Articles by Alon Salant
Viscape in USA Today
Our client Viscape was cited in a USA Today article on travel to DC for the upcoming inauguration as showing a 25x increase in rental listings. Viscape provides vacation rental listings and travel destination planning for property owners and travelers who want to use the wisdom of crowds to maximize their vacation experience.
SFMOMA.org Redesign Launches
The San Francisco of Modern Art released the redesign of www.sfmoma.org on Monday. This redesign has been in the works for a couple years and is the result of a lot of hard work by the folks at SFMOMA, Hot Studio and of course Carbon Five. Congratulations to all involved. SFMOMA.org is the latest site …
The Aardvark is out of the bag
TechCrunch is spreading the word about our client The Mechanical Zoo and their social search product Aardvark. I’m sure they’re helping the network grow. I certainly got a number of requests for invites to the beta as soon as the post was up. We worked closely with TMZ to bootstrap the development of Aardvark. They …
“We can’t afford to *not* take an agile approach”
We’re spending a couple days next week with developers at one of our clients to practice agile and more specifically test driven development. In preparation I’ve been exchanging emails with one of their leads on what he is hoping they will get out of this time. He’s a great developer who has recently been exposed …
Rewrite or Rescue
Java has been the tool of choice for enterprise application development for many organizations for over 10 years. We are seeing more and more applications that are aging and suffering for it. We have worked with several recent clients to breathe new life in to these legacy applications so they can evolve and grow with …
Alan Cooper presented by IxDA at Hot Studio
Alan Cooper spoke last night around the corner at Hot Studio at an event organized by the San Francisco chapter of IxDA, the Interaction Design Association. His talk was titled “An Insurgence of Quality” and was similar to the talk he gave at an IxDA event in Savannah in February. Cooper talked for a while …
Using paginating_find with has_finder
I’ve been enjoying using has_finder by Nick at Pivotal Labs and recently added pagination to the application I am providing volunteer time to for the San Francisco Bike Kitchen. I like the semantics of paginating_find over will_paginate but am not married to that choice if anyone wants to try to convince me otherwise. In any …
markaby_scaffold Rails Plugin
We’ve been enjoying using Markaby on our recent rails projects. When bootstrapping with scaffolding there’s a common recipe of turning ERB views into Markaby and then refactoring views with Markaby helper functions. One project wrote a rake task that converts ERB views to Markaby. Then Ingar created a plugin that re-implements the base Rails scaffolding …
Google Talking with JRuby and Smack
We’ve kicked off a new project that extends well beyond standard webapp frameworks and tools including significant instant messaging integration. Portions of the project will use Ruby on Rails for web functionality. I know that the open source Jabber software from Jive Software is excellent quality and feature rich. Would JRuby be a good tool …
JRubyGems Release
I’m releasing a first version of JRubyGems. This post is documentation until I come up with something better. JRubyGems allows you to package RubyGems on your Java application classpath. It removes the file system dependencies on locally installed gems that get awkward when using JRuby and dependent gems in a Java environment. Usage Use JRubyGems …