Category Archives: Software Design

Posts about software and interface design.

§ Marsedit and Markdown Quoting

I’ve specified an alternate mechanism for quoting things from NetNewsWire and sending them to MarsEdit to post about, to wit:

[#title#](#url#): > #body#

This works superficially, but if the body I’m quoting has more than one paragraph, clearly only the first one will have the quoting caret in front of it.

Gruber says:

Any decent text editor should [...]

§ Writing A Web Application In Merb Part II

More Thoughts on Our Design

As good as it is that we’ve started to play around with the model behind our web application, I feel I was flailing a little bit too much in the original article—jumping all over the place from idea to implementation. Reading over it again we get a good idea of what [...]

§ Writing A Web Application In Merb Part I

Testing different web frameworks is a great way to not only gain knowledge about that particular framework, but to quickly (as most of the Ruby web frameworks are focused on rapid development) implement ideas you’ve had kicking around for a while. This is what I’ll be doing over the next couple weeks, with the latest [...]

§ Too Many Aperture Interfaces

At this point I think I’m allowed to say that too many programs are trying to go for the ‘Aperture’ look.

This is Anxiety, Coversutra, Twitteriffic, and Pixelmator all up at once.

§ Merb and its Generators

It’s slowly starting to appear that what Merb needs is to test the correctness of its generators, to ensure that no exceptions are raised during the generation process, as well as to ensure that all the files they create are accurately named and contain allowed Ruby syntax. How on earth you’d test this sort of [...]