Software As A Service has become a common concept to day but yet the effort and approaches required to successfully achieve this are complex, various and challenging.
Thankfully Adam Wiggins has written a great article which is also available as a epub for your Kindle called The Twelve Factor App. It walks you through the steps and approaches involved and is well worth a read.
6 Legged robot which moves like a ball – watch the video its very impressive
If you’ve not heard of A book Apart they are brilliant at providing short to the moment guides aimed at people without the time to spend digging around through reams of pages. Just perfect for the train!
Luke Wroblewski doesn’t disappoint in this short guide on Mobile First for designers. Reading through this guide offers a wealth of advice, every second sentence it felt like another simple statement resonating within me. Here are just a few highlights (really) I particularly enjoyed, but for a few quid go and get the whole book:
Fantastic decision by Microsoft (at last) to start automatic upgrades of Internet Explorer for everyone. As a developer we have all spent time griping about IE 6, its not good for users and its not good for developers. The web is a potentially dangerous place and IE 6 is no longer good enough to keep the user safe. The browser has been criticised repeatedly for its security flaws and the pace of patches being made available to address these. Similarly the advantages of moving to IE 9 are gladly welcomed by all developers I’m sure. IE 6 is now over 10 years old (first released in August 2001) and offers little of the features and capabilities of modern browsers.
Microsoft’s decision to change direction on this will entitle everyone to upgrade to the latest browser remaining safer than ever before and improving how 600 million people experience the web.
Official news from MS on the upgrade and roll out plan can be found on the Windows Team Blog
The ideas of agi
le project management have taken hold in a strong way. I often find myself explaining what a good user story contains and although I’m no expert I base my approach on four simple items.
Tiltshifting has become quite a common effect, in this short article I’m highlighting the best app I’ve found for getting something similar with just your iPhone.
Great video – are you one of these statistics?
Podcasting is still growing at an ever increasing rate and the tools out to date have been slightly too cumbersome to work for me. Not so any more with the availability of Downcast.
Switching a rails app across to postgresql became a necessity recently due to the range of licencing and ownership considerations which have affected mySQL recently. Not wanting to be restricted in some way in how I utilise my app I decided to investigate using the popular opensource postgresql database.
If you’ve recently found rails complaining about the following:
rake/rdoctask is deprecated. Use rdoc/task instead (in RDoc 2.4.2+)
then open up your rakefile.rb and change
require 'rake/rdoctask'
to look like this:
require 'rdoc/task'
and remember to add the following to your Gemfile
group :development do gem 'rdoc' end
You may need to run the following on the command line to freshen your gems
sudo bundle install
