For our main product, Ideanet, we have over 2500 lines in our yml translation files. That is, 2500 lines per language. Currently we support Dutch, English, French, Spanish and German. We manage Dutch and English ourselves, but for the other languages we need the help of a translation agency. The problem is that Ideanet grows dynamically, [...]

It has always been a little annoying including video files for our clients. Since most of them use a outdated version of Internet Explorer, we have to resort to Flash video. We like to show demos to new potential clients on our iPads. The videos won’t display on the iPad since Flash is not supported. There’s [...]

We are proud to host the upcoming Amsterdam.rb meeting at Innovation Factory HQ this Thursday. None other than Sven Fuchs, father of the i18n gem, will come over from Berlin to give a talk about Travis-CI, the distributed Ruby CI server. And there is more. Josh Kalderimis will talk about Faraday and MultiJson and letting gem [...]

In the previous post, I talked about adding the mobile mime type and having separate .mobile.erb files. Back then, we decided to have constrained functionality in the mobile version. This resulted in extra conditional blocks in the controllers. Also, we had many extra .mobile.erb partials. Then came the new design. Implementing the new design gave us the opportunity [...]

You have several very useful libraries that do most of the styling / behavior for you: iWebkit jQTouch (sencha touch) iui We chose for iWebkit, but if you desire a more native feel you might choose jQTouch. The standard browsers on iPhone, Android, palmOS and Blackberry OS6 are all Webkit based. This ensures that sites based on iWebkit will [...]

At Innovation Factory we offer our clients two solutions for hosting our Innovation Suite applications: we can host it for them as a software-as-a-service solution or they can host it on premises, i.e. in their own IT environment. This means that we have several deployments of our suite that we need to maintain. In this [...]

For the short version: check out http://github.com/lafeber/world-flags-sprite Lukas and I are working on a pet project when we’re traveling between Utrecht and Amsterdam. We’ve built a website that contains cheeses of many countries. I’ve been a fan of the famfamfam world flags for years, so it made sense to include them in the site. You quickly get [...]

This is a story about the power of Rails. It all started two days ago, when Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki blogged about Appmakr.com. It allowed you to have an app in the Appstore based on your own RSS feed. The price they ask for this is $199,- I believe that the appstore shouldn’t be polluted [...]

Last year we talked about pair programming with Obie Fernandez at Rails Underground. He was very enthusiastic about this practice, to the extent that the developers at his company Hashrocket, pair up full time. Inspired by this, we decided to try out pair programming ourselves. And we got quite excited about it too. So we [...]

It always bothered me that when you do a gem install instead of a sudo gem install you usually get the following errors: WARNING:  Installing to ~/.gem since /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8 and /usr/local/bin aren't both writable. WARNING:  You don't have /Users/martijn/.gem/ruby/1.8/bin in your PATH, gem executables will not run. Most of the times, gems are all over the place. I just want [...]