Vim could be the final solution but I’m always scared to go ahead with it (already tried in 2007). So many hours spent learning how to copy and paste lines, words ecc. It’s great, I’m sure it is! Maybe I’m too old or maybe I’m just a front end designer… I need something easier!!!

So, today I’ve spent a couple of hours testing SublimeText at its new beta released and I’ve to say it: I like it sooooo much!

Here my “first look” notes:

What I liked in Sublime Text 2

• cross platform, osx, linux, windows
• split windows, a must have feature
• micro map preview to quickly scroll the whole document
• light vertical lines to show indentation level
• quick interactive preview of a file (you can select and copy text) without open it
• has a great package manager @ http://wbond.net/sublime_packages/package_control/installation
• has a SCSS bundle https://github.com/kuroir/SCSS.tmbundle/tree/SublimeText2
• zen coding ready @ https://bitbucket.org/sublimator/sublime-2-zencoding
• has and active community and support
• lorem ipsum ready
• can easily drag file within tabs, split windows and new window
• no distraction mode
• it shows hidden files visible in project draw
• project draw easily re-sizable
• reveal file in project draw
• has a subl command line (as mate for textmate) @ http://wesbos.com/sublime-text-2-tips/

What I disliked in Sublimetext 2

• it’s not Free Software or Open source
• snippets doesn’t seems to be so immediate then textmate
• autocomplete is good but not quick
• preferences’ file is a text file, scintilla style… nice but “anche no” as we say in italian!
• project are not “boxed”; you can edit files in the same window even if thay are not part of the project. this can be confusing
• trial version alert appears too often… I’ll buy it as soon you’ll convince me with a good software, not trying to force me!

Well, give me a whole week to test this piece of software… “Se son rose, fioriranno”

Dopo aver passato molti anni a lavorare come libero professionista nel settore web e multimediale in cui ho collaborato con numerosissime realtà in Italia, ho deciso di accettare una nuova sfida professionale entrando a far parte di Cantiere Creativo, una piccola web agency fiorentina molto ambiziosa e in ricerca di qualità.

Ho quindi valutato e accettato l’offerta di diventare parte integrante del team occupandomi nello specifico dello sviluppo di user interface, user experience e sviluppo front end mettendo a disposizione le mie conoscenze di Ruby on Rails/Django, Html, QML ecc.

E’ di conseguenza che, dove possibile, le mie collaborazioni attive da libero professionista, passeranno ad un rapporto con Cantiere Creativo: vedi Bookrepublic, Zazie, i lavori per Develer, Social Design, Visiva… ecc.

In Cantiere Creativo, in questi anni, insieme a Silvio Relli, ho contribuito allo sviluppo di Railsyard, un CMS per Ruby on Rails rilasciato sotto licenza MIT su github. Cantiere ha inoltre sviluppato numerose applicazioni e siti web e si occupa di sviluppo di applicativi per aziende, per mobile (Android/iOS) e della comunicazione per social marketing.

Piano piano abbandonerò anche questo blog che mi ha accompagnato per tanti anni chiudendo definitivamente la mia storia personale di Basic Trading. Aprirò un mio blog personale, oppure scriverò le mie scoperte sul blog di Cantiere, ancora non so.

Parto subito col dire che in Cantiere siamo in cerca di sviluppatori Rails, quindi se pensi di riconsocerti in queste caratteristiche, segui le istruzioni :)

A presto e buona fortuna a me!

Obviously I googled to find the answer but the web didn’t return the results I was looking for. Just tutorials on vector patterns, not on rasters.

It’s a long time I don’t use these kind of software as I work in web development or dtp with Photoshop and Indesign and I nerver loved AI too much. But I defenetly agree with whom says that it’s unusable and less intuitive for such basic things. I used to build vector graphics with Corel Xara that was so simple as amazing in ’90s… and was so easy to do a pattern with bitmap…

Well, 3 simple steps (when you know them!):

1. drag your image to AI
2. select the image and click on “embed” <- this is the trick
3. go to edit menu and click on “define pattern”, named it and click on “add to swatches”
4. now you can create our custom shape and drag your raster swatch on it. It will be filled with your btmap. Take care of resolution ’cause you cannot resize or distorce it (or I didn’t found how)

Hope this can help

Thanks to Luca Bonfiglio from @teamcantiere for his help on this issue!

