http://www.nutheory.com/posts Blog posts from the personal portfolio of Derek Rush http://www.nutheory.com/posts/5 A while back I was working on a project that needed to generate QR codes ( 2D barcodes ). The only gem I could find to assist me was really out of date and only worked with Ruby 1.8. I updated the gem to work with Ruby 1.9 and put it up on Rubygems just so no one else has to deal with that issue. Heres the link to it on [RubyGems](https://rubygems.org/gems/rqr19). or you can just use "gem install rqr19" http://www.nutheory.com/posts/5 http://www.nutheory.com/posts/4 Today I was having interesting conversation with a fellow web developer about some of the newer open source tools I have been looking into including SASS, HAML, and CoffeeScript. One question seemed pervasive in the conversation.... “Is this rails specific?”, HAML claims to work for PHP, ASP and ERB. SASS and CoffeeScript are compiled on save if you set listeners or just use the Textmate bundles, So i know they can work with any language. Also the “guard” gem assists in listening for SASS, Rspec, and coffescript changes. In rails 3.1 most of the tools mentioned are now nice defaults in the gemfile. They are SASS, CoffeeScript, and Uglifier. Why no HAML? HAML is really just be a personal preference and has a learning curve to it. HAML is not for everyone, plus writing AJAX callbacks in HAML feels awkward to me. I always used both, HAML for HTML pages and ERB in the js callbacks. But then again writing a js callback for each view is also seems strange. Backbone.js also looks like something to follow closely. Backbone.js a small framework to assist in handling all json posts and responses from the controller. One file per model/controller that handles all the js actions. It seems much more solid then knockout.js and is a welcome addition to most of my new projects. http://www.nutheory.com/posts/4 http://www.nutheory.com/posts/3 Over the past month I have stumbled across a few applications that look very promising due to the easy way they tackle the mundane tasks I perform everyday as a web developer. None of these tasks individually take that much time, however over the course of a day it just gets annoying and distracting. [Evernote](http://www.evernote.com/) ------------------------------ My note taking about everything from new ideas to cool sounding github projects to look into is sporatic at best. Most of the time how I take the note depends on where I am or what I am doing at the moment and I mostly use 37 Signals Backpackit, and iphone stickies. I was sure there was a much better way. I found it this past week with Evernote. This sits in my menubar on my mac next to my Dropbox, and stays synced with my iphone. No morebrowsing to 37 Signals (at least not for simple notes). [Gitbox](http://www.gitboxapp.com/) ------------------------------ To me Using Git was never a hard thing to do, however being able to push, pull, commit, diff, and have the commit log in a single GUI is really something i can get used to. Its a tremendus time saver and a few less things I need to remember or lookup in a hurry. I mention Gitbox as oppose to GitX just because it seems a little bit more polished. GitX is still a great free alternative. [Receivd](http://receivd.com/early-access) ---------------------------------- Receivd is the newest application of the bunch, in fact its so new its still in private beta. Receivd is a file sharing application that lets you that lets you add contacts and contact lists of people you want to share files with. To me the cool thing about this is the fact its a desktop/iphone app so have things like drag and drop, and can manage lists and security settings without going and logging into a dropbox online. I have way to many browsers open already. ...theres one more that I think should be mentioned but I won't go into detail about is [MongoHub](http://mongohub.todayclose.com/), a cool GUI for your Mongo databases. http://www.nutheory.com/posts/3