Blog

Monday, April 2

StyleBootstrap.info

Customise Bootstrap v2.

http://stylebootstrap.info/

Timeline

Cool JavaScript plugin for creating interactive timelines.

http://timeline.verite.co/

The FontShop Plugin

Try FontShop fonts in Photoshop.

http://www.fontshop.com/plugin/

SimpleBits / A Typographic Refresh

Dan Cederholm has updated the typography on his site with beautiful fonts from Hoefler & Frere-Jones.

http://simplebits.com/notebook/2012/04/02/hfj/

Tuesday, April 3

Instantly Beautiful Project Pages

GitHub has released an Automatic Page Generator for creating theme based project pages.

http://github.com/blog/1081-instantly-beautiful-project-pages

Startups, This Is How Design Works

A primer on “good design”.

http://startupsthisishowdesignworks.com/

Layer Cake

Tool for extracting image assets from PSDs.

http://macrabbit.com/layercake/

Wednesday, April 4

The Best Way to Be More Web 2.0

What’s the best way to be more web 2.0?

http://gradientsmotherfucker.com/

The Story of Keep Calm and Carry On

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrHkKXFRbCI

Thursday, April 5

RailsCasts Episode #338 - Globalize3

Screencast about the new version of the I18n library Globalize.

http://railscasts.com/episodes/338-globalize3

Figure by Propellerhead

Fun new app for creating music, with a great interface.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/4/2925471/feature-propellerhead-music-creation-app

Monday, March 26

Nothing to report.

Tuesday, March 27

Waging War on Whitespace (Using TextMate)

Getting rid of annoying diff cruft.

http://blogobaggins.com/2009/03/31/waging-war-on-whitespace.html

Wednesday, March 28

No comment.

Thursday, March 29

CSS3 Gradient Buttons the Right Way

Guide to creating nice buttons with just CSS.

http://theosom.com/p/A07g

Paper

Lovely new sketching app for the iPad.

http://www.fiftythree.com/paper

Friday, March 30

Bang methods; or, Danger, Will Rubyist!

Don’t overuse the bang!

http://dablog.rubypal.com/2007/8/15/bang-methods-or-danger-will-rubyist

Pastel

Beautiful web app template with lots and lots of features.

http://pattern.dk/pastel/home.html

Our logo

We finally have our logo over the entrance to our office.

Trusted Keys

Anders T released a new open source library for dealing with mass assignment of attributes.

http://github.com/unders/trusted_keys

Monday, March 19

CarrierWave Direct

Add-on to Jonas’ file upload library CarrierWave for direct uploads to S3 and background processing of the files.

http://github.com/dwilkie/carrierwave_direct

Tuesday, March 20

Working with time zones in Ruby on Rails

Nicklas wrote a blog post with some guidelines for dealing with timezone issues in Ruby on Rails.

http://elabs.se/blog/36-working-with-time-zones-in-ruby-on-rails

hubot, mustache me cjkihlbom

No comment.

Sonos for Mac

The new version of the Sonos controller app for Mac OS X is a huge improvement.

Wednesday, March 21

Browser you love(d) to hate

Microsoft is doing a big marketing campaign for IE9. Not bad.

http://browseryoulovedtohate.com/

Thursday, March 22

rspec-fire

More resilient test doubles for RSpec, from Xavier Shay.

http://github.com/xaviershay/rspec-fire

Photoshop CS6 Beta

The new version of Photoshop is out in beta. Jimmy and Johannes are very excited about this.

http://bjango.com/articles/photoshopcs6/

Tesseract

Tesseract is a JavaScript library for filtering large multivariate datasets in the browser. Tesseract supports extremely fast (under 30ms) interaction with coordinated views, even with datasets containing a million or more records; we built it to power analytics for Square Register, allowing merchants to slice and dice their payment history fluidly.

http://square.github.com/tesseract/

GitHub’s Ruby style guide

Pair programming really helps everyone keep a consistent coding style, but GitHub’s style guide was an interesting read nonetheless.

http://github.com/styleguide/ruby

Friday, March 23

Celluloid

Actors and futures in Ruby, wrapped in a nice API.

http://github.com/celluloid/celluloid

How to write a bug report

Having a problem with an open source library? Here are Jonas’ tips on writing a good bug report that will increase your chance of getting help from the library author.

http://elabs.se/blog/38-how-to-write-a-bug-report

CSS 3D Clouds

Check out the Michael Bay preset.

http://www.clicktorelease.com/code/css3dclouds/

Baldur’s Gate for iPad

Baldur’s Gate is coming to the iPad! Forget Google Maps, iBooks or iPhoto. This is the killer app.

http://www.macrumors.com/2012/03/23/baldurs-gate-enhanced-edition-coming-to-ipad/

I missed a week while traveling, but here’s another edition of Campfire Stories, pulled from our Campfire rooms last week.