Using “find” command on a shell is the hard (and better!) way, but sometimes you can’t. I’ve got to find an exact kind of file extension into my Time Machine backup.

I wanted all my .AI files. So, I’ve tried to find “.ai” as document name in the search bar of the finder. Sometime it could be enough, when the extention has no variants. But in this case I’ve got the problem that Osx is plenty of .AIF audio file and those are most of the results of my search.

As I said, it has been easy: “.ai” -aif

That’s all, hope this can help others.

Scenario

We are Ruby on Rails developers (Silvio Relli and Matteo Papadopoulos) sharing the same office at Cantiere Creativo. As often happens in web agencies, for small or medium websites projects, the boss wanted a quick tool to setup a website, manage contents, reduce development time and costs.
Rails is our favourite framework but the admin interface is a big missing and build it from scratch all the time can take a while.

We didn’t want to use WordPress (max respect for this piece of software!) or others php based CMS.
Django could be the solution but we did prefer to use our favorite framework as we are more confident with it.

So, at the end, the solution is always the same: build your own CMS! Aaaarrrgghhh!!!! And we have done it! :)

We love to be part of the community and we absolutely wanted to share this project; we wanted Railsyard to be free and everybody can fork it and gives his contribution (or not!).

History

Railsyard is a CMS made with and for Ruby on Rails. It was born one year ago to build several websites for Cantiere Creativo, the company who invested on this project.

The first release of RY, built with Rails 2.3, was published on a GitHub repository but it was a first attempt written in “rush mode” (as often happens in software development).

What’s going on

In July 2011 we did release the second version of this CMS written from scratch in Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9.2 (but it can also run with 1.8.7). In August we made many commits of new features and debugs. This has been possibile thanks to a first project of a customer that is actually running in production. At the same time the community started it contribution (as hoped!) and @paul_spieker is actually a great contributor!

Features

From my point of view (front end designer), these are the main features:

• You can easily create own themes with your favourites tools (js, scss, sass ecc)
• Multilangs support for the whole contents and admin interface
• Has fews but usefull snippets ready to use
• It’s easy to build your own snippets for advanced personalisation
• It’s easy to design layouts and manage contents
• Has pages and articles
• You can manage meta information for each page.
• Has a really good WYSIWYG editor
• Has an intuitive drag and drop admin interface
• pretty urls and other seo-friendly features
• different user roles
• You have Rails behind and you can build your own controllers/model/views

A first public theme has been release in these days. It’s not so “beauty” and it’s called “rough“. We just wanted to give a first simple theme, extremely cleaned, with three different layouts (one, two and three columns); it’s a basic theme to let users to be free to personalize the css and design for a new own theme. It uses a responsive grid system (fixed or fluid) with an html5 markup, scss and jquery.

Next step will be e good looking theme just to show how Railsyard can be used with different templates.

Lot of features and good proposals are still in our mind and we are really excited of this tool that is growing up, day by day! Stay tuned, it changes quickly! Have a look and enjoy it!

I’m actually working on this project with @silviorelli

Update 9 november 2011

Following yesterday’s coverage of Railsyard on ruby5, here you can find some direct resources for tracking our progresses:

• official railsyard twittter account: @railsyard
• official project page: http://www.railsyardcms.org
• Fork on GitHub GitHub repository
• Cantiere Creativo (the lead agency)
• Silvio Relli twitter account: @silviorelli
• and finally, my twitter account: @spleenteo

E’ stato pubblicato oggi il sito http://www.lorenzopiggici.com dell’artista Lorenzo Piggici, compositore di soundtracks per spot commerciali per Nike, Uefa, Subaru, Alfa e molti altri.

Sul mio portfolio

Il sito è stato realizzato sulla base di un design statico che mi è stato fornito.

La richiesta da soddisfare (andando contro la regola fondamentale del web per cui prima esiste il contenuto e poi il modo di rappresentarlo!) era quella di far sì che il sito (pensato per una risoluzione di 1920 px) fosse visibile nella sua interezza indipendentemente da monitor utilizzato (escludendo smartphones).

