Android Webapp in 3 Minutes

I’m going to use the rails application I created on the post How to Build a Mobile Rails 3.1 App to create a simple android app. You probably can do this in less than 3 minutes, I guess. ** UPDATE ** This guide is good to get you started, but I consider it deprecated. I think the end result gives a bad user experience, since it will won’t behave as an proper mobile app, and it won’t also behave as a webpage. Continue reading

Vagrant Archlinux Box

I could not find a vagrant archlinux box, so I created one. It’s available on SourceForge. (Archlinux 2011.08.19) It’s very easy to setup: gem install vagrant vagrant box add archlinux http://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/sourceforge/v/project/va/vagrantarchlinx/2011.08.19/archlinux_2011.08.19.box vagrant init vagrant up You can download it manually too.

How to Build a Mobile Rails 3.1 App

This is a simple guide to show how to use the Mobylette gem to make your Rails application respond to mobile and standard devices, and the jquery_mobile_rails gem to make it look awesome while doing that.

The final application’s source is available on Github. It is also running on heroku, if you want to check.

Continue reading

JQuery-Mobile for Rails 3.1 Gem

I’ve created a very simple gem that includes the jquery mobile files to Rails’ assets pipeline. To install, just add to your Gemfile: gem 'jquery_mobile_rails' And require the javascript/css files in your manifests: //= require jquery.mobile.min *= require jquery.mobile.min That’s it. No helpers, no methods, only the files in your application assets pipeline. For more information check the github repo.

Mobylette: Mobile Requests Handling (GEM)

In the last few days have been working on this gem. It’s named Mobylette and it works by identifying mobile requests in your app, and handling them with a new .mobile format. Mobylette’s Github project Mobylette’s Documentation Mobylette on RubyGems.org Once you have it installed on your application, adding respond_to_mobile_requests to your controller will enable it to deal with mobile requests. It will automatically look for a .mobile.erb (.haml, or whatever) when a request comes from a mobile device. Continue reading

Asynchronous UISearchBar / UISearchDisplayController With Autocomplete

This is my second week working with objective-c and iphone. The task is to make a search with autocomplete. Both search and autocomplete should get results from a remote webservice. I was searching google about how to populate a UISearchDisplayController with remote data, asynchronously of course, when I found a great guide here. I already had a working datasource for autocomplete: - (BOOL)searchDisplayController:(UISearchDisplayController *)controller shouldReloadTableForSearchString:(NSString *)searchString { [_autocompleteDataSource searchFor:searchString]; return NO; } The trick was to reload the tableview data in my datasource ([tableView reloadData]), when it finishes loading. Continue reading

Uploadify on Rails, without rack middleware (using devise)

You can avoid the middleware hack when using flash in rails with logged in users. As you should know, the browser doesn’t share the session with flash. Before using devise, I was using a rack middleware to hack into user session. But there is a much cleaner way if you use devise, you can use the built in feature :authentication_token. More details on how are here.