Noel Rappin Writes Here

I mentioned on Twitter the other day that I was starting to like using Haml and it was surprising me because I used to dislike it so much. Colin Harris asked me to elaborate, but Twitter was too short, so here goes. I assume that most people reading this have some idea of what Haml is, if you don’t, it’s an ERb replacement for view depleting which uses Python-style indentation for blocks, and a couple of other tricks for simplifying the amount of markup you need to write in your view – here’s a sample from the Haml tutorial, which gives you the flavor.

It’s been quiet on the Rails Test Prescription front. Those of you on the beta program should have gotten Beta 11 earlier this week. There are no major changes in this beta, but it does contain the final copyedit, a pass through the errata, and a couple of late-breaking reviewer comments. At the moment, the book is being typeset, which means that non-typesetter changes to the source files are definitely contraindicated.

So, back in the summer when I started my bizarre quest to edit my book on the iPad, I had three requirements. Be able to read the book files from Dropbox Support for editing HTML/XML files, syntax coloring, extra keys, something like that. TextExpander integration to make it easier to type the markup tags. It quickly became clear that I was the only person in the world looking for this exact set of features.

I’ve been doing a lot more reading on eBooks since I got the iPad. For the most part, I really like it. I’ve been using three different eReader programs: Apple’s iBooks, the Amazon Kindle, and the Barnes & Noble Nook. You’d think that an eReader would be basically similar between apps, but there are definitely differences in how the apps feel. Here’s one little example: how does each reader app marks your progress in the book?

Very quick status update: Rails Test Prescriptions is out of copyedit. It should head for typesetting on Monday for a probably ship date in mid-February. Right now, we’re in the phase where I go over the copyedit and whine about things. Actually, this copyedit has been pretty clean, probably the cleanest I’ve ever had. By way of contrast, when I did the wx book, the copyeditor did not realize that “Python” and “wxPython” were two different things, and decided to unilaterally change all instances of “Python” to “wxPython”, apparently in the belief that I had made the same mistake 1500 times.