E’ stato quindi realizzato un JS che “adatta” la griglia del sito web alla dimensione del browser, anche su resize. Il contenuto invece deve adattarsi senza ridimensionarsi.

Ho utilizzato la libreria Jquery Tools per realizzare il sistema di tab, lo scrollable della sezione media e gli overlay per la visualizzazione dei video. Per questi ultimi ho usato il Flowplayer per leggere in streming i file .flv

Il css è stato realizzato con un sistema scss per una gestione semplice e pulita delle classi.

Made with:

• html5
• css3
• jQuery
• jQuery Tools
• Flowplayer

I wanted to use the rake gem in it version 0.8.7 but in my rvm was also installed a 0.9.2 version.

I tryed to uninstall it with no success and the gem ask to run the

gem list -d rake

 rake (0.9.2, 0.8.7)
 Author: Jim Weirich
 Rubyforge: http://rubyforge.org/projects/rake
 Homepage: http://rake.rubyforge.org
 Installed at (0.9.2): /Users/spleenteo/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p330@global
 (0.8.7): /Users/spleenteo/.rvm/gems/ruby-1.8.7-p330

wtf is that @global? so, the only way to remove it is:

$ rvm use @global
$ gem uninstall rake
$ rvm use ree

this worked fine for me.

1. make easyer the way to design web templates for regular desktop screens, iphone and ipad, tablets, smartphone ecc.
2. using 960grid system I need a simple way to redefine the gutter between columns
3. sometimes I would need fluid templates still using a grid system
4. I love SCSS and want to have all my css with this system.

There are several tools, libraries and techniques and I wanted to try my own one to go deeper in the the understanding. So, in these days is born the Spleen Scss Library, a simple way to have an scss with some usefull mixin, a dynamic grid system, a reset css and a basic html5 template.

It is an alpha version, just to begin something!

Features

• Sass/Scss Grid System inspired to 960grid
• Design just one html markup
• Choose if you want fixed or fluid template, it mantains the same proportions on large screens
• If fixed you can choose your favourite size (not only 960px)
• If fixed you can choose the margins between columns
• Adapt content on tablets (ex iPad ecc), landscape or portrait
• Adapat contento on smartphones (ex iPhone, Android ecc)
• Some mixin as shortcuts for shadows, round corners, webfonts ecc.
• Some tricks for compatibility with old browsers
• Some usefull and modern js library I do use in my projects as Jquery, Jquery-ui ecc

Download

This little projects is available on Git Hub and it would be really appreciated if you fork it to make it better.

Anyway it’s really interesting to better understand how the grid and mobile worlds works! :)

This is not a “one time post”… it’s going to be updated in the next days. Any contribution is defenetly welcome!

CSS

Define the media screen size to override classes when the page is shown on ipad, iphone, android or desktop

• ipad landscape: @media screen and (max-width: 1024px)

• ipad portrait: @media screen and (max-width: 880px)

• smartphone: @media screen and (max-width : 620px)

HTML

Interesting notes on apple site

Meta Keywords to set the viewport for smartphone

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0, user-scalable=0">
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style" content="black-translucent" />
<meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no" />

Tell IE to use chrome to render

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1">

JS

<script src="js/libs/modernizr-1.7.min.js"></script>

For Png problem in IE

<!--[if lt IE 7 ]>
<script src="js/libs/dd_belatedpng.js"></script>
<script> DD_belatedPNG.fix('img, .png_bg');</script>
<![endif]-->

Al contrario di molte conferenze a cui siamo da anni abituati, Better Software è un momento esaltante di estremo interesse per gli addetti ai lavori dell’informatica a cui interessa innovazione e qualità. Da non perdere!

Consulta il sito Better Software per scoprire il prgramam completo degli interventi oppure segui il canale twitter per tutte le novità!

Dal sito riporto:

Better Software è la prima conferenza Italiana dedicata allo sviluppo di software e rivolta a imprenditori e manager del settore. Better Software è un’opportunità per intrecciare relazioni durature con nuovi clienti e partner.