Finally, Apple have released version 2.0 of their iPhone and iPod Touch firmware. Priced at $9.95 for Touch owners (though free to iPhone owners), i think it delivers excellent value for money, especially considering the previous update for the iPod Touch cost $20 and didn’t include the App Store.
Well i am pleased to report that most of these features have made their way to the update. My database demo which i posted about previously works fine, though initially i was a bit concerned that i didn’t see a “databases” section in the configuration options in Safari.
Turned out that this only appears when at least 1 database is created. A word of warning though: when i deleted my test database, the section vanished and i could only get it back by restarting the system. So watch out if you are playing about with it.
Sadly it appears that one of the binding features, the full-screen support, hasn’t made it into the update. Supposedly, you are meant to insert the a “apple-touch-fullscreen” meta tag into your HTML document, but i didn’t notice any difference whatsoever when i tried it. A huge disappointment, IMO.
Regardless, i think this is a positive step towards making the iPhone/iPod’s web application development platform actually useful – in a stark contrast to just over a year ago when Apple were promoting a rather limited web development platform with none of these cool features as the only way of getting third party applications on the iPhone.
Let’s not forget that for those not content with working within the limitations of the iPhone’s web development platform, there is now also the native iPhone SDK. So all in all, there’s a bit for everyone in this update.
Hot off the presses, i’ve just pushed alpha 3 of RailsCollab to both Rubyforge and Github.
Railscollab? What’s that?
Railscollab is a re-write of the Project Management solution ActiveCollab (otherwise known as ProjectPier), which instead is written in Ruby and runs on the Ruby on Rails web development framework.
Why on earth would you want to do that?
Good question. Well, it all started when the developer of ActiveCollab announced they were ditching the open source version and going commercial and closed source. Of course, there were people like me that didn’t like that.
So i decided to make my own fork – however i added a twist. I decided to re-write it using Ruby on Rails, since the original PHP code was giving me a headache. Plus it seemed like a great way to get to know the Ruby on Rails framework.
Note that around the same time, another fork called ProjectPier arose, which opted to develop from the original PHP code.
So what’s new?
Quite a lot, actually. Pretty much everything that was present in ActiveCollab 0.7.x is now implemented, sans the the fancy web-based installer. I’ve also focussed a lot on fixing bugs and improving stability, as well as enhancing the time tracking components.
… and of course there is the configuration editor which takes advantage of Phusion Passenger.
In addition, i have updated the RailsCollab demo, so if you don’t have the time to set everything up, you can still try out Alpha 3.
I’d also like to thank everyone (you know who you are) who has reported issues with RailsCollab over the past few months. Without your help, i doubt i would have had the willpower to make another release.
Edit: If you are stuck wondering “How do i login?”, have no fear, the solution is here. You will need to use OpenID to login.
Simply select the “Use OpenID” checkbox and type in your OpenID to login. An account should automatically be created for you if one does not already exist, provided that your OpenID provider provides a username, email, and name.
You can get an OpenID from many places – one of my favourites being myOpenID.
