Anyways, here’s what I use…

BlogLines (bloglines.com)

After messing around with desktop news aggregators for a while, I moved to BlogLines to monitor all my news feeds. It solved two problems for me: (1) the need for a cross platform news aggregator and (2) keeping multiple workstations synced with regard to the news already read. This is the perfect fit for web app.

GMail (gmail.com)

I entered the GMail race late in the game, as I was very happy with my mail hosting on the UML Co-op system that I use. However I discovered one problem with hosting mail on the co-op box. When the box goes down, how do I send/receive mail on the UMLCOOP mailing list? So I broke down a got a GMail account mainly for backup. I’ve very impressed with the clean and responsive user interface. GMail has set the bar for all web apps in the future.

del.icio.us (del.icio.us)

Yes, that’s how its spelled, and yes, that is really the host name. Weird. But I love this site. I had heard about it for some time and never really understood what it was all about. Then two months ago someone demoed del.icio.us at our local Linux users group meeting. Since then I’ve got over 400 bookmarks added to the system.

So, what is del.icio.us? It is a bookmarking web app that allows you to add keywords to the bookmarks. For example, if I come across a great site about programming X10 devices in Ruby, I can bookmark the site and associate the keywords "ruby", "x10", "programming" with the bookmark. Later I can come back and ask for all bookmarks associated with "x10". Cool! Did you ever want to return to a site you had visited earlier, but just can’t remember where in web it was? Del.icio.us is a great answer to that.

And what’s more, your bookmarks are sharable. Today someone ask me about Ruby IDE’s and I sent them to my del.icio.us bookmarks: del.icio.us/jimweirich/ide+ruby

Ta-Da Lists (www.tadalist.com)

I just came across this one today, and its the real reason I started this blog entry. Wow, what a simple idea. And so beautifully executed. Notice the lack of submit buttons. Just start typing todo list entries, hitting a return to go to the next one. Finished a todo item and want to check it off? Just check the box … no submit button needed to get the changes back to the database. Ta-Da lists uses XMLHttpRequest to interact dynamically with the host. Beautiful.

And to top it off, it is a Ruby-on-Rails application. Written in 579 lines of Ruby code, that’s less than the size of the XML config files used in many J2EE applications. David is really showing off the latest features of Rails too.

Now, if I only liked todo lists …

• Feedback

EMail: jim@weirichhouse.org

• Polyglot Polymorphism
• Same Fringe, Iterating Parallel Lists in Ruby
• Using Ruby -- In Introduction to Ruby for Java Programmers
• Test Driven Development Demo, In Ruby!
• Invitation to Ruby
• Building with Rake
• Dependency Injection
• Groovin' with Groovy
• The Many Facets of RubyGems
• Connascence and Java
• 10 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know About Ruby
• Dependency Injection -- Vitally Important or Totally Irrelevant?
• Speaking the Lingo
• Continuations Demystified
• A Quick Introduction to Rails
• Test Driven Design Meets Design by Contract

• rake
• source2html
• flexmock