Our insights

With so many ideas (like InStock), how do we test the viability of new business opportunities and  see if they stick before we invest the time in developing them? We have a couple of tricks up our sleeves to share with you that saves us both time and money and keeps us focussed on success. Firstly we...

I had an issue. iTunes is a fine program, with loads of great features, and it’s essential for the iTunes store and syncing my iPhone. Trouble is, in my house, we’ve got a central media server which reports 1037 albums – pulled from the CD collections of four music lovers. The combination of network access...

Depending on time of year, current workload, phase of moon, and other factors, the Go Tripod team may not always work from the same location. And even if we do, we’re often in Do Not Disturb mode with headphones on. We’ve found that the best way to keep track is by using the Campfire chat...

The Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook by Jorge Ramon is now available. As Jorge says in his introductory post: The Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook is for developers who want a book of useful techniques, with explanations, that they can refer to and adapt to their purposes. I was a Technical Reviewer for this book, and it...

Very occasionally, people will start asking me in detail what I do for a living. When “I write software” or “I make websites” doesn’t satisfy them, I go into a bit more detail about the different aspects of my job. One thing that happens quite regularly if I don’t go into enough detail, is that...

Rails 2.3 delivered a new feature that allows you to easily write forms in rails that can process nested attributes for related objects using the accepts_nested_attributes_for method in your models. Now there is a plugin to make adding and removing nested forms a walk in the park! I am not going to go into detail...

One of the hidden gems of System.Net is the ability to change from using an SMTP server for sending your email. Instead you can specify a pickup directory which will receive all emails sent from your application as a .EML text file. There are clearly uses for this in production – you may have a...

Having used flash extensively for the last few years I have really come to rely on using Scale-9 scaling on UI elements in the rich internet apps I design and develop. It is a great technique for things like rounded rectangles, button graphics etc and ensuring the rounded corners do not distort when stretched. I...

I have been meaning to blog about Phusion Passenger for a while as about 3-4 months ago we migrated Stubmatic from using Apache / Mongrel Cluster to Phusion Passenger A.K.A. mod_rails. Mod rails is extreamly easy to install. Make sure you update gem first: gem update –system Then install the Phusion Passenger gem gem install...

iPhone and Adobe Air developers (as well as any others that use SQLite 3) Menial has just released an excellent little app for creating, managing and running queries against SQLite 3 databases called Bases. The application is simple to use, very user friendly and has worked well from the testing I have done. It costs...

A quick sorry to all my Flex readership for the lack of Flex related posts these last few months. I though I would drop a quick tip / class I often use to create a two way binding between a form to a corresponding class model. Flex provides a one way binding through its ...

I recently needed to setup recurring payments through PayPal’s express checkout for a subscription based site I have writen using Ruby on Rails. There is already an excellent framework for interacting with most payment gateways, including PayPal, for Ruby called Active Merchant. Unfortunately recurring payments support in Active Merchant for PayPal Express Checkout is limited...

This may be an unusual first post in my Objective-C and Cocoa categories however it is quite relevant as the guys behind 280 Slides have released a new open source extension to the Javascript language known as Objective-J and a new Javascript framework based on Cocoa named Cappuccino. Other than having a very nice logo...

A quick tip if you have a dynamic scroll bar and want to bind it’s maxScrollPosition to a value at runtime unfortunately you can’t use the MXML binding, i.e. maxScrollPosition={value}. Alternatively you need to set the value programatically in an event handler, AND importantly call updateDisplayList() on the scrollbar. i.e.

EasyMVC is a lightweight architecture process for Adobe Flex and AIR first proposed by Tom Bray of SearchCoders and Chatopica. This is the second part covering Service calls, of a two part article on how to take that architecture and scale up to a simplified cairngorm style architecture when you outgrown EasyMVC. Click here to...

EasyMVC is an excellent, easy to use Model View Controller architecture for Adobe Flex designed by Tom Bray from Chatopica. However as your apps grow you may find yourself outgrowing this architecture. For example as all your event handlers are centralised into one class, this class may get to large to maintain, especially as the...

Just to let you all know I have updated WP-Flcikr, making it compatible with WordPress 2.5 As part of the update, I have fixed the following: Compatibility with WordPress 2.5 Issue where users without curl installed would get an error authenticating Updated the style to match WordPress 2.5 AJAX enabled the plugin to stop the...

WP-Flickr is a WordPress plugin that allows you to add photos from Flickr to your posts, without leaving the WordPress write post / page editor. Browse your Flickr photostream, sets or favorites and select to insert into the page. As part of a recent project, we needed to develop a custom WordPress plugin for our...