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Android App Inventor

July 25, 2010 by · Leave a Comment 

Big news on the Android front.  Google has announced Android App Inventor, which is a WYSIWYG editor for Android applications.  I previously had a look at the GUI Designer for Android, which I had  a little bit of trouble with but in general thought was a good effort.  Android is just picky enough about the format and structure of it’s XML files that tools like this are targets for many annoying problems.

App Inventor is from Google, so they’re in a better position to manhandle the interfaces on the device and GUI builder to get them to behave themselves.

Looks great on paper.  Stay tuned and I’ll report back after giving it a test drive.

I predict one of two outcomes:

  1. This will be a great rapid development tool for advanced developers and a great vehicle for novices to learn Android programming, or…
  2. This will be a great way for people who don’t know what they’re doing to get crapware into the Android Market, which is already a handful of diamonds in an ocean of crap.

Only time will tell.

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DHH at RailsConf 2010 – Rails 3

July 14, 2010 by · Leave a Comment 

RailsConf was right in our back yard this year (Baltimore, MD) and not one of us made it…:(. We can live vicariously through YouTube though. Here’s DHH’s talk on Rails 3. I’ve been using Rails 3 RC lately because I can’t for the life of me get Devise (which is awesome by the way) to integrate with Rails 2. I’m not sure why and I’m sure it’s my fault, but I have a low threshold for trying to get stuff to work so Rails 3 it is. Rails is finally getting even more polish and is starting to feel mature. I guess it’s time for something new!

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Installing the Twitter Gem on Windows 7

July 4, 2010 by · Leave a Comment 

Seems that the latest version of John Nunemaker & Wynne Netherland’s ruby twitter api wrapper won’t install on windows 7, due to the reliance on the yajl json parser. And I’m guessing that John isn’t going to be doing anything to change that (“My suggestion: don’t worry about windows? :) “). So what to do when you’re stuck on the windows platform (for the moment)? Simply pull down an earlier version. The 0.6.1.5 release (Aug 09) installed easily though I’m not sure yet what we’ll be missing when compared to the 0.7 drop (Oct 09). In case you need to know how to call a specific version using gem, using the twitter gem as an example, it’s

gem install twitter --version '= 0.6.15'

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