I have just had the most hard core css intensive weekend ever. Then end product is that SoapBX has received a major update in the stylesheet and userinterface department.
I’ve wanted to have a much more flowing intuitive userinterface, however that can be one of the hardest things to do. SoapBX is an online application, not an online publication, so the user interface needs to be different than your regular weblog or similar application.
Eric Meyer the father of the CSS stylesheet that I use to format the presentations has also been busy. He has released version 1.1b4 of the S5 Stylesheets. I have updated SoapBX now to support this latest version, which has several neat new features as well as is much cleaner than before.
My presentation thumbnails pretty much emulate the layout of Eric’s slides now and I have most of the work done now, to allow people to create their own templates. All I really need for that now is the userinterface.
As I’ve said before, Ruby on Rails saves me from much of the annoyig plumbing that you have to spend a lot of time doing in the J2EE world, however I now have gotten so deep and dirty in css and dhtml that I otherwise wouldn’t have dared doing, that that has now been taking almost all my development time. I think the bases are now done for me to focus on the application now though.
One of the coolest MIDP applets I have seen in a long time is MidpSSH.
With this free applet you can connect via ssh to just about any unix server from your mobile phone. They have a range of versions for both MIDP 1.0 and 2.0 phones, where you can select the features you want to conserve memory. The MIDP 1 version with ssh1 lite build worked on my ancient Nokia 6610 phone. However I tested it on my wife’s LG U8120 3G Phone with the full MIDP 2.0 version.
This is great it has full support for ansi colored text as seen in linux directory listings. I was able to connect to one of my servers at a reasonable speed via 3G. The usefulness of this would be enhanced by writing macros for common tasks. This you can do on the phone. Typically I would imagine you would use this for remote monitoring and emergency work on a server while youre on the road, so it would be good to setup an emergency tool kit of macros to help you out.
I love the way GMail uses JavaScript for everything to create a very intuitive web application. It is one of my goals of SoapBX my online presentation editor and viewer to allow the same kind of flexibility.
One of the first things you’ll notice when you start editing your presentation is the realtime preview. Many other RubyOnRails applications are taking the XMLHttpRequest route for textile preview. I was certain that that wasn’t necessary and sure enough google to the rescue brings me Jeff Minards’s JavaScript Textile . Using this and plain jane dhtml for non textile parts, I have implemented a fast intuitive preview.
Now, do you think I would give up on using the latest cool thing XMLHttpRequest? Of course not. If you look on the presentation edit screen, you will notice that there aren’t any save or submit buttons. What happens is that once you finish a field that you have changed, the onblur event sends a request back to the server using XmlHttpRequest. This happens fairly quick and in the background. I have used the objects background color as a visual feedback to show that it is being updated.
The great thing about RubyOnRails is that I can spend time on cool stuff such as this and not all the application plumbing necessary in j2ee.
So what is missing? First of all I know that the style sheet looks like cr*P in IE. It is my priority now to get that working. Secondly I want to use XmlHttpRequest for the last two parts of the editing scree:
- New Slide
- Move Slide Up or Down
It shouldn’t be too hard, now I’ve grocked it for everything else. Deleting a slide does use XmlHttpRequest and dhtml.
Thirdly the Taging system is broken and I’m working on that.
Finally most of the basic account management stuff is missing. I only have a very basic change profile screen.
I am getting there. Thanks to the power of ruby on rails.
I am looking for a new hosting provider for all the NeuClear sites as I have been forced to take them down. Please be patient. This includes the following sites:
You can still find some highlevel info at:
as well as the developer sites for the individual projects:
If anyone has recommendations for good cheap dedicated server providers to run java based apps, please let me know. I am looking at EasySpeedy who are right here in Denmark, however they are all out right now.
The other day I tried to add a password to a database for the local development mysql instance that I am using. Rails hoarked on it and I didn’t have time to investigate it further. Instead I left the user without password.
Now I updated rails to the new 0.9.4 and suddenly my rails was throwing wierd mysql permission errors.
It seems that Rails didn’t support thew 4.1.1 connection protocol very well. I then added a password and it worked. However I am not sure it should hoark when there isn’t a password present.
Update Found the bug and fixed in this patch
Like everyone else I have been fascinated with the Mac Mini. It is a very low entry level machine into the world of Macintosh and tiny.
I am a very mobile oriented person. I travel frequently and dont want to buy any equipment that I can’t drag along to the next project/country or whatever. As long as I havent got a monitor with it I could easily take it with me. I realise that the iBook 12” is probably what I should get. However it is nearly twice the price. I dont own a monitor though as all my computers are notebooks. So what I would think would be cool would be if I could hook up to it and control it via VNC and or ssh.
Now, I know the answer is yes. But would I need a monitor for the first run of it to enable ssh and install vnc? I seem to remember that on first run on macs you need to go through an installation procedure. But Im not sure. I guess I could take it to work and get it setup using a monitor here. I guess I really should just go for an iBook. But hey, Im a low budget kind of geek.
I got an idea less than two weeks ago and now as a testament to the
power of Rails I have released the first initial beta version of
SoapBx, with less than 20 hours of programming involved so far.
SoapBX is an application to create css based presentations and uses
Erik Meyer’s cool S5 css and js code
With SoapBX you can use basic Textile and a simple web app to create
presentations.
What are my priorities with this right now?
- Improve the user account management screens (there aren’t any right now)
- Create more themes (right now only the standard S5 theme is used)
- Allow users to create their own themes
- Integrate with Flickr for image management
- Add a blog and a forum
Flickr is pretty cool. I will try to upload some of my photos here.
This one is from Isla Contadora in the Las Perlas islands in Panama.