Referencing Android layout elements before defining them
Occasionally it’s convenient to have an Android RelativeLayout that references another layout element that hasn’t been defined at that point in the XML file. E.g.:
Announcing Flipout! 2.0!
I am very pleased to announce a major update to Grio’s memory matching game: Flipout!
Flipout! is a game of luck and skill where you need to match pairs of cards… similar to the game of Concentration. We throw a few twists at you, however, to add to the challenge. What if suddenly the cards decided to up and swap themselves? Can you keep track of entire rows moving as one? And just when you thought you had a handle on things, one of the cards explodes, scrambling all of the cards around it!
jQuery Placeholder Library on AngularJS
This is for anyone who has to build an AngularJS application that needs to support IE9 and below.
Filedart 1.0 Released
Today we launched a new productivity app for Mac OS called Filedart (filedart.com). Filedart allows users to share files and screenshots in seconds. Drag a file or take a screenshot and your file is on the cloud. A URL is instantly in your clipboard, ready to be pasted into chat windows, emails, or sharing tools. On the receiving end, users click on the URL link to access the file or image in their browser. No sign in or registration is required.
This isn’t a new concept, but we think we’ve done it better. We intentionally kept the feature set minimal, focusing on design and usability. As we developed the tool, we made frequent use of Filedart for collaboration. We darted screenshots of the product page, various iterations, of the logo, nightly builds, and marketing strategies. It quickly became apparent that we were settling into a new way of working. After a few tosses, using Filedart becomes as intuitive and natural as Copy/Paste. While you don’t need Copy/Paste to work on a Mac, most of us would hate to go without. Filedart starts to feel the same way.
In terms of privacy, we don’t request user data and promise not to peek at your files. We don’t know who you are, and we are not interested in snooping. Ultimately we hope that the tool we created is useful, reliable, and secure.
We would love to hear your feedback on how to make Filedart better – just email us at feedback@filedart.com. Happy darting!
Brad
In search of a better Image Optimizer
Web users never like to wait for a website to load. As a software company, a long wait time can result in losing potential clients. One of the tricks that can speed up the loading of your website is the optimization of your images. There are several free tools that you can use for this. Here are five that I recommend.
Generating Static Pages with Rails
When working on Filedart we wanted some statically served pages, but to use our site template(s) to have them fit the look and feel. Updating our site’s assets (javascript, css, images, etc) should be easy to update in our static pages as well. Here is a brief overview of how I made this happen.
Of Darts and Buckets
Recently, I had the opportunity to work on an exciting in-house project for Grio called Filedart. This service, which will launch in the near future, affords the denizens of the web the ability to effortlessly upload content to the cloud by dragging photos or files to a small icon in their taskbar. After the file is uploaded by the client, the service automatically copies a mini-fied URL to the client’s clipboard. This URL leads to a brand-new, public web hosting wrapper for that file that they can easily distribute to their friends of colleagues to share. The service is free, and users don’t even have to log-in to use it.
Defining Software Quality
Here at Grio we strive to constantly improve the quality of our software. But what exactly does that mean? Is there a way to measure software quality? What are the metrics? What are the tools needed for this endeavor?
Unit vs. Acceptance Testing (Part 2)
By now, my post on unit tests influenced you so much that now you have 100% unit test coverage. But yet, some functional bugs still creep in and you still get the dreaded “It’s a bug because you didn’t build what I wanted” bug.
So let’s take a look at acceptance tests and how they can you help you improve your external quality and your compliance with product requirements.
How to create a rake cron job in Heroku
A few weeks ago I had to deal with setting up a cron job that periodically updated some db tables of a Ruby on Rails application running on Heroku. Here’s a brief step-by-step tutorial to make your life easier in case you were approaching the same task.