The “mobile web” may look more like the web we know and love as devices get more powerful, but there will always be a place for a bit of customization in the name of improved UX on mobile browsers. CSS media queries go a long way toward accomplishing this, but you may find yourself wanting to do more. Ask around or do some searches, and you’ll find the usual answer to supporting mobile devices in Rails involves adding a MIME alias for text/html named “iphone” or “mobile” with register_alias, then forcing a mobile request’s format to this MIME for use with respond_to. This can work, but it’s a huge pain in the neck, and I believe there’s a better way. Read on.
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No, I don't work in NYC, DC, or the valley, and I'm cool with that.
Tag Archives: coding
Mobile Devices and Rails: Maintaining your Sanity
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Jan 5, 2011
Converting Your Code to ARel 2.0
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If you haven’t read Aaron Patterson’s post about the massive rewrite of ARel that happened for version 2.0, do yourself a favor, and go read it. It’s good stuff, and Aaron’s work rewriting ARel was a monumental feat of awesomeness. Plus, it’s responsible for tipping me off that someone else did a momentous rewrite: porting the venerable zombo.com to HTML5. Back? Good. Aaron mentioned, “for people using ARel directly, some methods have been removed, but all previous functionality should be available in one way or another.” Since I spent some time making sure that the old functionality was available to support the arel-2.0 branch of MetaSearch and MetaWhere, I thought I might tackle explaining some of the changes you’ll see.
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Oct 15, 2010
Reaper
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If you get a free moment, and don’t mind parting with one of your Twitter follows (OK, you can always navigate away if you chicken out) try out Reaper, my latest little Twitter toy. Twitter app development is really a lot of fun, compared to Facebook apps. I think I’m addicted. :)
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Sep 27, 2010
Git Bisect is Awesome
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As the sole developer on most of the projects I use git with, I generally know who breaks my code: me. However, when attempting to maintain Rails plugins that do some pretty intrusive stuff in core Rails functionality, I find myself waking up some mornings, doing a git pull in my vendor/rails submodule, and finding a bunch of failing tests. Then, I go get some coffee, and spend a bit of time scratching my head over what just caused the breakage. It comes with the territory. Still, better to track 3-0-stable as changes come along than scramble to figure this stuff out all at once and release a new version of MetaWhere every time a new Rails gem is released, right? Thus began my love affair with git bisect.
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Sep 10, 2010
H8ball, the HTTP Status 8-ball
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So, there’s this pointless little side project I did last week. It’s called h8ball, and it’s completely stupid. I’ll say it first so you don’t have to. Still, I figured I’d make a quick post about it, all the same, just so you’d know how something so random and stupid came to be.
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Aug 26, 2010
Coder Archetypes: The Line Worker and the Artist
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It’s no secret that there are two types of coders out there. The first went out and got a CS degree because someone once told him that there’s a good future in anything having to do with computers. We’ll call him the Line Worker. The second has a passion for coding. His degree might not be in CS. He may not even have a degree (oh, the humanity!), but he loves to code. He’s an Artist. It’s not just a day job for him. Companies who don’t seek out and retain Artists are doomed.
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Aug 4, 2010
About
I'm Ernie Miller. But then, you probably knew that by looking at the page title, or the URL. I'm a Ruby programmer in Louisville, Kentucky. This blog used to be called "metautonomo.us", which I thought was kind of clever, but nobody, including me, could type it. Lesson learned.