I’ve started to poke around with iPhone development as well. One of the things I’ve realized is that we use iPhones a lot when we are brewing to lookup recipies, update / read our wiki etc. This will not be my main focus, especially considering the site doesn’t really work for anyone besides me yet. But I do think it will be a fun and interesting thing to work on in the future.

I’m headed out to Zurich on Saturday for our European Sales Engineering (I think that’s what SE means) rotation. I’ll be talking to them about the thing I do for my day job. So…. at least one more week brew manager will be on hiatus. But I’m at least at the point where I want to do it. Hopefully soon want will turn to need and time will allow.

So… off to it then.

So far I’ve got the recipe page with tabs to a users inventory. After writing this I’ll work on getting the tabs fleshed out more, I’m still not sure what elements it makes sense to navigate to. I keep having this internal debate that tabs should take you to content and not actions. For instance it should take you to your recipes but we should not have a tab to start a new recipe. I think I might add tabs for recipes, inventory and brews, and possibly the BJCP guidelines (If I choose to reproduce them here, still up in the air on that too). Each of those tabs will have the list you would expect, as well as action links for deleting, editing and adding / starting a new whatever.

Its funny how little time this took, about an hour but how productive it feels because it changed the way the site looks. In my day job I don’t ever see a user interface change for the work I do…. instant gratification is nice.

One gotcha I don’t particularly understand about Tabnav. Whenever I update what a tab links to, or the text in the tab I have to restart mongrel… what the heck? Not a huge deal but I wasted about 15 min figuring out why my changes wouldn’t take effect.

Be warned that that page is in no way functional. Anything posted under the pre alpha site is really just for Chris to take a peak and what I’m doing and is never guaranteed to work (I update things haphazardly and make no effort to ensure that it reflects a consistent image) and it isn’t really for public consumption. I probably should not have named it pre alpha….

Anyway I’ve learned that I don’t know much about CSS. This is not a terribley huge suprise. I am muddling my way through and making decent progress. If anyone’s got a good web page or book on CSS to recommend I’d appreciate it. I’ve read some stuff online and haven’t found any good comprehensive thing I’m supper happy with. I plan to go pickup a book this weekend maybe. Surley O’Reilly has something that can help me out.

Anyway, thats my quick update and now I’m back to it.

Going camping again this weekend and work has picked up so things are on hiatus until next week or so.

So I did some reading. The unit tests aren’t as decoupled as I would like them to be (yes Michael Feathers, you have made an impact in my life (his legacy code book is pretty good. I suggest it). I firmly believe that a unit test should not use a database or network. I think you can do that with the model well enough (by avoiding fixtures), but it looks next to impossible for controllers. From what I’ve read testing a controller makes http requests to the web server. I’m not a purist or anything, but its a bummer it has to do that. And I don’t think I can setup an in memory model object for a controller to work with (I’m probably wrong about that, I’d guess there’s some magic) I’d imagine for a full tests suite it would slow things down considerably. The other thing I’m not immediately seeing is a way to sense through a fixture. While not strictly necessary (and may in fact be more trouble than its worth) it sounds like a neat idea. All that said, it looks like the functional testing you can do with the unit test framework is pretty slick. I’m kicking around the idea of setting up some sort of nightly check out / test run just for kicks.

There has been a vanilla crisis in my house ( I think I get cookies!) I’m out.

The nav is still incredibly clunky. Hopefully Chris has had some time to think about what navigation should look like. Next tasks is to figure out if the measurement stuff should move out of the recipe class itself and into a helper of some sort. I’ll also make it so recipe ingredients aren’t shared between users (may hap we will have some common pool of them and then you make them your own).

The other task I’ll tackle is the ability to add steps to a recipe. This should get recipe creation all done and I’ll have produced something capable of storing recipes per user that can be searchd by everyone.

One thing I’ve done, that I’m not sure what to do about is allow recipes to be created by an unregistered user. This is cool, and they can create it and add ingredients and all that. The thing is they can’t come back and edit it later. Once they click ‘save’ that’s the ball game. I’m officially soliciting suggestions. One thing I was thinking bout is using gravatar’s. They have the ability to bind a session to an IP which is kinda cool, and it just looks like it would be a neat thing to integrate. I don’t think they provide anything I couldn’t get with a session cookie or the like…. but eh… why not. Other ideas appreciated. Should I just restrict recipe creation to registered users (not wild about that).

Also, wordpress has this autosave feature that turns spell check off (when using the wyswig editor)… anyone know how to disable that?

def initialize(params = {}) #Not def initialize()
    super(params)
    ....
end

So anyway, users now compose inventories. Life is good for them. Still can’t enter recipies, because you know I got side tracked. But eh that’s how it goes.

I’ve got beer to rack & bottle (heff into bottles and racking a brown to secondaries) tomorrow night so I won’t get to work on the site for a day or two. When I get back to it I’ll finish up the recipe stuff and get it out there.

I got the boiler plate webpage up that says “hey I’m going to build something”. I hope to have recipe creation up by the end of the weekend. I’m going with the release early and often approach I think.

In more exciting news, for me at least. I got subversion up and running on a host outside my house. So now it runs on dreamhost. Hopefully I’ll get bugzilla installed and I can stop making notes to my self via google docs.

So far I’m liking dream host a lot. I’ll put up some intelligent and organized thoughts about why I switched over from godaddy hosting later.

I’ve connected the user and the inventory object… I think for now I’ll leave it at that until I can get a model drawn up somewhere. Paper and pen maybe… lofi.