Those of us who primarily develop Rails applications on OS X are mostly familiar with TextMate, a great, powerful and stylish editor that seemingly entices more Rails developers over to the Mac platform every day (judging by the comments on the #rubyonrails IRC channel). However, another option available to all platforms is the GNU Emacs editor, an open source Emacs-based text editor that’s been around since the computer dark ages.
The Ruby Visual Identity Team have released a Ruby logo kit for use under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. The kit includes high resolution JPEG and PNG bitmaps, along with PDF, Adobe Illustrator, Xara, and Flash vector format versions. Subject to the Creative Commons license, this logo pack makes it easy to use the official Ruby logo within your own projects and Web sites (perhaps a redesign of Ruby Inside’s logo should be on the cards..)
Corban Brook presents a step-by-step guide to producing ‘great looking collages’ using Ruby and the RMagick graphics library. Rather than be stuck with a dry picture-by-picture view, Brook uses RMagick to great effect to produce a complex, dynamic image that looks as if it were put together by hand. If for nothing else, this is a great look at some reasonably advanced RMagick code and a great way to learn about a few of the more arcane methods it offers.
Nick Sieger has put together pretty dependency graphs for Ruby, Java, and JavaScript using the YACC definitions for each. If none of this makes sense, at least the pictures are enjoyable, and if you print out the high res copy it’d look great as a wall poster.
Want to get the Google-powered Ruby Search (searches over 40 Ruby sites - blogs, forums, references in one hit) easily accessible in your Firefox browser? Now you can, head over to the Google Ruby Search site and click the link to add the search to your search bar.
Hot on the heels of the last post comes a new feature to Ruby Inside.. a Ruby and Rails search engine powered by Google. It’s on the front page here at Ruby Inside (link for those reading via RSS) and lets you search a bumper collection of Ruby and Rails sites in one go.
If you search for ‘Integer’ you get the Ruby class references, rather than the Java and Wikipedia links you get with Google.com, and you can use it as a…
Ruby Search, a project by Simon Parker, is a special Web search tool that looks through the Rails class index, Rails methods, Ruby standard libraries, and Programming Ruby and presents the results in a simple sidebar to be viewed in a frame on the right. It seems to be a bit patchy from my tests, but it’s still a cool tool. (Found via ozmm)
The winners of the Rails Day have been announced. For those who haven’t heard about it before, Rails Day is an annual contest in which hundreds of developers take 24 hours to develop an application.
Evan Weaver has put together a great run-through of the different winners along with what each one is and how it looks.
Merb is a micro-framework (developed by Ezra Zygmuntowicz) that ties in with Mongrel and erb and provides basic controller and view templating. It’s an ideal way to put together quick and simple Web applications with Ruby that don’t rely on any of the fancier features offered by Rails. It does have support for ActiveRecord, however. Merb allows you to create small systems that produce dynamic requests and can interact with databases but without the significant weight of the Rails framework. Where…
