I’m excited to announce I am starting a new project. It’s still in the early phases but I need your help! If you would consider yourself a “Unix-geek” (this includes Mac OS X users) and would like to help beta test, please either comment here or e-mail me. Thanks.
Apple officially announced Tiger’s release date: April 29, 2005. Yay!
They’ve also updated their Mac OS X page with spiffy Tiger graphics and content.
From the new features page, things I’m most looking forward to:- Spotlight (even across network shares!, CLI tools)
- Dashboard
- Quartz Composer
- Xcode 2
- Finder Slideshow (slideshows from selected images directly within Finder)
- Smart Folders, Smart Contacts, Smart Mailboxes (Smart-anything, really)
- Birthday Calendar
- iChat (Buddy Groups, multiple accounts)
- WebDAV improvements (Kerberos-enabled)
- Preview (PDF forms, slideshow)
- Quicktime 7
- Safari RSS (RSS reader, web-page archiving, inline PDF viewing
- Safe Launch (re-launch after a crash)
- Automator
- RSS Visualizer Screen Saver
- New default desktop (looks very similiar to Panther’s, which isn’t all bad)
- Access Control Lists (ACL)
- Remappable Modifier Keys (“Remap modifiers such as control and caps lock to be super elite.”)
In short, a lot.
This is probably obvious to most of you, but if you’re coming from a PHP background to Rails, you probably don’t know much about database structure (or think its something you can make up on the fly).
With Rails, its extremely important to plan out your database structure before you start coding. But the good thing about Rails is its language is simple to understand. has_one, belongs_to and such.
Taking time to think about your data models will save you tons of time down the road.
I’ve jumped on the RubyOnRails bandwagon by starting to write a simple app.
I’m just getting started, but it seems very nice thus far. It solves some of the problems (ok, not really problems… pet peeves) I have with web development using PHP.
The big one is forms. They are essential to any web app and they are such a PITA to code properly. Especially validation. The great thing about Rails is this is all done for you, so setting up a validation rule in your data model scales all the way down to form submission. Its smooth.
Updates forthcoming.
