A New Job

So I'm now in my third week at Global Cloud. It's been a lot to absorb coming from such a small shop to a much larger shop. Finally seeing processes and standards in place! All the developers and designers use version control - I'd tried to get that to catch on before, but couldn't get any buy-in...

I'm working with lots of CF again, so that's a lot of fun and I'm moving back to more of a designer role as opposed to a swiss army knife. I still get to program, but now I've got folks making sure I'm doing things correctly instead of flying by the seat of my pants. The good thing is I realize all the stuff I did before was mostly right, nice to have that validation!

So more to come at some point. Getting settled into a new house, a new job and soon a new marriage. Then I'll start to take a better look at CF8 since I haven't done much with it for awhile.

It's that time of year again...

A List Apart has posted their 2008 survey, so if you work on the web get over to ALA and take the survey. It's quick, easy and painless. This is the second year they've done this and it offers some great insight into the web workers world.

check it out

Mindmapping

As I continue to refine my workflow process I've begun to rely on mind mapping for my brain-storming sessions. It's also a great way for me to keep my focus in meetings and I now have notes that actually make sense to me when I go back and look at them.

Amazingly as I was working on this I noticed that Lifehacker covered the mind map on Monday. I still get some strange looks around the office, which I find interesting since I work at an Ad Agency (everyone doodles during meetings... mine are just on-topic)

So far I've had the best luck with a big sketchbook, I really like the feeling of putting pen to paper. Mapping on the computer is good for somethings, but I've noticed that I works better if I start with paper.
That being said, mindmeister is great, so far the best software I've tried. In the beginning I tried some of the others - but the terrible clip art shapes killed me. MindMeister doesn't let me doodle in the margins, but they don't insult my design intelligence either. I still haven't tried the map via email, although that looks like a pretty good way to get something started on the road.

I'm not sure if mind mapping has made me all that more productive, or if my projects are better thought out. Only time will tell. I do know that it has made long boring meetings tolerable and given me notes I can actually decipher after the fact!

iPhone 2.woe

or Everyone should have seen this coming all along.

Since late last night I've obsessively been clicking the software update button in iTunes 7.7 to see if 2.0 had been released to the general public. Knowing my luck I didn't want to install the firmware that gizmodo posted about yesterday. So I was a good Apple FanBoy and waited to install till Apple told me I could.

So what do I get for this patience? A brick and now I'm phoneless.

I updated this morning around nine and then after restarting the phone I started getting error messages. Most of the time I see a pop-up with the extremely informative error message "We could not complete your iTunes Store request. An unknown error occurred (-4)." That really just translates into - "Hey, we didn't think this thing would catch on, so we didn't prepare for the activation traffic."

Now I've got a phone that doesn't work and NO idea when it will. Hope no one calls to make an offer on my condo today.

Thanks Apple.

*** UPDATE ***

so finally it went through and now I have a phone again!

(10+2)*5 - relearning what Merlin taught me...

I'm back on a hyper-productivity kick.

I found my @work to-do list getting longer and longer, and my @home list wasn't in much better shape. Looking back through the apps, widgets, etc. that I've saved over the years I came across one that I found extremely helpful in the past (I used this for most of the productiveparenting.com build) and decided to give it another shot. A huge thanks to Merlin Mann, who has made most of us web-workers at least somewhat more productive over the years. You can read his original article here 43Folders.com

Merlin Mann's (10+2)*5 Procrastination Hack

Ten minutes working plus two minutes not working (surfing the web, daydreaming, etc.). Just repeat this five times and you'll have knocked out an hour of work. It's really amazing how much one can accomplish when working in ten minute blocks. I was able to knock out a bunch of SEO tasks I'd been avoiding, organize the last few months files, respond to emails & voicemail's, and even launch a website.

Right now I'm testing out FlexTime from red sweater software. I just downloaded a copy, using the 30-day trial version at the moment. Don't know if it's worth $18.95 quite yet, we'll see as the 30 days go by.

Blogging for work.

So I've started some new blogs for work, we've decided to give the idea a shot. Not only are there SEO benefits, but it helps establish us as leaders in our industry!

You can check them out here

• Whambangzoom.com


• KGB Blogging 101

Wedding Site Launched

So I've finally completed enough of the wedding site to launch. I'm definitely rolling out a limited set of functions with plans to add features in the near future.

so check it out www.carrieandjonwedding.info.

Test of Code Formatting

I'm checking to see how this shows up with some new CSS that matches my TextMate environment.

    
      safari = OSA.app('Safari')
  
      for u in URLS
        this_url = "http://www."+u #format the URL
        safari.activate
        safari.documents[0].url=(this_url)
        sleep(2)
        snapz.capture
      end
    
  

This is from the monokai theme for TextMate by Wimer Hazenberg (http://www.monokai.nl/.) You should get the theme here -
so far it's the best theme I've seen!

