Seth Ladd's Blog

We're busy developers, you and I, and we want to get back to building our awesome HTML5 app and not muck around too much with user sign in and registration.  There are enough accounts out there, there's no reason why your users need to create a new account identity just for your system.  Let them sign in with an existing account, your users will thank you!! We're going to learn the bare minimum required to allow your users to use their Google Account to register and sign in to your Ruby on Rails 3 web app.  I think you'll find that it's very easy to add OpenID support for Google Accounts, especially for Rails 3 web apps. Assumptions: You are building a Ruby on Rails 3 web app. You do not yet have user authentication or registration for your app.  A future article will show you how to add Google OpenID to your authlogic app, but this article is all about starting from scratch. You want your users to use their Google Accounts for their identity. You have a model...

You're busy, I'm busy, let's get right to it.  I'm writing this blog post for a buddy of mine who has an awesome app that would do great in the Chrome Web Store .  He's crazy busy, so he needs the "just tell me what to do" guide, so here we are. Wait, what, you haven't heard of the Chrome Web Store?  Are you a web developer that writes awesome web apps and wishes there was a great consumer marketplace to distribute and sell your apps?  Yup, that's the Chrome Web Store.  That's what I thought, you want in on this. We're going to assume you already have your app.  If not, go build an amazing HTML5 app.  I'll wait. Got your app?  Good, let's go. Create a Google Account.  You might even have one, and you don't need a GMail account.  This Google Account will be used to publish your app, so you might want to create a role account, not tied to a specific person. Create a directory and name it something like my-app-rocks. Wri...

Aloha, I recently taught a one day class titled Intro to Ruby on Rails 3  at the Pacific New Media school from University of Hawaii.  It was a great learning experience for me, as it was my first full day class teaching anything. Some lessons learned: I under-sold the class description, thinking it was an intro class, but in reality it was an intermediate class.  I was assuming the students knew what the Terminal was, or what a relational database is. If there are basic tools required to learn the base material, spend some time explaining these basic tools, even for an intermediate class. Pair programming worked about 50%.  I had the class arrange themselves in a line, from newbie to expert.  This was a great ice breaker, and I used this to group people together.  However, some people wanted to stick with their colleagues.  I saw a lot of people helping each other out and teaching each other, but not everyone is into this format. There was e...

Aloha! The Chrome Web Store will launch later this year as a new consumer marketplace to distribute and monetize web apps.  We've collected a great set of resources and documentation to help you get started. Chrome Web Store developer documentation Integrating with Chrome Web Store payments Installable Web Apps docs Chrome Web Store Image Guidelines Guidelines for designing web apps Chrome Web Store FAQs Chrome Web Store apps discussion forum HTML5 Studio We encourage you to sign up as a Web Store developer and get started.  It will be an easy way to get your great web app in front of the 70+ million active users of Chrome! Seth

Aloha! Thanks to the Pacific New Media Center, I will be presenting an Introduction to HTML5 on September 10th at 7pm at University of Hawaii Art Auditorium, Art Building . This will be a fun and engaging talk with lots of time for questions and answers. Intro to HTML5 Abstract: This presentation will cover a very broad range of exciting and cutting edge HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript technologies that are powering the next generation web.  We will see lots of demos and code for a variety of features, and we'll learn why so many developers, large companies, and users are excited by the family of HTML5 features.  We'll focus on what's possible now (more than you think!) and we'll look to the future of what's to come shortly. This intro talk is targeted at web enthusiasts and web developers new to HTML5.  Anyone who has heard about HTML5 and wants to learn what it's all about and what you can do with it should attend. Who am I? Seth Ladd is a Developer Adv...

The Axioms When talking about the mobile phone market, have you noticed that it seems like everyone is taking about and analyzing "smart phones"?  That is, there's an incredible focus on smart phones, the vendors, the SDKs, the marketplaces, and users.  It's easy to see why: smart phones are extremely capable, monetize well, and there is a lot of competition which leads to innovation which leads to users winning. There are plenty of logical reasons why a developer chooses to develop for a smart phone instead of a legacy phone: smart phones have tremendous features and functionality smart phones typically have great SDKs smart phones integrate with marketplaces smart phones are evolving smart phone users are trained to spend money on apps There's a finite amount of energy in the universe, and the more it's spent on smart phones, the less it's spent on legacy phones.   In the mobile space, developers choose the target platform for their applicati...

HTML5 is being adopted quickly, with many of the specs already enjoying cross browser support.  Now is the perfect time to dive in and begin to plan HTML5 feature implementation to enable the types of Rich, Fast, and Highly Functional applications users are demanding. I can recommend the following set of resources to begin your journey.  Have fun, get creative, and start hacking! Overview HTML5 Rocks! Interactive presentation, Code playground, and Tutorials.  Produced by Google’s Chrome Developer Relations team. What is HTML5 and Why Should We Care? High level infographic illustrating the different HTML5 features and how they are related. HTML5 Readiness Browser implementation of individual HTML5 features.  This page itself is written using HTML5! HTML5 Demos List of demos by feature and browser support. Get Started HTML5 Presentation... in HTML5! An HTML5 presentation written in HTML5.  Covers all of the new features, with demos for mo...