I cur­rently develop on a Win­dows machine. (You can cut the snick­er­ing.) There­fore, I don’t have the plea­sure of using Text­Mate. I’m also avoid­ing IDEs as a mat­ter of course when an edi­tor and CLI often avoids the bloat and sub­se­quently works faster. I first used Scite which shipped with InstantRails. I quickly moved over to jEdit when I switched to Rails on Cyg­win. With the right set of plu­g­ins you can quickly and eas­ily get a TextMate-like edi­tor. I decided to give Vim/GVim a try when I saw it in action. As much as I liked the raw power, things just didn’t make sense to me. When you learn to use edi­tors a cer­tain way, it’s hard to break old habits. Enter Cream.

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The UI on a project of mine had to be resiz­able. The UI included a script.aculo.us slider which unfor­tu­nately did not have a resize method nor was it smart enough to update itself should the under­ly­ing ele­ment be resized. So I cre­ated the fol­low­ing extension:

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I’ve sub­mit­ted a patch to the Rails devel­op­ers that adds a Touch­pad con­trol to script.aculo.us. It is a 2D con­trol based heav­ily off of Slider and so shares some of the same options and behav­ior. The Touch­pad call­backs out­put an array [x, y] rather than a sin­gle value v which is what Slider does. Touch­pad also has no han­dles so the last value is not preserved.

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Ruby’s beauty is often attrib­uted to its terse­ness. How­ever, there are times when you need to be really explicit in order to coax it to do your bid­ding. For exam­ple, a Rails form helper needs a bunch of paran­the­ses and curly braces in order to be a named ele­ment. Which makes sense, as :id can rep­re­sent a Rails (ActiveRe­cord) object ID or a DOM ele­ment ID. The Ruby punc­tu­a­tion removes such ambiguity.

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