Category: Brain Dumps

Starting a “professional” Rails 3.1 app with Web App Theme, Devise, and Kaminari

Update: This tutorial is way out of date. If you want to create a modern (ie. 2015) app, please use a generator like RailsBricks.

With the recent release of web-app-theme providing Rails 3.1 support, it’s time once again for me to write a tutorial on how to earn money from cheap clients who can’t afford designers.

For reference, the previous tutorial can be read here.

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crud screen

Every Rails developer knows how to create a Rails app. It’s easy as

rails new APP-NAME-HERE

But how many know how to create an app from scratch that looks good enough to sell to clients i.e. with slick design, authentication, authorization, and all that? Sure, there are tutorials out there that cover those components, but most of them cover them only in isolation from each other. A quick tutorial containing multiple components at a time would be a valuable resource to anyone planning to start a new app.

As the resident dilettante in these parts, I’ve decided to create such a tutorial based on a recent demo I made for a prospective client.

This post will discuss how to create a Rails 3.1 application that looks good enough to sell to clients (of course, YMMV) while still having components found in “professional” apps. This tutorial will cover the following:

  • Andrea Franz’s web-app-theme gem – this gem generates themes for your web app (hence the name). The demo and the list of available themes can be found on this page.
  • Devise – our authentication module. Authlogic‘s fine, but I find Devise’s approach less obtrusive.
  • Haml – replaces Erb. Not perfect (e.g. screws up with inline a tags) but the drastic decrease in code makes passing it up difficult.
  • Rspec – replaces Test::Unit. Only setup will be covered in this post, actual usage is left to the reader.
  • Kaminari – gem for pagination. We’re going to use it in place of the previous gem will_paginate

Rest of the tutorial is below the cut.

Continue reading “Starting a “professional” Rails 3.1 app with Web App Theme, Devise, and Kaminari”

Solve LibreOffice’s SlideShare and Windows Anti-aliasing Problems

antialiasing

I frequently make slides but since I don’t like paying for Office/iWork and I haven’t drunk the Google Docs kool-aid yet, my tool of choice for presentations is LibreOffice Impress.

LibreOffice is more than sufficient for my needs. There are, however, two major problems I’ve encountered so far:

  1. ODP format isn’t fully supported by SlideShare, as you could see from my Haml presentation last year.
  2. I sometimes present in Windows (e.g. Rails workshops with everyone in the audience using Windows) and I’ve noticed that anti-aliasing sucks in that OS even in 3.4.3rc. With me having very good eyesight combined with most of the text in my slides being large phrases (i.e. the proper way to build slides), those jagged edges can be annoying.

Fortunately, there’s a simple solution to both of these problems:

Export to PDF

By exporting to PDF, you bundle the correct fonts in the document. Also, this approach leaves the anti-aliasing to your PDF reader which is more likely to have better AA rendering.

The picture at the top of this post shows the difference between LibreOffice and PDF-XChange Viewer‘s AA rendering, respectively.

Make gitk look better by updating tk

I thought I’ve already done this to all of my machines but it seems that I haven’t done it on this laptop I’m using right now.

Anyway, I use gitk for my graphical git browsing because I’m too lazy to download other graphical packages. Unfortunately, gitk looks like this:

pre-tk8.5
(click pic for larger version)

The solution to this is to install tk8.5 and tell gitk to use it instead of 8.4. From SU:

To fix this the Debian (Ubuntu) way:

$ sudo apt-get install tk8.5
$ sudo update-alternatives --config wish

And then pick the wish8.5 alternative.

Here’s the result:

post-tk8.5

Free Rails 3.0 tutorial/manual

Computer Science teachers have it easy. Every time a new semester rolls in, they can simply reuse the material they’ve been using for years.

As a teacher of a quickly evolving web framework, I do not have that luxury.

As I write this, less than 24 hours have passed since the Rails Core team released the new version of Ruby on Rails: version 3.1.0. This means that I now have to update my student manual (i.e. this document) for upcoming classes to use this new version. Having done that before when we moved from Rails 2.3. to Rails 3.0, I know how much of this document will be changed: sections will be gutted, swaths of code rewritten, and at least one new chapter would be added.

And, yet again, I will not be paid a single cent for those updates.

So instead of just letting this nearly obsolete document go to waste, I’ve decided to give it away for free.

Get it here.