Adam on the Net

I have completed some initial work on a redesign of this site and now feel it is complete enough to go ahead and announce it.

My goals were to build an extensible personal blog in Rails 3, utilize some HTML5 and CSS3, and end up with a custom foundation I can use to try out new ideas. So far so good! I am sure I will be tweaking and improving as time goes on and will try to make some posts about anything interesting I learn. Any cool ideas for new features or design tweaks would be much appreciated!

Today at Indie+Relief, a total of 145 Mac and iPhone developers have joined together to pledge today's sales proceeds to various charities benefiting Haitian relief efforts.  My iPhone apps TextMinder and DateCalcPro are there, in the company of many other excellent applications.

Many thanks to Second Gear and Garrett Murray for coordinating this effort, and to Dan of http://popmyapp.com for donating his time to create additional graphics needed for me to participate.

Be sure to visit http://www.indierelief.com today to pick up some fun and useful software and help make a difference in Haiti.

I'm participating in a group of over 100 iPhone and Mac software developers who have pledged to donate their proceeds on Wednesday, January 20 to charities targeting Haitian disaster relief. This effort is called Indie+Relief and its web site can be found at http://www.indierelief.com A list of participating developers and software should be available on Tuesday for preview prior to Wednesday's event.

If you have an iPhone, iPod touch, or a Mac, be sure to visit http://www.indierelief.com on Wednesday. There will be loads of fun and useful apps and software, and you will be purchasing something you can use and making an important donation all in one shot. In addition to donating all the proceeds from sales of my apps that day I will be using this as a great excuse to check out some new apps and software myself!

Other developers interested in taking part can find more information at http://www.indierelief.com/developer-information.html

It was a pleasant surprise to find both of my recently-updated iPhone apps live in the App Store today! I submitted both of them 9 days ago and had been wondering which one would appear first - a dramatic simultaneous release was the last thing I expected. This was a minor update for both apps, but each of them include new app icons professionally designed by Dan of PopMyApp.com. Enjoy!

The TextMinder 1.2.1 update is now available on the App Store! This release wraps up some loose ends, fixes a bug, and introduces a couple minor new features. The complete change list is as follows:

• Fixed the connection issue that occurred when using incorrect capitalization of username
• Added new repeat types: Weekdays, Weekends, and BiMonthly
• Implemented minor visual enhancements throughout
• Completed certification on final version of OS 3.0
• Added iTunes link to help screen for an easy way to post a review

Stay tuned for information on some more adventurous improvements I have planned in the future. I hope you continue to enjoy the service and as always please feel free to let me know about any questions or problems.

Yesterday, my newest iPhone application was released on the App Store! Its companion service has since begun providing service to all the new users coming on board.

The TextMinder service, along with its companion iPhone app, allows you to schedule SMS text reminders to be sent to you at the times you specify, repeating as often as you choose. Remind yourself of your medication, shopping, errands, bills, chores, and other todo tasks. With the ONE-TIME purchase of the iPhone app, you can:

• Create unlimited SMS text reminders to be sent to your phone
• Specify an exact date and time and choose a repeat schedule for each reminder
• Review, modify, and delete reminders using the iPhone or iPod touch

TextMinder can send SMS alerts to US and WORLDWIDE phones using Ameritech, AT&T, Cricket, SprintPCS, T-Mobile, Verizon, Virgin, or any of our other dozens of supported carriers listed at this link.

The iPhone app requires either a cellular data (3G, EDGE) or WiFi connection to operate. Our service does not charge to send you text messages, but your carrier's standard text messaging policies and rates apply.

The TextMinder service contains NO ADS and your one-time iPhone app purchase includes FREE upgrades and tech support.

I purchased a MacBook Pro a little over a year ago, and as tends to happen after a year of installing, uninstalling and reconfiguring applications, the machine hadn't been running quite as quickly as it did when it was brand new. I had already defragmented the hard disk a few times over the last year with some effect but it didn't seem to restore like-new performance to the machine on its own. Looking for more, I came across OnyX, a donation-ware multifunction utility for Mac OS which packages an impressive number of maintenance utilities into a single easy-to-use and attractive interface.

After launching OnyX, browsing through the Verify, Maintenance, Cleaning, and Utilities tabs will give you an idea of the many types of optimizations OnyX can perform. These items have descriptions and warnings where appropriate, to clue you in to what changes OnyX will actually make to your machine. Moving on, below is a screenshot of OnyX's nuclear option, the Automation tab:

Above are the settings I used on my machine. For safety be sure to go through all the descriptions in the other tabs before running all these to make sure you don't inadvertently make any changes you don't intend. In particular, the "LaunchServices" and "Display of folders content" options will reset some of your Finder customizations back to defaults and by removing logs and temporary items there is a slight possibility you will inadvertently remove something you need. As always, having a recent system backup is always a good idea when running any system utility. I was reasonably certain I wasn't going to lose anything important, so I left everything checked, except for the "Execute Maintenance Scripts" option. In my case (screenshot below), OnyX had already verified for me that my scheduled maintenance items had executed at their last scheduled times:

After clicking Execute and waiting for the processes to finish (about 15 minutes), my Spotlight icon indicated its index was rebuilding as promised, so I allowed that to finish (another 10 minutes) then performed the suggested system restart. The results were significant and immediately noticeable. All operations with Finder and the Dock are now as snappy as I can ever remember them being, Spotlight is blazing fast, and even 3rd party applications seem to start up and shut down more quickly than before. In addition to what I've discussed above, OnyX also offers on its Parameters tab some helpful interface customizations, similar but not quite as comprehensive as what you'd find in Secrets for Mac OS or TweakUI for Windows. The developer has forums available to handle support and questions. For me, OnyX did a great job and I look forward to continuing to use it. I found it well worth making a donation to support this independent developer's very useful application.

