Noel Rappin Writes Here

Hey, guess what, I’ve got another iPad text editor or two to review. The thing is… I really like writing on the iPad, with or without the bluetooth keyboard. It’s a very lightweight, fun writing machine. But all the editors I’ve used have flaws that have been making them less than workable for me. I still like them, but I’m getting resigned to their limitations. For example, iaWriter doesn’t see subfolders, meaning that it doesn’t work with Scrivener sync directories.

So, I’ve been writing technical books for about ten years. What can I say about that time overall? Here are two pie charts representing my published books to date. I’ve thrown in the Lulu version of Rails Test Prescriptions just for the heck of it. Care to guess what the pie charts represent? Before I give the answer, please note that there is basically no correlation between the values in each chart.

As it happens, my generic advice on Rails testing hasn’t changed substantially, even though the tools I use on a daily basis have. Any testing tool is better than no testing. Okay, that’s glib. You can make an unholy mess in any tool. You can also write valuable tests in any tool. Focus on the valuable part. If you’ve never tested a Rails application before, I still recommend you start with out of the box stuff: Test::Unit, even fixtures.

Consider this part of an occasional series where I attempt to revisit tools discussed in Rails Test Prescriptions that have undergone some revision. (NOTE: Most of this was written before the DHH Twitter-storm about testing this week. For the purposes of this post, I’m choosing to pretend the whole thing didn’t happen.) The cucumber-rails gem released version 0.4 last week, which had some significant changes, and intensified what we might call the opinionated nature of Cucumber over what a Cucumber scenario should look like.

When I say that I’m really bad at self-marketing, one of the things that I mean is that I’ve left this blog basically dark for almost a month. This was an especially good idea because a) the TextMate post on Feb 10 became the most read post on this site ever by a factor of 5 over the previous three most popular posts (the PeepOpen review, the iaWriter review, and the thing about writing bad code, in case you care), and b) my book actually came out in print during this time.

I have a couple of upcoming conference and training appearances that I don’t think that I’ve mentioned on the blog before. March 16, I’ll be in Salt Lake City for Training Day, the day before the official start of MountainWestRubyConf. I’ll be doing a full day of training, the morning will be on Improving Your Ruby Skills, and the afternoon will be Getting Started with TDD in a Legacy Environment. You can get more details, including location and pricing at the MWRC site.

After a long time bouncing back and forth, I’ve come back to TextMate as my main editor. I realize that’s starting to sound almost old-school these days, but it still works the best for me. What I’ve come to realize about TextMate versus, say, Vim, or RubyMine is that a) this is a genuinely personal decision and different people are just more comfortable with some tools than other and b) it comes down to what each tool makes easy and how useful that is.

Among Others is an evocative, subtle, and mostly brilliant fantasy novel on the themes of dealing with loss, growing up, learning to live, and how amazing the new Heinlein novel is. People who grew up inhaling SF and fantasy books are, by and large, going to recognize themselves pretty strongly. Not surprisingly then, many SF writers who have reviewed the book on line have raved. I’ll rave too, with some quibbles that we’ll get to in a bit.

I suppose I should get this on the blog… Rails Test Prescriptions was sent to the printer yesterday, actually a couple of days ahead of the schedule that we’ve been on through the last stages of production. Here are the dates, as I understand them… The book is scheduled to leave the printer on Thursday, Feb 17, headed for bookstores and warehouses. I’d expect that you would probably see it in bookstores early the following week.

I mentioned on Twitter the other day that I was starting to like using Haml and it was surprising me because I used to dislike it so much. Colin Harris asked me to elaborate, but Twitter was too short, so here goes. I assume that most people reading this have some idea of what Haml is, if you don’t, it’s an ERb replacement for view depleting which uses Python-style indentation for blocks, and a couple of other tricks for simplifying the amount of markup you need to write in your view – here’s a sample from the Haml tutorial, which gives you the flavor.