Instant Rails = Epic Win
This week Lappy 9500 had a little zombie problem in its hard drive (for the second time in nine months which is how old it is), so I had to switch to the creaky old silver Dell while I wait for a new hard drive to get here. Reasons why I should have bought a Mac aside, my eyes were opened to the wonder which is Instant Rails.
The migration of my desktop development envrionment consisted of:
Step 1: Copy C:\iRails folder from freshly bitten undead Lappy 9500
Step 2: Paste iRails folder onto C:\ drive of Dell Slowpoke.
Step 3: Recognize.
Seriously... Database: check. Web server: ready. Environment variables: check. IDE, are you kidding: check. Codebase: check. It was glorious.
Interestingly getting set up to use Heroku on a new Windows machine is orders of magnitude more complicated. I understand cloud hosting vs. local environment, but if the story is how super easy Heroku is to use to get up and running with RoR, there is no comparison, it fails in comparison to Instant Rails. My other gripes about Heroku are the lack of a console window and the impossibly small pipe. Building an app on free-beta Heroku can feel like riding a Ninja 250 - the rev limiter is pegged right from the start, and it starts throwing errors above 55 mph.
For the record, to get Heroku back up on Silver Lappy would require installation of Firefox, 7-Zip, GitBash, my codebase and data scripts. I know, it's apples and... green apples, but for keeping me working seamlessly Instant Rails gets my gold star this week.
While I'm digressing on scrappy bootstrapping tools, I also installed ColorPic and the Gimp. ColorPic is a lightweight way to get the hex for any color you find, then fine tune it on your site using the raw hex values. Gimp is a sad pale shadow of Photoshop, but it's free. It isn't good for details or freehanding, but if you just need a curvy shape, a color change, a scale or a crop it gets the job done. Microsoft Expression Design is targetted at doing just this sort of thing and is comparatively really good at it, but if you're going to spend the money my opinion is that you might as well get Photoshop.
The migration of my desktop development envrionment consisted of:
Step 1: Copy C:\iRails folder from freshly bitten undead Lappy 9500
Step 2: Paste iRails folder onto C:\ drive of Dell Slowpoke.
Step 3: Recognize.
Seriously... Database: check. Web server: ready. Environment variables: check. IDE, are you kidding: check. Codebase: check. It was glorious.
Interestingly getting set up to use Heroku on a new Windows machine is orders of magnitude more complicated. I understand cloud hosting vs. local environment, but if the story is how super easy Heroku is to use to get up and running with RoR, there is no comparison, it fails in comparison to Instant Rails. My other gripes about Heroku are the lack of a console window and the impossibly small pipe. Building an app on free-beta Heroku can feel like riding a Ninja 250 - the rev limiter is pegged right from the start, and it starts throwing errors above 55 mph.
For the record, to get Heroku back up on Silver Lappy would require installation of Firefox, 7-Zip, GitBash, my codebase and data scripts. I know, it's apples and... green apples, but for keeping me working seamlessly Instant Rails gets my gold star this week.
While I'm digressing on scrappy bootstrapping tools, I also installed ColorPic and the Gimp. ColorPic is a lightweight way to get the hex for any color you find, then fine tune it on your site using the raw hex values. Gimp is a sad pale shadow of Photoshop, but it's free. It isn't good for details or freehanding, but if you just need a curvy shape, a color change, a scale or a crop it gets the job done. Microsoft Expression Design is targetted at doing just this sort of thing and is comparatively really good at it, but if you're going to spend the money my opinion is that you might as well get Photoshop.
posted by aseever at
1:39 PM
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