Noel Rappin Writes Here

Top Story iPads. Lots of them popping up in and around work. Probably some more coherent impressions coming later. Wait, once again, Twitter has a big announcement after I start writing this. This time, they are going to start placing ads in the Twitter stream in various ways to be announced today. My quick reactions: a) I long suspected this day was coming, b) if the ads in clients are any guide, they aren’t particularly burdensome, c) implementation details will decide how irritating this is.

Top Story For a while, it looked like the top story was going to be Apple’s new developer Rule 3.3.1, described here by John Gruber. More on that in a second. But the real top story is the news that Twitter has bought Tweetie, intending to rebrand it as Twitter for iPhone, and dropping the price to a low, low, free. Eventually, it will be the core of Twitter for iPad.

Book Update Not much to report. Still messing with the integration test chapter. Also still waiting for cover possibilities. Tab Dump Continuing the RailsEnvy story from yesterday, today Jason Seifer posts some more details. This essay is more personal. I wish Jason nothing but good things. In a somewhat ironic counterpoint to Gregg and Jason writing about Rails envy, it was widely reported today that Justin Long thinks the “I’m a Mac” ads, of which he is the right-hand half, are over and done.

Book Status Did a read-through of the integration testing chapter, mostly for grammar and clarity, there haven’t been any technical changes in the material that I have been able to discover. Next up is Webrat/Capybara, which will have some changes. Other Got my RailsConf non-approval, which is disappointing but, you know, I also probably could have put a bit more effort into polishing my proposals. Tab Dump Gregg Pollack gives a brief history of RailsEnvy.

Book Status Phone call with Colleen (the book’s editor) confirms what I had posted yesterday. We should know shortly when the beta actually will begin for real. Started looking at the integration and Webrat chapters. I’ll be adding Capybara to the mix as well. Also started putting together the Rails 3 version of the sample code, which quickly foundered because there isn’t an official Rails 3 version of Authlogic. There are a couple of forks that claim compatibility, though, so I think one of them will serve as a shortcut.

Book Status The initial beta release of Rails Test Prescriptions has been pushed back at least a week. It’s not anybody’s fault, just a traffic jam of books all coming into the system at the same time (including, I assume, the new iPad book). Hoping to see a cover and other details in time for next week. In the meantime, I’m continuing on as if we’re in the beta, which means I’m now revisiting the section on integration testing.

Actual public beta of Rails Test Prescriptions is finally getting close enough that I can see it. Unless I forgot something from my conversation earlier today, there are three things that need to be done before the book can be put on beta-sale: Both myself and Colleen, the editor, need to do one more read through the chapters in question to make sure there aren’t any gaping things missing.

iPad, iPad, iPad. Five Random Thoughts Given that Apple’s business model for most of the past 30 years has been not to compete on feature lists, but rather to pare down features in the name of user experience, that a tech analyst would at least pause before proclaiming the iPad to be a failure because it doesn’t have feature X. I don’t think the iWork stuff got enough attention.

The book went out for 50% technical review this week, covering the first nine chapters, which is about 160 pages. With the warning that I don’t actually decide any of this stuff, it seems like if the reviews are basically positive, then the book will head into beta purchase while I work on the rest of it. I doubt that will happen in February, but I’m really hopeful for sometime in March.

Here’s where we are in the publishing cycle of Rails Test Prescriptions: The book went through a major hurdle in December when it went through “Publisher review”, where three chapters were submitted to Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt for review. Dave and Andy, thankfully, said mostly good things, asked for a few revisions, and caught some relatively minor technical issues. (I suspect the major technical issues are in a later chapter…).