Scripting and the Terminal or How I DRYed up my Rails workflow and learned to love Ruby even more

As I work more and more on Rails projects I realize how many steps you have to go through just to start working.  Start the server, start the console, run autotest, open the project in TextMate and cd a terminal tab to your project directory to get ready for a little rake and generate action.  All this before I can write any code at all!  Of course this really isn't all that complicated with a combo of Terminal's history and Quicksilver you can accomplish all these tasks fairly quickly.  Although if you aren't paying attention Terminal's history can come back to bite you if you are working on several projects at once.  So yesterday I thought - there's got to be a better way.

So I fired up Script Editor and figured I'd hack together something to fire up the terminal, run a command, open a new tab, run another command and so on.  Not exactly elegant, but a good place to start.  Finally a great use for AppleScript.  Then, I started to peruse the dictionary for Terminal.app.  Dead end.  Maybe AppleScript wasn't the right choice (or a choice at all) here. Maybe I'll give Automator another shot.  WOW, even more of a dead end. So, off to Google I went.

Strangely I don't seem to be the first to ponder the steps we go through just to start working.  After searching a bit I came across this article by Solomon White.  Sounded a bit familiar, so at least my initial thoughts were completely insane - I mean why can't I tell my Apple to do the things I know it can do using Apple's own scripting language?  So I read further.  Solomon mentioned RubyOSA, which I think I had a brief interlude with one late night months back.  Seems that doesn't do the trick either, RubyOSA seems to work best with applications that are more AppleScript-able.  Luckily it seems that Matt Mower found a better way to handle all this and wrote about it in his "Scripting a better 'cd' and then some" article.  Which is where I learned of ruby appscript which, according  to the appscript website, is a user-friendly Apple even bridge.  Although the statement "Appscript makes these languages serious alternatives to Apple's own AppleScript language for automating your Mac." in the description of appscript did give me a bit of a pause - since of course AppleScript had just left me confused and with a serious headache.  So a quick "sudo gem install rb-appscript" and I was ready to start hacking.  By this point the feature set had already expanded greatly in my head - because seriously if I can open new tabs in Terminal and run commands, why couldn't I fire up a browser and point it to localhost:3000?

So I then sat down to work out a script that would do the following:
In Terminal:

• Boot Mongrel
• Start script/console
• Start autotest
• Start IRB
• Open the project directory in TextMate using "mate ."
  

Each of the above in it's own tab in Terminal.
Then once things were up and running it would:

• Launch Safari if it wasn't already running
  
• Launch Firefox if it wasn't already running

I'm a stickler for testing in multiple browsers.  So I've always got a few running at all times (now if I could find a way to script parallels to start XP and open an IE window also - I guess there is always version 2.)  Once the browsers were up and running it only makes sense that we would point them to the site we were working with - I mean if we are too lazy to open Terminal tabs ourselves then manually entering URL's is totally out of the question!  So of course the final steps would be:

• Point all the browsers to the site
• Bring TextMate to the forefront
• While we are at it go ahead and close the tab that ran the "mate ." - we don't need any extra tabs...

Not too much there, looks like a pretty solid representation of the "getting started" process.  Just needs a "Open fridge, retrieve cold beer, bring beer to coffee table" command and I'd be set.

Luckily a lot of folks have done a lot of work ahead of me and I was able to cobble together something that accomplished my goals - so thanks to Soloman, Matt, Hamish Sanderson (rb-appscript) and a lot of other random AppleScript snippets I found searching mailing lists along the way.  Without the work they'd done I'd still be starting to work on my projects the traditional way!

Well it's getting late here, I've got a terrible head-cold and I think it's time to hit the hay.
Coming up:
Part two - the initial Terminal steps with a sweet YAML config file so this has value on multiple projects.
Part three - using appscript to launch browsers and point them in the right direction.
Part four - tying it all together - the final script, installing the script and actually getting to work on a project!

Blogged with Flock

Blogging from Flock

Trying out Flock again.  I've always liked the way Flock works, but with as often as I write in my blog I just never get around to using it much.

Blogged with Flock

Getting to know Markaby

I've spent the past two evenings hard at work on an update of jonsteenbergen.com. Since I was building it using Ruby on Rails I figured I'd give Markaby a shot. The syntax is interesting, I'm not exactly sure what I think. So far it does seem a bit cleaner, plus I'm writing Ruby instead of HTML - that can't be all bad.

It did take a bit of poking around to figure out how to escape HTML characters like the © symbol. I still haven't figured out how to handle <br /> tags yet. But, I think I'll stick with it through this project (or at least most of it.)

In case you are wondering, the escape works like this:

p do
    text "my escaped string &copy;"
end

It's finally here!

After months and months of waiting Apple has finally released the iPhone SDK! It's HUGE, the zipped download was about 2.1gb and it needs over 5gb to install. It might be best to wait till the hoopla dies down, I know the site was super-slow earlier tonight.

Guess it's time to brush up on my Objective C, I've been dreaming of a good solid To-Do list application I keep with me at all times. The Moleskine just isn't cutting it.

The SDK is available here.

Why Blogger?

So as a web developer I'm actually struggling with the idea of using a free blogging service. Shouldn't I build my own?
Do I lose design integrity by selecting a template via radio button?

Possibly...

But, with all the work I have to do on my portfolio site, my wedding site and of course my day job this is more about getting things done than some belief that I have to do it all every time.

More to come.