Monday, March 12

MongoDB Stockholm

Conference about MongoDB in Stockholm, April 5th.

http://www.10gen.com/events/mongodb-stockholm

Tuesday, March 13

Elabs team on Coderwall

http://coderwall.com/teams/4f271951973bf00004000661

Hating on IE6

Coderwall encourages users to update their profiles by showing you “embarrasing” defaults.

http://coderwall.com/blog/2012-02-23-hating-on-IE6

Nordic Ruby speakers

We announced the speakers for Nordic Ruby, the Ruby conference that we organise every year. We have an amazing lineup of speakers again this year, and we can’t wait for the event in June.

http://nordicruby.org/speakers

Landing page for ProjectPuzzle

As we mentioned in our previous Campfire Stories post, we’ve been working on an app to help with project scheduling. We’re getting closer to launch, but in the mean time we’ve put up a landing page where you can sign up if you’re interested in learning more about the app when it launches.

http://projectpuzzle.com/

Elycharts

Elycharts looks like an interesting alternative to Highcharts JS.

http://elycharts.com/

Kalandae

A framework agnostic Javascript date picker.

http://github.com/ChiperSoft/Kalendae

Wednesday, March 14

Strong Parameters

Gem from the Rails core team to help deal with mass assignment security issues. An alternative to our own trusted_attributes.

http://github.com/rails/strong_parameters

Using event capturing to improve Basecamp page load times

37signals describes how they improved page load times for the new Basecamp by deferring Javascript event bindings.

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3137-using-event-capturing-to-improve-basecamp-page-load-times

Entypo

More pictograms.

http://www.entypo.com/

Thursday, March 15

Detail from the internal dashboard we’re working on.

Friday, March 16

Where’s _why?

Wonderful article about the disappearance of “Why the lucky stiff”, one of the heroes of the Ruby community.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/03/…

PaintCode

A vector drawing app that generates resolution independent Objective-C drawing code for Mac OS X and iOS.

http://www.paintcodeapp.com/

We love Campfire at Elabs. Even though we’re all in the same office, we use Campfire to share links, images, videos, etc. Some are useful, some are funny, and some are just disturbing. We thought we’d share them with you.

Monday, February 27

Polstjärna

Polstjärna is a Swedish foundation whose vision is to support children and young people in Sweden in the risk zone of social exclusion.

We designed some banners to help them spread the word.

http://polstjarna.se/polstjarna/vanner/

Enrique’s picture of our office

Last year we had our friend Enrique working with us for a couple of days. In addition to being a great developer and all-around nice guy, Enrique is also a good photographer. Here’s a picture he took of our office during his stay here.

You can read more about Enrique’s experience working with us here: http://www.ecomba.org/post/17558226325/elabs.

Tuesday, February 28

Harvest for Mac

Harvest, the tool we use for time tracking, has released a desktop client for Mac OS X, helping us keep our time tracking even more accurate.

http://www.getharvest.com/mac

Minimalist coffee table

http://minimalissimo.com/2012/02/vic/

Frank Chimero’s new site

http://www.frankchimero.com/

ProjectPuzzle competitor

In between our consulting projects, we’ve been working on an app to help with project scheduling. We call it ProjectPuzzle. Last week, one of our competitors launched their attempt at solving the same problem: http://floatschedule.com/.

They even got a TechCrunch article written about them: http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/28/float-does-simple-scheduling-for-teams-and-simple-is-hard/.

Wednesday, February 29

Throne of JS

One of our favourite conferences ever was FutureRuby, hosted by Unspace in Toronto in 2009. Now Unspace is back with a new conference, and we’re very excited: http://throneofjs.com/.

Minimalist Pixar Posters

http://www.probablybest.co/2012/02/minimalist-posters-of-pixar-films/

CJ reaches Inbox 0

Didn’t last long unfortunately.

Thursday, March 1

“Font-Embedding Icons: This Is a Big Deal”

http://somerandomdude.com/2010/05/04/font-embedding-icons/

Hand crafted, infinitely scalable & royalty-free icons for user interface designers

http://pictos.cc/

Friday, March 2

“Give it five minutes”

Dismissing an idea is so easy because it doesn’t involve any work. You can scoff at it. You can ignore it. You can puff some smoke at it. That’s easy. The hard thing to do is protect it, think about it, let it marinate, explore it, riff on it, and try it. The right idea could start out life as the wrong idea.

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3124-give-it-five-minutes

Coffee

Lots of excitement about coffee at the office. This week Camilla from Coffee & Memories will be delivering our new coffee making equipment.

Gridset

Create advanced grid systems on the web.

http://www.gridsetapp.com/

“Ruby patterns from GitHub’s codebase”

Zach Holman shares some tips and techniques from GitHub’s own codebases.

http://zachholman.com/talk/ruby-patterns

Curious that he doesn’t talk about how they handle mass-assignment issues.

MailChimp Guides with book covers

MailChimp has designed individual book covers for each of their how-to guides. Beautiful work.

http://mailchimp.com/resources/

Feedback

We’re considering making this a regular feature on the blog. This is an experiment, so please let us know what you think!