Wishing Kathy well. We were mortified by the news of Kathy’s death threats. Our Campfire was flush with wtf’s and holy sh*ts. Kathy Sierra is probably the most universally liked blogger among the 37 crew. To see her subjected to this kind of vile, despicable, criminal behavior is heartbreaking Hopefully the guilty will be duly [...]

New release of Hobo: The rapid Web application builder for Rails. Just over two months ago I posted about a new rapid Web application development framework for Rails called Hobo. The team have now let me know they've got a brand new, redesigned site, and that Hobo has a major, new release. Hobo makes it [...]

Joyent Slingshot. For a while now, Magnetk has been engaged in developing ‘Slingshot‘ with Joyent. Slingshot is a platform which allows Rails developers to easily create hybrid web/desktop apps with ease and flexibility. There are some great office 2.0 applications out there, but you must admit there is but there is only so much you [...]

re: Vista – I’m downgrading. After about 3 weeks of using Vista RTM as my primary windows development environment, I’m officially downgrading to XP. The reasons for this are many: Driver issues; Mouse, firewire controller, power management, to name a few. Nothing works without about 10 extra installation steps. VMWare Workstation and Visual Studio are [...]

Johnny: New features in iFolder 3.6. Eric from virtualomni.com has written a post on New Features in iFolder 3.6 . Check it out !!  [Planet iFolder]

Indie Tip #5: Think Small (But Act Big). One of the trickiest things for me as an independent developer has been choosing the right size of applications to build. I didn't want to make software that only a few people would use, but at the same time, it was out of the question for me [...]

Indie Tip #4: Get a Life. Being an independent developer is great, but it can lead you to feel isolated if you don't force yourself to get away from your computer. You're not mingling with co-workers every day, so you've got to find other ways to socialize. Otherwise you'll end up being just another blob [...]

Indie Tip #3: Don't try to be cool. Call it a pet peeve, but it annoys me when I see “cool” applications with “cool” features that provide little or no value to real customers. Honestly, there are waayyy too many useless “Web 2.0″ applications that look like they were designed by developers who want A-list [...]

Semantic web as social enjoyment. The recent launch of Freebase.com, the first application of the semantic web engine being developed by Danny Hillis’ new company, Metaweb, was written up by, among others, Esther Dyson, Tim O’Reilly, and Martin Heller, from whom I received an invitation to try Freebase. (Note: I don’t yet seem to have [...]

Joyent Slingshot. Introducing Joyent Slingshot Joyent Slingshot allows developers to deploy Rails applications that work the same online and offline (with synchronization) and with drag into and out of the application just like a standard desktop application. We have Joyent Connector and a select group of third party applications working under Joyent Slingshot. Joyent plans [...]