[] I hate it when this happens and I have a dozen of Textmate and Terminal windows open…

If you are a Rails developers, chances are you have heard of, or are using either Devise or HAML in your projects. And if you’re like me who uses both, then surely you’d wish these two worked together, i.e. generate devise views in HAML. Today is your lucky day! I’ve just committed some changes that enable you to do so! The changes are already merged back to the primary repository. In order to generate HAML views instead of ERb views, simply do: rails g devise_views -t=haml You can use t...

[] First Photoshop, now Textmate, what’s next?

Did you know, you can perform advanced search queries on GitHub? For example: ruby AND (textmate OR tmbundle) The above query will search everything containing ruby, as well as either textmate or tmbundle. Unfortunately at this stage the GitHub API does not support it. I’ve opened a ticket here.

Web applications normally have many forms. Building forms is always a mind-boggling task because it involves repetition and chaos. A shortcut is to use a form builder / DSL, such as Formtastic. As I am using Rails 3, and the Rails 3 port of Formtastic isn’t complete yet, I thought I’d just use the plain vanilla Rails built-in form helper. First of all, I am using Haml instead of ERb. Already, I got the out-of-box clean looking Haml markup. Some of you might not be aware of the fact that Rails...

[] This is from an email newsletter I received in my Gmail inbox from Macheist. Note to all the designers out there, please don’t use fancy CSS, not even some of the basic ones, because they don’t work in email clients! Here’s a great table of contents on what you can and cannot use for different email clients.

[] Okay, this is actually an archive post from my other blog Beyond Coding, but I feel like reposting it here for some humour. :) Today I decided to upgrade my Windows 7 build 7000 to the latest build 7057. The system is installed on my Fujitsu P1610 which I use as an e-book reader and ultra-portable. I ran the DVD inside Windows, then I chose to archive the old installation and install the new version from scratch. Here is a screenshot of the archived Windows folder, apparently Microso...

In case you don’t already know, both PunyPNG and Smush.it are lossless image compression services. From my experience, PunyPNG produces better results than Smush.it does. The sprite image for this blog yields 160kb when it was created. Smush.it reduced the size by 30%, PunyPNG reduced the size by 50%. [] The PunyPNG API is going to be extremely useful when it is out of beta.

When making the new design of this blog, I inevitably come to the dilemma of whether to use traditional CSS sprites (i.e. to use background image positions to locate the images) or to use Data URI sprites (i.e. to use Data URI / MHTML to replace the actual image files). First of all, during the design and development stage, everything was built without any sprites in mind. It is just so much easier to build the template without worrying about background image positions. After the template is fi...

After spending the weekend coming up with the design, one night of chopping and slicing and half a night of Tumblr themeing, I have finally done it! [] Thanks to 960.gs and the Variable Grid System, they made making layout so easy! The theme is tested in all major browsers, except IE6. Let me know what you think! :-)