Posted by Tom | June 24, 2009
2 Responses
Go grab Hobo 0.8.8 : )
Actually I only just published the gems so don’t forget that Rubyforge takes a while to get its act together.
I’m really posting this on behalf of Bryan who’s done pretty much all the work in this release - thanks Bryan! And thanks to Owen and the guys at Barquin for their continued support.
This release is mostly bug fixes. The low-down, as usual, is in the changelog
Oh one more thing. We liked the fresh new look in the previous post so much that it’s now the Hobo default. (that doesn’t mean you need ImageMagick, we just included the generated PNG files in the Clean theme)
Enjoy!
Posted by Tom | June 23, 2009
3 Responses
Hobo 0.8.8 is coming very soon, consisting mostly of bug fixes and bringing us that bit closer to the hallowed version 1.0. While we’re waiting, I though I’d quickly let you know about a very simple Rails plugin I knocked up that makes it extremely easy to add gradient background images to your stylesheets. (If you follow the hobousers group you’ve already seen a mention of this.)
For example:
div.featured { background: url(/gradient_images/50:aaa:fff.png) repeat-x white; }
All that’s happening is that the plugin is rendering a PNG image on the fly; 1 pixel wide, 50 high, with a gradient from a light grey (#aaa) to white. It renders the image you would otherwise have to make yourself in Photoshop or whatever.
The general pattern for the image URL is:
/gradient_images/<height>:<start-color>:<end-color>.<format>
Colours are 3 or 6 digit hex values, as in CSS. The format can be anything supported by ImageMagick (e.g. png or jpg).
You can also do multiple gradients in the same image, like this
div.featured {
height: 100px;
background: url(/gradient_images/50:aaa:fff::50:fff:aaa.png) repeat-x
}
That will give an image 100 pixels high fading from grey to white and back to grey.
Note that you only take the performance hit on the first request, after that the images will be served up directly by your web server thanks to Rails’ page caching. You’ll see a bunch of image files in public/gradient_images.
Requires Rails 2.3 and RMagick.
The plugin is available on github.
UPDATE: We just threw up a quick example app on github. It’s great to see how much nicer you can make the default Hobo app look with just three CSS declarations.
Posted by Tom | April 22, 2009
9 Responses
Things may have been quiet on the blog, but those who’ve been following the hobousers google group or keeping an eye on the github commits will know that the Hobo project is just as active as ever. In fact we have a couple of news items for y’all
First up, I’d like to give a big welcome to Bryan Larsen, who is now working on Hobo full time. Bryan made some excellent contributions entirely off his own back, and he happened to come to the end of a previous project at just the right time so we snapped him up. A big thanks too to our good sponsors at Barquin International for helping us to bring Bryan on to the team.
As requested on hobousers, we’re going to start putting out regular updates on the blog about the latest changes to the code; a sort of “This week in Edge Hobo”. Bryan will be helping out with these posts.
And the other little item of news is that we’ve started the push to Hobo 1.0. The feature set is frozen at this point, and we are working our way through bug fixes, improving the test coverage and docs. If you’ve got a pet bug that you want to see fixed in Hobo 1.0, make sure it’s ticketed.
Stay tuned!
Posted by Tom | December 10, 2008
10 Responses
Just had time to dash this off before heading out. I’ve already said a thank you to the team at Barquin, so I better not forget others who’ve helped out along the way!
Many thanks to Dr Nic for the early work in getting Hobo running as a gem, and for those super cool TextMate tricks. And to Mathijs and Matt for many fixes and tweaks here and there. And of course Mr. James Garlick for a ton of commits in all areas of Hobo, contributions to the docs, and for making Hobo look good both on the outside (the Clean theme) and the inside (James is my API aesthetics consultant!)
Also a shout to Jason and Joel over at i5labs. These guys helped me out with a Hobo project that I got too busy to finish. If anyone out there needs development or help with a Hobo project, drop i5labs a line - they know what they’re doing.
Also thanks to Pete Ferne and the boys at Jiva, for choosing Hobo for Beanbag, and for the many contributions to Hobo which they funded. I am going to do a proper post about Beanbag at some point - promise!
Finally a big thanks to everyone in the wider Hobo community for their involvement, large or small.
Merry Christmas — or whatever you will be celebrating — to all!
