Found a new site today, called iusethis.com. Its a collection of Mac application with an easy to use GUI to quickly mark the apps you use, sharing the list with others and in the process, finding other apps you might like (which I did). Here are the apps I’ve currently marked that I marked as “loved”:

For a complete list of apps I use on the mac see this list.

See One-line web server in Ruby on dzone snippets for exactly as described…a one line web server in Ruby.

As if I didn’t love my Mac enough already, I had a chance to use iMovie this weekend. I was creating a video message for my 10 year old (who is raising money for a fundraiser which he does every year…he raised almost $1,400 last year). We recorded several takes with my Sony digital camera, then easily imported the video onto my Mac with iMovie.

Once imported, its so easy to select which pieces you want and drag and drop them into your project. Adding transitions is a snap. We added a music track, and some overlay text, then exported it, and converted it to a flash movie using ffmpeg. I then used the JW FLV Media Player to embed the flash movie into my son’s WordPress blog. In all, it was surprisingly pain free.

To view our finished result, which we are quite proud of, but hope, most importantly it helps encourage more pledges, visit Brandon’s site: Brandon Walks for Life.

When you need to toggle the odd or even class names to stripe your table rows, or any similar functionality, you can skip using a counter and checking if its divisible evenly and instead use the Ruby on Rails helper called cycle. It cycles through whatever values are in the supplied argument list each time its called, so it can also be used in other situations. Here is an example for marking your table rows with odd and even classes:

cycle('odd', 'even')

I am a very visual person. I like to see graphical representations of large sets of data and complex problems, structures, or processes. This includes application databases, so I was immediately drawn to a new Rails plugin, written by Tom ten Thij, called Schema Browser. It’s as easy as pulling it from git, and running a generate command. The screenshot below is from Tom’s mephisto blog and it illustrates the very nice schema graphic produced from the plugin. Installation instructions on Tom’s blog post, Rails schema browser plugin: proof of concept.