Tweed Popup Menu Options

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

We recently added meta-tap for copying tweets. It seems to have some bugs and we are thinking about options.

Originally, we wanted to put Copy as an option in the tweet popup menu, but the menu is getting crowded. Currently, it can have

(Un)Favorite
Reply
Retweet
Conversations
Photos
Delete
(Un)mark
Link1
Link2
…

We are considering rearranging the items. There are two current ideas:

Option A

(Un)Favorite
Reply
Retweet
Conversations
Photos
Delete
(Un)mark
More (sub group)
- Copy
- Email
- IM
Link1
Link2
…

Option B

(Un)Favorite
Reply
Retweet
Conversations
Photos
Delete
More (sub group)
- Copy
- Email
- IM
Links (sub group)
- Link1
- Link2
- …

Which do you prefer? Tell us at Survey Monkey

Voting ends Thursday, April 15.

Standup 4/9/2010: New Bundler API Gotcha

Pivotal Labs

Friday, April 9, 2010

Interesting Things

Switching to Bundler 0.9.x?

If your old gem definitions use :lib => false, don’t forget to change it to :require => false

Additionally, older versions of Bundler use the deprecated named argument :require_as (instead of Rails’ :lib and Bundler 0.9′s :require) to override the path that Bundle requires for you.

Here is an example of how to tell Bundler 0.9.x not to require a gem automatically:

gem "leetsauce", :require => false

Tweed 1.6: User Search, Copy Tweets, Internationalization

Christian Sepulveda

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Version 1.6 has been submitted and should be in the App Catalog soon.

Bugs

Load More showing gaps in home timeline (should finally be really fixed)
List notifications were false/repeats in some cases
links that had all capital letters didn’t work
notification stability improvements (more may be needed though)

Features and Changes

Goto User (tap App menu, Goto User)
User Search (as you type in search box, option for user search will be presented)
Copy Tweet (gesture-tap of tweet — hold finger in gesture area, then tap tweet )
Internationalization beta

Internationalization Beta

Tweed has been translated to the various languages for which webOS is available.

With this version, pricing returns to $2.99, though updates for existing paid users are free.

Tweed
Tweed

New Tech Talk: Top Seven Recipes for Confusion

Sean Beckett

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

John Boykin teaches us to recognize the seven most common sources of confusion and how to avoid them. Using real-world case studies, John dissects each pattern, proposes a redesign to reduce confusion, and offers general guidelines for making your website more intuitive.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

Gowalla looking for Android Developers (Austin, TX)

Sean Beckett

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

At Pivotal Labs, one of the services we provide our clients is helping them interview and hire. This is an excellent opportunity for you to learn Extreme Programming by working side-by-side with Pivotal’s talented and experienced developers while at the same time joining a small and dynamic product team. Pivotal Labs and our clients place a strong emphasis on Agile development and its many aspects: Pair Programming, Test-Driven Development, rapid iterations, and frequent refactoring.

Gowalla, based in Austin, Texas, is looking for a Senior Android Developer. The full job posting follows.

Gowalla Inc. is a well-funded startup making an unconventional game for the latest smartphones, using virtual collectibles to motivate location discovery and sharing. We are a small, growing team, with strong design and technical chops. We work from a big, bright office in downtown Austin with multiple Xboxes and a full fridge. We’ve got an A-list roster of investors and advisors. We’ve got a passionate, fast-growing user base. And we’ve got a huge opportunity to build a genre-defining product.

About you: you will assume primary responsibility for Gowalla’s Android client. Gowalla for Android is more than a port of the original iPhone app — it should embrace the unique strengths of the platform. You won’t just be implementing features, but helping to determine the product direction for the platform. If you’re excited by the opportunity to build a stand-out, in-demand app for a hot platform, this is the gig for you. The position is full-time, on-site in Austin. Ideal candidates will have:

Broad programming language experience, with significant Java experience. Mobile (especially Android) is a plus.
Demonstrable ability to ship user-facing code
Strong design sense
Experience with test-driven development
Familiarity with web development, REST service integration, HTTP caching concepts, etc.

Interested? Contact Scott Raymond at sco@gowalla.com.

Top Seven Recipes for Confusion

Wednesday, April 7, 2010 | Run time: 56:22

John Boykin teaches us to recognize the seven most common sources of confusion and how to avoid them. Using case studies, John dissects each pattern, proposes a redesign to reduce confusion, and offers guidelines for making your website more intuitive.

Standup 4/7/2010: Disabling Rails' IP Spoofing Safeguard

Pivotal Labs

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Ask for Help

“How can Rails’ IP spoof attack safeguards be disabled when its guesses give false positives that block out important users?”

When Rails has this safeguard in place, it may block out users behind poorly configured firewalls and some mobile devices.

The safeguard causes Rails to return a 500 and log the following message:

ActionController::ActionControllerError: IP spoofing attack?! HTTP_CLIENT_IP="16.89.XX.XXX" HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR="15.243.YY.YYY"

Rails 2.3 and later lets you easily disable this by overriding a setting in your environment.rb initializer:

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  config.action_controller.ip_spoofing_check = false
end

As always, be sure you understand the implications of disabling this security feature!

Standup 4/6/2010: Milligan's Pants

Pivotal Labs

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Milligan's Pants

Standup 4/5/2010: Spidering Web Pages

Pivotal Labs

Monday, April 5, 2010

Ask for Help

“Does anyone have any recommendations for how to crawl web pages and check certain pages have certain things?”

Pivots suggested two main approaches:

Mechanize: Mechanize is a library that lets you write Ruby scripts which load pages, fill out forms, click links, and do arbitrarily sophisticated things with the DOM. Its API is very Rubyish and probably works well for most needs.
Typhoeus: Unlike Mechanize, Typhoeus is designed for high volume fetching of web pages with good support for concurrent requests. It’s not designed to poke around at content on the page so you’ll need to use Nokogiri/LibXML/Hpricot in combination with Typhoeus if you want that level of functionality.

Ruby Summer of Code at Pivotal Labs

Pivotal Labs

Thursday, April 1, 2010

As you may have heard, this year there aren’t any Ruby projects as part of this year’s Google Summer of Code. The Ruby community’s response to this is a pretty amazing validation of the awesomeness of us! We have created our own Ruby Summer of Code, and raised $100K in just 3 days to sponsor 20 students to work on Ruby open source projects. That’s actually a lot more than Google would have sponsored anyway. And Pivotal Labs is one of the six full-project sponsors, woot! We’re sponsoring $5K, the amount to cover one student’s work full time for the whole summer.

We will no doubt have some pivots volunteering for mentor spots. If you want to volunteer to mentor, you need to apply by the end of this week (April 3rd).

Pivotal Labs is also going to be providing desk space for (a couple?) local students who want to come work in the office for the summer – they’ll get to come to our daily standups, eat breakfast with us, attend our tech talks, play Pivot Pong, and just be part of the Pivotal experience. We hope there are some local students who participate in RSoC and that someone comes to hang out with us for the summer. It’s also likely that some local students would get to do a report on their projects at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference in September.

Students can apply for spots during the period April 5th-23rd.

Thanks to everyone for stepping up and supporting this great response. This is the kind of thing that makes being a Ruby developer so gratifying, and so fun too.