Beyond The Type

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Posted by Martin on Jan 03, 2008

New Year, New start. Hello CitySafe

As of January this year I’m pleased to announce I will be working with the team at CitySafe.

CitySafe build tools to help emergency responders collaborate and communicate. These include mission critical apps in use daily by the Police, Government, and high profile financial and retail institutions. It’s predominately Ruby (on Rails) based so I’m looking forward to getting stuck in.

For those of you wondering about Working With Rails…. This remains under ownership of DSC and I have passed all the day to day running over to colleagues there. Prior to my departure I ensured that the Hackfests would continue up until March. Much thanks goes to Josette @ O’Reilly for the RailsConf ticket prizes.

All in all WWR has been an amazing project. I’m so pleased to have created it and see it grow from strength to strength benefiting the community so greatly. Many thanks to everyone who uses the site and contributed in some way over the past year. It has been fantastic to have your input and feedback.

I’ve heard many success stories from developers starting user groups as a result of finding each other on WWR, to getting a job through recommendations, collaborating on projects or helping to get Rails adopted in their workplace. Not forgetting to mention the numerous prizes given away through the regular Hackfests.

I hope it has benefited you in some way and continues to do so. Thanks everyone!

Stay tuned…

Continue to keep up with my news via this blog (rss) and via Twitter

Posted by Martin on Jan 02, 2008

VirtueDesktops alternative for OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

Just upgraded to Leopard and sad at the loss of VirtueDestkops? Spaces not doing it for you? Read on…

Background

When Leopard was announced Spaces was touted as the replacement for VirtueDesktops. This lead to Tony Arnold the main developer of VirtueDesktops downing tools and declaring VirtueDesktops dead.

So everybody waited in anticipation for OS X 10.5… only to find Spaces not living up to their expectations.

So why the big fuss?

With the advent of 10.5 Apple has tightened up the code such that no other Desktop managers properly work on top of Leopard. This leaves many followers of VirtueDesktops little or no choice than maybe to change their working practices to Spaces or find alternatives….

1. HyperSpaces

From the creator of VirtueDesktops comes HyperSpaces. Unfortunately this isn’t set for launch until 2008 and it also isn’t clear if it will have the same rich feature set that VirtueDesktops has.

2. YouControlDesktops

YouControlDesktops has probably the closest functionality you are going to get to VirtueDesktops. The interface for configuring things isn’t as intuitive or slick as Virtue but it’s not such a big deal since you’ll not need to use it that often.

Currently there is a beta version for 10.5 that works pretty well but there is some kinks. Namely issues with the Dock not always getting context when it should.

So in summary the solution is not perfect but it’s the best I’ve found so far. Download the beta and provide the developers with feedback, hopefully we can help push this forward.

Posted by Martin on Nov 21, 2007

Mephisto gets a core team

Good news for Mephisto users. The core team has been decided and the ideas for the 1.0 release are being finalised.

Interestingly enough there may also be a push to switch over to using Git which is gaining a bit of traction in the Rails community. I’m an avid user of SVK and gave Git a try a while back but stopped short after hearing tales of woe with git-svn… I may revisit at some point.

Posted by Martin on Oct 22, 2007