We're actively seeking developers & designers for our new Detroit location. Learn more
Technology patents appear to be broken. When a company like Yahoo can claim to own “customizing views to certain friends” and “Dynamic Page Generation” it’s clear to me that patents are broken. Twitter, and others like RedHat, appear to agree and have stepped up to do something about it. Twitter’s Innovator’s Patent Agreement: [The] Company…
My rails application has a variety of users, and I want to make the root of my app load something different based on the needs of each user after log in. For example, if a student logs in, I want to load the students/dashboard page. If a Teacher logs in, I want to load the…
I recently wrote a small wrapper for the Flickr API in backbone.js. I found the Flickr API to be a little strange but very consistent in its strangeness. When developing a web-based application, thinking about your API can help demystify design and responsibility of controllers, models, routes etc. Here are a few resources I’ve found…
I share a desk both at home and at work, which means that space is always at a premium. Here are a few of things I’ve tried to make better use of the space in my work environment. 1. Vertical Laptop Stand A vertical laptop stand can free up a large amount of space. While…
Rich fonts, kerned type and grid-based text are expected now when browsing the web. Thanks to browser css support, the W3C, and sites like typekit, we’re now able to offer a much richer text-based experience to our readers. Ellen Lupton has written a wonderful book, Thinking with Type, to help us understand type-rhythm, kerning, and…
Currently, in Rails 3.1 the wrap_parameters controller method works great, but is untestable. Controller specs do not run the wrap_parameter initializer packaged with Rails. Adding a wrap_parameters call to the controller also does not work when running controller specs.
When upgrading a Mac to Apple’s OS X Lion the new no-box-or-cd install left me searching for directions on how to do a fresh install instead of an upgrade. By default OS X Lion upgrades from Snow Leopard potentially leaving old OS cruft laying around.
When mapping a Backbone Model directly to a REST API it is common for the resource you’re accessing to have a nested or associated resources. Backbone Models are a wrapper for a single resource, but do not attempt to implement a nested resource relationship. Backbone Collections also provide a nice mechanism to fetch multiple resources…
Using Sprockets in Rails 3.1 can be a little tricky. It wasn’t hard to get Sprockets compiling CSS files from SASS into CSS. However, it became difficult when we wanted to use a compass mixin and put erb assets into our sass files. Here’s what we did to get it to work 1. Install the…
Carl is the president and co-founder of Atomic Object