Site Archives: General
Super-easy cross-browser gradient backgrounds
Posted by Tom | June 23, 2009 comments 3 Responses

screen shot

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.

Cookbook and Tutorials Updated
Posted by Bryan Larsen | May 14, 2009 comments 3 Responses

To coincide with the release of Hobo 0.8.6, the cookbook and the tutorials have been updated.

The agility tutorial is now a gitorial, a tutorial made with git. This shouldn’t affect you much but it does give you a few more options when running through the tutorial. This should also give you more confidence that we haven’t let errors creep into the tutorial!

Besides numerous typos and errors being fixed, there are two new chapters in the agility tutorial: User Activation and Integration Testing

The User manual has a new chapter: Hobo Scopes. The HoboFields and HoboSupport doctests have been updated and included in the manual.

The cookbook now includes an additional section: Third Party Plugins. Submit your plugin and join the party!

Hobo 0.8.6 Released!
Posted by Bryan Larsen | May 14, 2009 comments 7 Responses

We’re pleased to announce the release of Hobo 0.8.6.

Hobo 0.8.6 includes Rails 2.3 support.  Rails 2.2 support has been maintained.   Rails 2.1 support was dropped in 0.8.5.

Significant effort was put into unit and integration tests in this release.

Some small changes were made to item order and positioning to fix bugs with IE6. This may require updates in custom stylesheets.  The most likely problem is the positioning of <account-nav>.

Previously, the lifecycle transitions had a parameter called :params in the documentation and :update in the code.  The code has been updated to match the documentation.

Support for big_integer in HoboFields has been dropped.  It appears that this has never worked correctly.

<input-many> is now a polymorphic tag and the default tag for <has_many> inputs.

The content parameter has been renamed to description for generated cards.

<input-many> and <sortable-collection> have been improved.

Many tags have had parameters and attributes added to improve customization.

Many bugs have been fixed.  See the lighthouse or the git commit history for more details.

0.8.6 is a release candidate for Hobo 1.0.  At this point we do not believe that there are any outstanding bugs on Hobo that do not have workarounds.   The lighthouse shows the remaining tickets scheduled for 1.0

This Week in Edge Hobo
Posted by Bryan Larsen | April 28, 2009 comments One Response

Here’s what’s been happening the last 3 weeks in Hobo.

Automated Tests

Unit tests have been updated, and integration tests have been added. More information is available in this post.

Rails 2.3 Support

Hobo finally supports Rails 2.3.  More information, and instructions on how to upgrade are available in this post

The Push for Hobo 1.0

As Tom mentioned we hope to get Hobo 1.0rc1 out soon.  The code is frozen, we’re only fixing bugs.  Please ensure you’ve entered any bugs you find in our Lighthouse so we don’t miss any. And if you have any changes of your own, please send patches or pull requests quickly.

Hobo –no-rails

The --no-rails option was added to the hobo command to make it available when hobo is run as a plugin.  See this recipe for more details on how to upgrade to a plugin

Bugs Fixed