Noel Rappin Writes Here

Top Story

MacRuby 0.6 is out. Big new features include a debugger, a new interface to Cocoa’s Grand Central Dispatch, and a rewrite of the internals of basic Ruby classes.

In a related story, the early text of Matt Aimonetti’s MacRuby book from O’Reilly is available for free online. Nice job all around.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it here, but I use MacRuby and its ability to manipulate AppleScriptable programs to power my crazy-obsessive iTunes random playlist generator, so speed improvements are hoped for.

Book Update

Still in the Cucumber chapter. Had to go back to the beginning to make sure everything still made sense with Cuke 0.7. The end of proofing what I had is near, but I also need to write about newer features, most notably tags, and I need to make sure I still agree with all the ideas about when to use Cucumber that I had a year ago.

I changed the Cucumber in the chapter to use Capybara instead of Webrat, but it broke on test (having to do with a checkbox being checked). Not sure if it’s an issue in Capybara, the Cucumber web steps, or me.

The book, of course, is still on sale.

Lulu raffle tomorrow, so get those address changes in if you need to.

And Then…

Big day for O’Reilly releasing stuff. Obtiva’s Own Dave Hoover’s book Apprenticeship Patterns was also released for free – the whole book this time.

Gregg Pollack put together a big list of links on the official Ruby on Rails blog. All of these were originally covered on Gregg’s podcast, Ruby5.

Brian Hogan has a set of matchers for using Cucumber with Watir, looks like it gives you in browser tests using a syntax similar to the existing Cucumber web steps, but more detailed.

Finally

Dropbox for iPad is out as of last night. If you care about that, it’s really nice.