I have spent many hours holed up in my tent reading Rails books and tapping sample code into my Mac Book Pro.

I have learnt alot compared to last year and now I can safely say I “Get” MVC!

It’s brillliantly concieved interface is a revelation for me. I had intially resigned myself to building a relatively simple Web-to-Lead form for submitting a Borrowing Capacity Assessment from our website, but FormAssembly has changed all that. I can have conditional regions based on the users input, so different sections will appear on the form according to employment status for instance.

I have been having a wonderful time setting up these forms, FormAssembly is a delight to use and there seems to be very little that I can’t do with it.

A few of the things I needed that form assembly supports:

• Save and resume input of the form later
• Multi-Page forms
• Direct export and field mapping into SalesForce
• Upsert support into Salesforce
• Easy to Use Interface
• Conditional form elements - great for multipath surveys
• Workflow - hand form data between forms sequentially

Anyway, I will have to post a link to the completed form when it’s finished!

Strike me dead, I swear Chrome is at least twice as fast as Firefox to use while navigating around Salesforce.

Pages load real fast, Salesforce now is an even more pleasurable app to use. (is that even possible?)

I think this probably would have something to do with Chromes fancy multi-threaded Javascript processor.

Salesforce uses alot of Ajax, and I can see alot of applications benefiting from this. More than anything that Chrome has to offer, I think performance with the latest and greatest Web 2.0 applications will be it’s biggest contribution to our working lives.

I’m convinced that as we move more and more to the “Cloud” for storing every aspect of life, every nano-second of performance will add up.

Right now there is alot of intellectual and creative capital being invested into the iPhone as a new platform for delivering content and services. As of this moment, a million ideas are slowly brewing in the minds of futurists, technologists and developers all around the world.

Apple’s App Store is going to change everything…

With the iPhone version one, Apple created a platform, on Monday the 9th June, Apple delivered a platform.

People think that the big anouncement was the iPhone 3G. Sure, it will be alot easier to deliver content and services with a faster radio modem (HSPA), but the real announcement was tied to how applications are now delivered to the device.

The App Store and Universal Push Service will enable developers to deliver services to users on the go that had not even been thought of or contemplated before the first xCode SDK was released.

Here is a question I have been asking myself that could be solved using a collection of web services, On Demand Applcations, software mashups and iPhone interfaces to existing SaaS (Software-as-a-service) solutions.

1. Is it possible to run an online business completely from an iPhone?
2. What are the tools necessary to run a business without touching a desktop computer or other non-mobile device?
3. Could this be done for all business types, or is it only possible for certain kinds of businesses and or job functions?

So my challenge is this:

1. Develop the tools and interfaces to run a mobile business completely from an iPhone for a year
2. A desktop computer can not be used or touched during this time
3. All tasks must be completed completely and solely on the iPhone

Here are some requirements:

• Book Keeping (ERP)
  eSuite, Force.com. soho.com etc
• Lead Generation, Account Management and Opportunity Management, Quotes, Product Books and Case Management (CRM)
  Salesforce, eSuite, soho.com etc
• Website Content Management; Mobile Blogging, Knowledge Bases (CMS, Blogs & Wiki’s)
• Printing to network capable printers (CUPS)

This is a big question, and one I think will evolve and grow as I blog more about it.

Hi!

I just discovered by accident that word can send blog items to wordpress!

Just trying it now.

Hey,

Just found this neat OS X screen ruler.

I got tired of doing a screen capture, loading it into photoshop and measuring using info from there.

This makes it all so easy, and best of all its free!

http://www.pascal.com/software/freeruler/

Technorati Tags: Apple, design, OS X, ruler, screen

Imagine my delight when on adding a hosting account for a friend that Wordpress 2.5 was available!

So with much delight I set to and upgraded all three of my own Blogs in about 3 minutes flat.

So easy to do.

The alternative was to hard to even consider… Spending the night backing up and ftping all the files to all three sites, running through the setup procedure etc etc.

After a fair bit of gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair, I have managed to get Suckerfish drop down menus and yaml.de working together. Add in a dash of jquery, care of Myles Angell and we have magic!

I will make the css a little more analogous to the wider yaml community so it will work with as little modification to the basemod.css file as possible.

Just a little tip, the one thing that really confused me the most… It was a real “DER!” moment when I realised where I was going wrong:

Try removing the overflow attribute from #nav in the basemod.css file.

I couldn’t understand why the drop down wasn’t working until I realised the #nav div was cropping everything trying to go outside it… like a dropdown.

This may also be of use to jYAML users as well, I know many Joomla themer’s like to use drop down menus in their designs.

Technorati Tags: css, dropdown, jyaml, drop down, suckerfish, yaml

This image should be a sunset, but a neat anti-leaching measure will replace your stolen images on another site with a replacement image.

This is the tutorial I used:
http://websiteowner.info/tutorials/server/bandwidththeft.asp

Alot of bandwidth gets stolen when people link to your images from their website on your hosting account.

If you follow the tutorial carefully, this will be a thing of the past!

Just started learning to program in Ruby on Rails.

What is it?

The Ruby part is an easy to understand runtime compiled object orientated programming language.

Using plain language, Ruby allows novices to get started alot quicker than other pre-compiled languages like Java and C.

What about Rails?

For web developers / designers, Rails is where all the action is.

It’s basically a full stack object orientated web development framework.

Importantly, Rails provides a full MVC (Models, Views, Controllers) framework for developers to script with.

What does this mean?

It means that Rails does a heap of things that your average web developer should never need to worry about, like database abstraction and constant recoding of similar logic.

It takes alot of repetition out of the development process and this is a great thing for rapid application development.

The Cool thing about MVC’s is that you can separate your database (Models) code from your logic (controller) to your template code (html, xml etc).

It keeps things tidy and reusable.

Got a page that shows a list of podcast items and another xml feed podcast feed? Why recode your logic for both when you can use a single controller and models. for both “Views”?

I just get giddy thinking about it.

I’ll keep you posted on some of the projects that I want to do with it.