Noel Rappin Writes Here

Look, I said it was a weird trick, not necessarily an effective trick… Every day, it seems, I get a digest from Medium that has a bunch of articles that are all titled “9 VS Code Extensions That Will Change Your Life”. To be completely honest, I read a lot of them, and I actually do find some useful tips. But I want to back up a second and talk about developer tools in general.

1. Today’s News: Github for Mac Odds are you heard this one already, but the fine folks at GitHub announced a Mac desktop client. It differs from, say, GitX in that it attempts to be a front end to your entire GitHub account rather than one particular repo. I haven’t used it a ton yet, but a couple of quick impressions: I think we can now definitively say that Tweetie and Loren Brichter is to the current set of Mac applications what Delicious Library was to the batch a few years ago – the source of a widely used design aesthetic.

Top Story Thoughtbot talks about their plans for Shoulda moving forward. The big takeaway is that, while the context library will be separated out for use in Test::Unit, both Shoulda style and Shoulda effort will be focused on RSpec integration. I have some complicated thoughts about this one. I’m thrilled that Shoulda is being maintained – it’s a tool I’ve used a lot, and I was starting to get worried. And they should move their open source tool in any direction they want.

Looks like I did get a few links gathered yesterday. I’m also working on a post about PeepOpen, TextMate, and RubyMine, I had an interesting day with all of them yesterday. I also remember working on a book-like thing once upon a time, and the whole point of doing this daily blog was to give me an incentive to work on the book every day. Links August 19th is the anniversary of Why The Lucky Stiff’s sudden withdrawal from the online Ruby community, and Glenn Vanderburg is organizing Whyday for this Aug 19th, as a day to “put your best practices away” and celebrate Why’s unique spirit and contributions by making something great and off the normal path.

Top Story Beta 3 should be out today. The main change in this Beta is the inclusion of the Cucumber chapter, which has been updated both in terms of new tech, and also in terms of conclusions about how to use Cucumber. And In Rails news… When last we met, Rails 2.3.6 had just been released. Well, in the intervening 24 hours, we’ve bumped all the way to 2.3.8, with two bug fix releases, explained by Jeremy Kemper here and here.

Top Story Just a quick update here. Cucumber chapter newest draft is complete, and I’m hoping it will be beta 3 early next week. Not sure what to do next, I need to look around and see what’s relatively stable with respect to Rails 3. The book is still on sale. Tell all your friends. And then Rails Dispatch this week is about the new routing in Rails 3. Yehuda Katz has a really nice article on workflow with git.

Top Story For me, the top story is still Rails Test Prescriptions on sale, and my discussion yesterday of the raffle for the old Lulu customers. Book Status Now re-doing the Cucumber chapter, which was written long enough ago that it didn’t consider tags. Cucumber has had approximately seventy-million releases in the interim, so there’s some writing to do. This is the first chapter where I’m adding Rails 3 setup instructions, which will eventually go everywhere in the book, of course.

Top Story If you think the top story is going to be anything other than the continued launch of Rails Test Prescriptions, well, you probably don’t know me very well. I may not be a marketing genius, but I do know the value of repetition. I mean, if there’s one thing I know, it’s the value of repetition. Thanks to everybody who made yesterday fun: those of you who bought the book, those of you who blogged or tweeted about the announcement, and anybody who read this.

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.