone NDA. New agreement will come out in a week (or so).

Until now I wasn’t concerned about the iPhone NDA as the iPhone is really cool, there are nice apps appearing on the App Store and face it, this platform is there to stay, the iPhone is just impressively useful and versatile. But recent news on applications being rejected by Apple for undefined reasons and the fact that the pragmatic programmers book on iPhone was pulled due to the NDA, ticked me off. That’s what the “Prag’s” released in their news: “It now appears that Apple does not intend to lift the NDA any time soon. Regrettably, this means we are pulling our iPhone book out of production.”

Damn that! That was THE book I was waiting for. I am a developer, did Objective-C development on NeXTSTEP 15 years ago and follow closely what’s going on with the iPhone. I was one of the first admitted to the iPhone developer program and I am certainly bound by NDA beyond my comprehension, but I was also really hoping that the platform would open up. Early on it made sense as Apple wants to have the “Wow” factor when they first announce their product, and that’s worth millions to them. But now that the phone is out for quite a while, that all Apple competitors have access to all the beta SDKs, let me ask you this:

WHY?

Why does Apple keeps this NDA…I just doesn’t make sense. Let the development community go crazy, share the knowledge, create something unique beyond what you have. Apple, you are making your development community ANGRY.

I tried to find a good reasons why there is still this NDA in place, but there is just no reason. What did I miss? What has Apple to gain? What can we do?

Please leave your thought as comment here after.

Daniel.

Photo from iphonemag.ch.

Cool now my brother doesn’t have to bug me to check out stuff at the Apple Store every time something new comes out ;-).

Also with the current value of the dollars you now can buy a MacBook Air for 199 Swiss Francs :-)

One of my customers, Fiserv Insurance Solutions, looks for an experienced Flex Developer for one of it’s new project. In short they are looking for a good Flex developer. Here is an extract of the job post and you can read more about here.

We are seeking a senior level software developer proficient in ActionScript and Flex to join our team building the cutting-edge browser-based applications. Extensive experience with Rich Internet Application (RIA) development using Adobe Flex and ActionScript is required. You will be involved in designing and implementing a creative and innovative application platform with Adobe Flex which will be used to build very large projects (300+ screens). Qualified applicants will have 3+ years of in-depth ActionScript development experience developing RIA applications, and at least a year of full time, hard core Flex experience. Also required is experience with Flex Remoting (AMF) and experience with Flex frameworks such as Mate, PureMVC or Cairngorm.

Knowledge and Desire Skills

• Experience with Flex MVC frameworks: Mate, Cairngorm, etc.
• Source control system
• Agile development methodology, SCRUM preferred
• Effective, creative problem solving skills
• Strong organization skills, self-motivated, team player
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• MUST be proficient in ActionScript 3.0 and Adobe Flex development
• Experience with custom component development
• Extensive experience with AS3 & MXML
• Experience building large, enterprise applications with Flex
• Strong Object Oriented Programming expertise

Deep understanding of Flex internals:

• data binding
• event system
• data grids & custom renderers
• module-based application development
• internationalization & localization
• AMF Remoting

I was watching Bill O’reilly on Fox and just saw that Sarah Palin’s email account was hacked and leaked to on the internet…that’s 11 or more hours after the fact apparently and I wanted to do a quick check if they managed to stop the propagation of these emails. I said to myself, left see if I can get access to the full text in less than 5 minutes starting on Google. Well, it didn’t work out, but many source reported the information, but most of the sites that have it are currently down. But in short, on the net just forget about privacy. I know, you don’t want your private stuff to be out there, but it eventually will be. I don’t want the picture of my kids on the net…but if they once get indexed by on of the bots…google and others..they are out there. Now I hope my emails don’t become public…but emails are not secure anyhow unless you encrypt them.

So here is what my quick search returned:

• Watched Bill Oreilly and heard about the hack.
• Checked cnn.com home page…nothing.
• Search google and followed the first link…which was a link to a Yahoo news story, with not much information.
• Then searched twitter and followed a link from chrisgen to http://pastebin.com/f7fb944c5
• That link was point to the following links on artvoice.com with some pictures of the email
  • http://blogs.artvoice.com/techvoice/2008/09/17/hackers-break-into-sarah-palins-inbox/
  • http://blogs.artvoice.com/techvoice/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/011.jpg
  • http://blogs.artvoice.com/techvoice/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/04.jpg
  • http://blogs.artvoice.com/techvoice/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/03.jpg
  • http://blogs.artvoice.com/techvoice/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/02.jpg
• Checked out digg which pointed to http://www.sarahpalinisnthillaryclinton.com/
• Which highlighted some name that I fed to the google machine: Ivy Frye Nizich, Michael
• Which pointed to two interesting links, the first being down:
  • http://wikileaks.org/leak/sarah-palin-hack-2008/email-index.txt
  • http://www.mahalo.com/Sarah_Palin_Email

Well that was futile search, but I wanted to see how news spreads on the internet and how the force will try to stop it. Now it’s time to check out Star Wars the Force Unleashed for the iPhone.

Now for the readers of my blog, this has nothing to do with Flex or Rails, but hey! Also if you wonder what I was doing watching O’Reilly, let’s simply say I watch many news source from many countries and like diversity of information, but very often I don’t share his or Fox way of propaganda, but I enjoy the topics addressed.

That’s the most political blog ever as I don’t want to bug my readers here, I’m definitively less expressive than my friend John, but in any case and for the future or the country my children, go Obama!

Ignite Denver: you can register here and read more about it here

When: Wednesday, September 10, 2008 from 06:00 PM – 11:00 PM (MT)

Where: Fado Irish Pub, 1735 19th Street, Denver, CO

Some of the talks planned for Denver on the 10th:

• Kevin Hoyt – The wonderful world of Cigars
• Rob McNealy – Social media for low tech companies (AskAFloorGuy.com)
• Peter Batty – Future Location and Social Networking – Location aware applications are a hot topic in the social networking space at the moment. This presentation will talk about a different approach to this space, focusing on future location – where will you and your friends be in the future? This is harder to implement than an approach based on current location but more useful if you can do it successfully. We will talk about some of the challenges in this area and the many cool applications of this technology.
• Brian Holmes – how to swear in French
• Jim Hutchison – The glamorous world of Entertainment Business lighting and how rockstar-ish it can and cannot be, followed by a side order of ridiculously simply difficult lighting math chased with industry information and quirky stories. Living like a rockstar is fun!
• Andrew Hyde – TechStars is a entrepreneur boot camp that every summer selects and seed funds 10 startups. From an inside viewpoint, what is the experience like? What are the biggest lessons, and the biggest challenges of starting the startup.
• Scott Dudley – Digital Theatrics
• Dave Taylor – Filmbuzz (get your hollywood news fix!)
• Jun Heider – 5 minute intro to the world of Hackintosh

A while back I worked with Lee and Sean on Compassionate Communications which was featured in an interview/article in the San Diego North County Times last week. Read it here.