Ramblings

Android 1.6 Donut

Today I updated my Google ION (HTC Magic-ish) phone to Android 1.6. It's no where near as smooth an upgrade process as iPhone software but I eventually figured it out using the fastboot method described on HTC's Goole ION product support page (http://developer.htc.com/google-io-device.html).

After tinkering with it for a few minutes I came up with what I think is a statement that captures the overall Android experience.

Periods of functionality punctuated by awkward, stuttering pauses of feedback and interaction.

I'd really like to see Android get better but so far, the user interaction is not even remotely responsive and offers almost no feedback.

QuadCamera

QuadCamera is a pretty fun iPhone app that's really grown on me. It basically turns your iPhone into a Lomo (http://www.lomography.com/) camera. I love the effects and there's just something about several consecutive stills that just looks so good.

They have a site (http://artandmobile.com/quadcamera/) to go along with it that will take your strips and turn them into animated gifs if you're inclined to do so.

Overall pretty cool experience and a very good example of an iPhone app that exists beyond Springboard with the above feature bringing more to the experience.

Good job guys.

Script/destroy and Scaffold.css

So script/destroy can be pretty handy if you're not the most accurate typist. A downside is that it deletes scaffold.css which, at this point, I'm still relying on for the rest of my rails app.

Though not critical there is already an issue filed:
http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/7189

To get the scaffold.css file back in it's pristine state I had to copy it from another project to my live server... didn't find a better way with .5 minutes of searching.

First Hiccup

So, following along with the 15 Minute Blog Tutorial i created a Post model using:
script/generate scaffold Post subject:string body:text

Which managed to fail somehow, producing an error in my log looking something (or exactly) like:
ActionView::TemplateError (undefined local variable or method `new_post_path' for #<ActionView::Base:0x41f5b57c>) on line #20 of app/views/posts/index.html.erb:
17: <% end %>
18: </table>
19: <br />
20: <%= link_to 'New post', new_post_path %>

I'm not sure exactly what went wrong. I recreated a new model called Ramble with the same process as above and it worked just fine...

A Log of my Journey Learning Rails

So I'm doing an experiment. I've decided to learn Ruby on Rails. The experiment part comes in the way I plan to approach it. I'm going to write about my experiences of creating a simple rails app that functions as my personal site and blog. It will be updated, tweaked, improved over time and as i do i'll be writing about what i've done, problems I encountered, and what I did to fix them. By the end I hope to have a fairly good history to look back at and a functional site that serves my changing needs.