My Take on using Ruby on Rails
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So I recently decided to give Ruby on Rails another chance. For many of the same reasons I gave jQuery a chance. I'll use this decision as an example, so bear with me for a second.
I was a huge fan of MooTools (and still am), but I decided to give jQuery a chance. I liked MooTools better. I thought it was superior to jQuery in its organization and many other things. You have to admit that MooTools's animations look way better.
All of that said, two things made me switch: the amount of code I didn't have to write and the huge community around it.
OpenBeta and OKCCoCo
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Tonight I went to OpenBeta with some friends from work. I met a lot of super cool people too. It's always cool to connect with people in person that you have only met via Twitter.
OpenBeta is an unconference focused on web development, software development, and design. There were over 200 people there. It's awesome to have such a community here in Oklahoma City. I always love meeting other iPhone developers in person. So far, I've only met two.
Another really cool thing happening here in Oklahoma City is OKCCoco. OKCCoCo is the Oklahoma City Coworking Collaborative:
Linus Torvalds on git
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Just watched this video on YouTube. I thought it was really interesting. I've never heard Torvalds speak before. He's a funny guy. I liked how he told people to google how to use git if they didn't know. Good stuff.
If you're not already using git for source control management (or not using source control management at all, which you should be doing anyway) you should check out git. There are tons of great resources for getting started on git's website and in GitHub's guides.
iPhone Plist Tutorial
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Update 03/03/12: Please don't listen to this. Using JSON is highly preferred over Plists these days since JSON parsers have come a long way in speed. They are actually faster than binary plists now (which is nuts). Anyway, please, please, please don't use plists for your API. Generating them is slow and unreliable. You should use JSON. Period.
Many people transfer data to and from web services to the iPhone via JSON. This is a much better way than using XML. Parsing XML on the iPhone just plain sucks. It's overly complicated and super confusing. Currently the YouVersion app, Bible, uses JSON to transfer everything back and forth from the server and it all works great.
Hello World Again
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So here I am rewriting my blog. It's great fun. I love that it uses Markdown. You can read all about Markdown at Daring Fireball.