techno.blog("Dion")

I talked about the lovely clean, responsive, UI of tadalist.com.

There is ONE tweak that would make me happy as a bunny. At the moment you can subscribe to an RSS feed of your ToDos. At the moment the RSS pings you with new additions, which is nice, but isn’t what I want.

I would like the RSS feed to come at me with the following everytime a ToDo list has been changed (new item, item marked as ‘done’, etc).

RSS for Todo List: Code Changes for X

TODO:
- Add method foo() to Bar
- Refactor FileParser
- Scrap whole thing for Rails implementation

DONE:
- Add method bar() to Bar

This would be great as then when I am offline, I will always have my current Todo’s in my RSS aggregator. When a new RSS entry comes in for a ToDo list, I would just nuke my last one.

OR, if the same GUID was used, it would just be replaced!

I found out about TaDaList.com from Jim Weirich:

I just came across this one today, and its the real reason I started this blog entry. Wow, what a simple idea. And so beautifully executed. Notice the lack of submit buttons. Just start typing todo list entries, hitting a return to go to the next one. Finished a todo item and want to check it off? Just check the box

Rails first put out a video of a Mac OS X desktop setting up a simple blogging application right in front of your eyes. This has turned into the Rails Academy, and more videos are being added.

For example, there are now new lessons in which you see a full install from scratch on Windows.

It would be funny to do a parady in which someone starts from scratch, sets up a JVM, an application server, an IDE, downloads a bunch of open source tools, etc ;)

David Hannson (creator of Rails) talked about Dave Thomas who is showing Amazon Rails, Ruby, and more this week.

Man, if Amazon starts getting into the Ruby wave there would be a bunch of folk who could go up and get some work done :)

If you don’t know much about Rails, you have to check out the Setup Movie.

Picture having someone video you as you start a new web application. Picture having something done in 10 minutes. Watch the video, and you will see how cool the web framework is!

I agree with Cedric.

The “best” programming language, doesn’t mean the one that creates the lowest wc -l.

I actually always found myself writing quite “verbose” Perl code, for example.

However, I do feel that languages such as Ruby, Groovy, and yes… even Perl allow me to get closer to the zen of “expressing everything I want, and need to get across… but not more”. Every operator/method tells me a lot.

For example. Compare the code for taking out some text from a string:

Groovy:

name = “Dion ‘Sick Boy’ Almaer”
name -= “‘Sick Boy’”

and in Java? ergh.