Mc-Kenna.com

Some details have been made available by The University of Washington on how to develop web applications for iPhone - lots of basics in there, like keeping a good separation of HTML and CSS, but also some specifics on e.g. the screen width, some limitations in place, etc. Mandatory reading for anyone doing iPhone apps.

UPDATE: Apparently someone didn’t like the info being posted publically, so someone posted a copy of the iPhone details elsewhere.

There’s finally a ColdFusion-based project management tool for everyone’s enjoyment:

• Project Tracker

Well worth trying out, if you do a lot of ColdFusion work.

While working on a site in Rails tonight I was adding a button_to that I wanted a JS confirmation requester. Well, based on my albeit beginner knowledge of Rails I thought the following would work:

As it turned out this wouldn’t work, it kept adding “?confirm=Really empty your cart?” to the URL instead of doing a popup. A bit of fiddling later I realized that to work correctly the additional arguments to button_to need to be arrays, e.g.:

I just came across this - a brand new website testing tool called WBox that is really easy to use. If you do any sort of web application development this is worth trying out.

One fault that could be levied at the computer industry is that they’ve lost a lot of the out-of-the-box creativity experience from the early days, back in the 80’s when every computer you bought came out of the box with a programming language that anyone (with a manual or two) could start writing their own Hello World apps. Back then most people didn’t learn to program at college, they learned from their $200 home computers. There is a new option for people seeking this experience again called Hackety Hack, a new programming kit based on the existing Ruby language bundled in a really easy-to-use package. Although aimed at children it is also well suited to anyone who wants to try their hand at something a little bit different, and is well worth giving a try.

The Rails plugin Goldberg is really quite good for kick-starting a site with its permissions system and basic CMS. There is one small bug in it though, it doesn’t like adding nested controllers in the admin console. There is, however, a simple work-around: simply go to e.g.:

• http://localhost:3000/goldberg/site_controllers/new_called/search

That will load up the New Controller page which lets you type in a controller name and set the default permissions for it, so all you have to do is type in the name of your new controller, e.g. admin/news, and it'll work just fine from there!

UPDATE: FYI this has been fixed in the latest v0.2.1.

Parallels Desktop, the app that lets you run a virtual copy of Windows or Linux on your Mac, has just gotten better with the announcement of the forthcoming version 3 which adds two really snazzy features:

• You can now set software on one of the OSes (Windows on the virtual machine, or the host OSX) to run software on the other side when it is launched, e.g. if you’re running Outlook on the virtual Windows you can launch attachments in OSX apps without any stupid fiddling. Awe-Shum!
• 3D support for games and other uses; how well this works is left to be seen, but it will hopefully mean being able to run Diablo 1 at the very least :)

Despite its name, Genie Games Backup is a general purpose backup utility for Windows that lets you make backups of any files you want, and run the backup either manually or on an automatic schedule. While their fully-fledged commercial products work wonders, I’m personally amazed they’re giving away something so fully fledged for free. Well worth trying out if you don’t already have a backup utility.