The release candidate of Ubuntu 9.04 was announced yesterday, so I took the opportunity to install it on a machine of mine that's been running Ubuntu for about a year. This machine had been originally installed with Ubuntu 8.04 and was later upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10. My main interest, in addition to checking out the new features in 9.04, was to review the upgrade process between major versions of Ubuntu, a procedure that can of course be problematic at times on other operating systems.

The upgrade instructions provided at Ubuntu's community documentation site looked straightforward enough, and as promised the upgrade was as simple as starting the graphical update manager by running update-manager --devel-release then clicking a few buttons and waiting a little while for everything to download and update. After this, a restart was necessary and the computer booted straight to the new version without issue.

What struck me as extremely convenient during this process was with the network upgrade there was no initial download, no CD or DVD to burn, and at least for me no incompatibilities or corrupted settings. After booting, my desktop - including all its customizations - was exactly how I had left it. The attention to detail the Ubuntu team has put into the upgrade process results in a huge time savings for Ubuntu users and as someone who regularly runs several different operating systems this convenience is something I can greatly appreciate. Of course, a significant portion of this should be credited to the Debian team and their APT package manager which has been laying this groundwork for over 10 years.

UPDATE: With Ubuntu 9.04 final available today (Apr 23) the above instructions will upgrade you to the final release just as easily. Or, if you've already performed the steps above to upgrade to the release candidate, you are a quick Update Manager launch away from getting the latest bits. Enjoy!

I am happy to announce the availability of DateCalcPro 1.3, with the following new features:

1. Added option for all calculations to utilize and display any combination of Years, Months, and Weeks in addition to Days. This allows the choice of preferred date units when entering a date range or viewing calculation results.
2. Added option to calculate using selected days of the week to allow for calculations to count only weekdays or any other desired combination of days.
3. Added blue highlight to the selected date when it is set to the current date. This provides a useful visual clue to verify a calculation is being made using today's date.

To upgrade to this version (for free), just check for app updates using iTunes. If you are new to DateCalcPro, please click here to launch iTunes with the information screen for DateCalcPro. Please feel free to post with any suggestions, bug reports, or any other comments.

This just a quick post to announce that I've released DateCalcPro on the App Store. DateCalcPro is a date calculator application which allows calculating the time between two dates, adding or subtracting years, months, and days from a date, and viewing the day of the week for any date. If you have iTunes installed, please click here to launch the information screen for DateCalcPro. Enjoy!

Recently I've been researching software development frameworks in an attempt to maximize the consistency, maintainability, reusability, and performance of my software while minimizing the repetitive boilerplate development tasks that can plague enterprise development. For the .NET Framework platform, I've been focusing on Castle Project, Spring.NET, Enterprise Library, and CSLA.

Castle Project

The Castle Project is perhaps best known for its Rails-inspired MVC framework, MonoRail. That being said, it has grown to include a full feature set of components useful at all levels of development. The Castle Project appears to be a popular and well-tested choice.

Spring.NET

Spring.NET is a reimplementation of Java's Spring Framework for .NET. It seems to be most strongly suited for full-stack development of web applications and while it may not yet have all the features of the Java version it has a very impressive feature set. This .NET version is relatively new but is quickly gaining notoriety.

Enterprise Library

Enterprise Library is a set of integrated libraries produced by the Microsoft Patterns and Practices team. It covers many areas helpful in the development of backend enterprise systems, but is not quite as featureful for full-stack development as the above projects. This would be a good choice for creating robust base class libraries while sticking with standard Windows Forms or Web Forms development for the UI.

CSLA

CSLA was created by Rockford Lhotka, author of several books on programming enterprise business objects starting with VB6 and continuing through .NET. It is strongly focused on the business object layer and for that reason may not have quite the feature list of the others but is very mature, refined, and well tested. Unless you absolutely require some features not found here, this is one to strongly consider.

Comparison Chart

I've created a chart that shows a feature summary based on my research so far. Please keep in mind that I am not yet an expert in any of these technologies so there may be some errors or omissions. I would very much appreciate any comments that would help to improve the accuracy or completeness of this chart.

Conclusion

Any of these frameworks seem to be capable of satisfying the requirements I listed at the beginning of this post and like many technologies the best choice will differ depending on the specifics of the project. I'm looking forward to selecting one or more to explore further and put to use on future projects. I'll keep you posted!

Voting for the 2008 Webware 100 is currently taking place and will remain open through March 31, 2008. The second-annual manifestation of these awards will recognize influential and popular contenders in the categories Audio, Browsing, Commerce and events, Communications, Productivity, Publishing and photography, Search and Reference, Social, Utility and Security, and Video. Over 1 million votes have been counted since voting opened late in February. After voting closes on March 31, results will be announced April 21. Don't let your favorite tools and web sites slump into obscurity: go vote now!

At Servergrid we have always recommended the use of standalone FTP software instead of the built-in FTP support of the popular web browsers. I recently came across a third option which may provide a useful middle ground when working from an unfamiliar computer. AnyClient is a browser-based FTP client which will run within any Java-capable web browser. It supports a respectable number of protocols (FTP, FTPS, SFTP, WebDav) and although it provides the most important features necessary for everyday use it probably will not quite replace your favorite FTP client installed on your own computer. I've bookmarked this and will keep it on hand for the next time I am away from my primary computer and need something more than the basic FTP support included with web browsers.