I’m not a developer and I don’t want to be a developer, but I want to be able to build small apps when I need to, to understand better the code wrote by the people I’m working with, and to put together simple prototypes. That’s why I decided to give it another shot at learning a programming language, in this case Ruby. I chose Ruby because I love its syntax: simple, elegant, readable. Also, it happens to be the language behind the Ruby on Rails, a widely used web framework that I’m planning to learn next.

After some research, I decided to read Learn to Program by Chris Pine, and I’m glad I did so. The book is a pleasure to read, thanks to the colloquial style in which the book is written. Every concept is really well explained, with several example to support the explanations (and please, always re-write the examples with your editor, even just copying helps to impress those concepts in your memory). At the end of each chapter, the author also invites the reader to take on simple challenges (with possible solutions at the end of the book) to practice the concepts just learned. Beside a couple of challenges, I think they were all very well calibrated for each chapter, and I guarantee you, you’ll feel proud of those little programs you’ll write throughout the book.

After been done reading the book, I feel I have good handle on the basic Ruby syntax, and I’m able to write simple applications. Of course the hardest part is to get used to the logic required to write some programs, but I’m sure time and practice will improve that. Definitely Chris raised the bar for the next programming book I’ll read (yes, I’m looking at you Ruby on Rails Tutorial).

You can find Learn to Program at The Pragmatic Bookshelf

Let’s say your are lazy and you don’t like using Terminal to commits on GitHub (I assume that if you are smart enough to use Git, you are also smart enough to use GitHub for your repositories). Let’s say you aren’t an hard core coder (like myself) and you pick your software based on its look and feel. Well, today GitHub released their GitHub for Mac, their spanking new native mac client. I didn’t play with it a lot yet, but for what I’ve seen so far it works great, and it’s complemented by a very elegant and intuitive interface.

I honestly don’t know yet if I will completely substitute Terminal for my commits and GitHub browsing, but I’ll definitely give it a try for a while.

Here’s some screenshots:

I know, I know, enough with these Git clients, use that damn Terminal app! I see your point but for a lot of designers and non-terminal people, having a user-friendly client can be a great way to be introduced to Git. A few weeks ago I was asked to beta test Tower, a soon-to-be released Git client for OS X that is easy to use yet very powerful. The interface is a little more elaborated than other clients like Gity or Gitty, but it that doesn’t seem to affect the ease of use. At the same time, if you like minimal interfaces, you may like Gity’s simplicity better.

On top of the regular Git functions, some of the nice features offered by Tower are a repository manager to keep track of your repos, direct integration with Github, and a stash support.

Tower should be released in November, if you want to read more about it you can visit http://git-tower.com.

During my “Google Chrome” phase, I learned to love some of its extensions. One of those is Rapportive. It’s a super simple CRM for Gmail, that replace the ads with the personal information about the sender based on their email address, pulling data from Twitter, Crunchbase, Linkedin and many other sources.

Since Safari 5 came out I decided to go back using Apple’s browser, but I immediately missed some of my favorite extensions, so I decided to try to port them to the unsupported platform. The first one I tried was Rapportive. I actually almost did nothing thanks to a library for porting Chrome extensions to Safari published by Michael Gundlach (author of AdBlock).

Of course this extension is unofficial and unsupported, and I’m sure the Rapportive guys are already working on a better extension for Safari (even though on the site they said the next browser up is IE). If you can’t wait for them and you want to use their great product on Safari 5, here is my version:

Update
The guys at Rapportive just released the official Safari version of their awesome plugin. To get it, just visit http://rapportive.com with Safari and click install.

Since we started working on Get Apps Done, I had to deal with Git. I never used Git before that, but Heroku, a great platform for hosting Ruby on Rails projects, forced me to. Using Git isn’t too complex, but when you start getting errors or merging problems, then a nice interface would be very helpful. The first client I tried was Git GUI, not really an eye candy but it was getting the job done, but still it didn’t offered me a nice and clear interface for Git. GitX, another Mac OS X Git client, was definitely a great UI improvement, but it was somehow incomplete for what I needed. Finally I recently discovered Gity, in my opinion, a very well done Mac OS X client. The interface is very Apple-ish, and it makes easier to solve problem even for a designer like me. While it had a $18 price tag until recently, now Gity is free and open source, and you can download it from Mac Endeavor’s site.

No, this is not the title of a geek gay porn movie. “One laptop, two guys, six days of SXSW” is the best way to condense an awesome experience I had at SXSW. Everything started at the Fort Lauderdale International airport, when, because of a delay, a generous friend decided to buy the first round of beers to kick start the conference in the best of ways. We all know that SXSW means a lot of bar hopping and parties, and this is when the idea sparked: why don’t we build an application to keep track of who owes you drinks?

Lately I’ve been trying to learn Ruby on Rails, so I thought this could be the perfect project to flex my new Rails skill set, so I asked Emmanuel (@jewgonewild) to assist me. We decided that it would be cool to build the entire application on the flight from Fort Lauderdale to Austin so that we could use it during the conference. To be honest, Emmanuel did a little more than assist me. Ok, aside from the design, he built the whole thing. I just set up the basic structure and created a couple of controllers under his vigilance. So far so good, right? There was one small problem: I was the only one with a laptop we could work on. We ended up building the basic functions on the plane but the work continued throughout the conference. And while we had a working alpha version to use between us friends since day 3, the actual version was completed literally on the flight back to Fort Lauderdale (on St. Patrick’s day, how appropriate). It was a great experience, mostly because it shows once again how to build cool stuff (at least cool in my opinion). There really is no need for huge budgets and months of planning. You just need to execute.

So what did we come up with? I’m proud to present to the whole world Tab It Up Alpha (it took us two dinners and nine people to decide on the name). The concept of the application is actually really simple. The user just needs to login using their Twitter credentials (we use oauth to do so), and the app is ready to go. Simply add the twitter handles of the people you are buying drinks for and what type (for now we have “beer,” “wine” and “drink”) and tab it up. On the user page you’ll be able to see your recent activity.

What this really is going to evolve to is a way to find relationships and interesting data through drinks you buy and those that are bought for you. Soon enough we’ll display things like your best friend (who bought you the most drinks) and the people you should avoid (freeloaders). We are planning to add a few more nifty features, and we’ll introduce them in the upcoming weeks.

For now, I hope you will try and enjoy Tab It Up. Please let us know what you think about it.

Do you need to create a quick e-mail newsletter but you feel lazy and you don’t want to deal with e-mail clients compatibility problems? Don’t worry, check out this selection of 101 free e-mail newsletter templates:

33 Free HTML email templates
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/templates/

The first thing I thought when I found out about the new Facebook Share button was: “Cool! I’m going to add it to my blog right away.”
The first thing I thought after I installed it was: “Why couldn’t they make the button height 15px like most of the other sharing buttons around???”

Yes, I was pretty annoyed by having buttons at the top of my blog posts with different heights, so I decided to try to modify the css of the button myself. Here’s the result:

.FBConnectButton {
height: 15px;
float: left;
background-position-y: -251px;
background-position-x: -1px;
border-bottom: 1px solid #1a356e;
}
.FBConnectButton_Text {
font-size: 8px ;
height: 9px;
}
.fb_share_count_inner {
height: 9px;
position: relative;
}
.fb_share_count .fb_share_count_right {
float: left;
}

Just copy and paste these few lines of code into your CSS file and your Facebook Share button should be the same size of your compact Tweetmeme button.

I may do more modifications in the future to improve the look of this reduced version, but for now this is usable enough for my blog.

Last night I gave a very basic presentation at the Design Miami Meetup about some of the new features offered by CSS 3. Here is the slide show:

If you want to learn more, you should look at these links:

• CSS3.info
• Push Your Web Design Into The Future With CSS3
• CSS 3 Cheat Sheet
• Using CSS3 (video)

And of course the most boring one

• Cascading Style Sheets Current Work (W3C)

Last Friday, Atebits launched the new version of their popular iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie 2, which in just one day dominated the Top Paid and Top Grossing charts in the App Store. What can we learn from this?

Keep your interface clean and simple.
Tweetie 2′s interface is really clean and simple, almost as if Apple themself may have had a hand in designing it. Everything is easy to access and erroneous clicks are pretty rare.

Offer what users need, not everything.
For sure, Tweetie 2 doesn’t offer as many options as other clients. Twittelator, just to name one, offers a full array of integrations and functions, but this may only serve to confuse a new user.

Keep it open.
On the other hand, Tweetie 2 gives you the option of using whatever service you want for posting pictures and shortening URLs, which is great!  Now I can use my own URL shortener, and I’m not forced to use Twittelator in order to use, in my opinion, the best picture service around: Pikchur. Actually, if you want to use Pikchur as well, here’s the API ending point you need to insert in Tweetie: http://api.pikchur.com/tweetie

Create good products and people will throw money at you.
Tweetie was a great product, but Tweetie 2 is even better. And when you create such great products, people won’t mind spending $3 for your application. Of course, that doesn’t come without work. You still need great PR, and you have to ensure that your product gets in front of the right eyes (like that of a Mashable or Techcrunch writer). I must say that this doesn’t happen too often; there are several great applications buried in the App Store, but the best ones hardly stay buried forever.