AlternateIdea: Did motion graphics jump start Ruby on Rails?

July 24th, 2005

Did motion graphics jump start Ruby on Rails?

3 comments on 492 words

A lot of comments and blog post around the web show people who are reflecting on there first experience with “Rails”:http://rubyonrails.com. It goes something along the lines of “I saw the video and was amazed.” Are the Rails videos playing a bigger role in marketing Rails than we might think?

We are a busy culture and thus reading an 8 page introduction on fill-in-the-blank really isn’t something we enjoy. Nobody likes reading manuals. When we buy new gadgets we usually rip it out of the box and immediately begin playing with it.

Taking a camera as an example, most people are familiar with your common digital cam, so instead of reading the manual we pretty much just start pressing buttons and expect it to work like you think a camera should. You’ve seen a camera work before.

Generally developers coming to Rails know how to program so we want quick proof of how this can be beneficial to us. We don’t really want to be bothered with reading a big tutorial to see if learning a new programming language (Ruby in this case) is worth your time but if there is no other option you’ll probably find that most won’t really pursue it further or put it off until another day.

h3. Enter the show me revolution

The Rails videos have been monumental in my opinion of “hooking” developers before they have a chance to put it off for another day. Watching a video doesn’t require much effort and thus quickly lets you decide whether you want to take things to the next level or dismiss it all together. Another, possibly overlooked example of how Rails is making it easy for you.

Do you think videos will play a bigger role in “open source marketing”:http://www.collaboratemarketing.com/opensourcemarketing/ in the years to come?

Update: It seems “Curt Hibbs”:http://blog.curthibbs.us made this “same observation”:http://blog.curthibbs.us/articles/2005/04/27/screencast-videos-a-better-way-to-get-it about 3 months ago. There is a good discussion on the topic over at Curt’s place.

Discussion

Curt Hibbs said on July 25th

I made the same observation here: http://blog.curthibbs.us/articles/2005/04/27/screencast-videos-a-better-way-to-get-it

I invited people to tell their story if they were hooked on Rails through the video… and many did.
Curt Hibbs said on July 25th

Hmmm… that URL got cut off. Here it is in pieces:

http://blog.curthibbs.us/articles/
2005/04/27/screencast-videos-a-better-way-to-get-it
Nathaniel Talbott said on July 25th

Good article… FYI, I posted a follow-up at my blog.

Sorry, comments are closed for this article.

Justin is the Design Director for entp, the company behind Lighthouse, Warehouse, and Mephisto. You can check out his dated portfolio for a peek of what he's done.

Beautifully simple issue tracking and project management. With a beautiful Mac-like interface, email and subversion integration, Lighthouse is the perfect project management tool. We took the suck out of issue tracking.

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```
alias grep='GREP_COLOR="1;37;41" LANG=C grep --color=auto'
```
Stash this away in your Z Shell (~/.zshenv) or Bash environment (~/.bashrc) and set your preferred ANSI code.
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DoubleClick and Define using Apple Dictionary


var selection;
if(window.getSelection)
  selection = window.getSelection();
else if(document.selection)
  selection = document.selection.createRange();

document.observe("dblclick", function() {
  if(navigator.userAgent.include("Macintosh")) {
      location.href = "dict://" + selection;
    }
});

A quick (and probably dirty) Prototype-based hack allowing Mac users to get the definition of any word by double clicking it.

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A strftime for Prototype


Object.extend(Date.prototype, {
  strftime: function(format) {
    var day = this.getUTCDay(), month = this.getUTCMonth();
    var hours = this.getUTCHours(), minutes = this.getUTCMinutes();
    function pad(num) { return num.toPaddedString(2); };

    return format.gsub(/\%([aAbBcdDHiImMpSwyY])/, function(part) {
      switch(part[1]) {
        case 'a': return $w("Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat")[day]; break;
        case 'A': return $w("Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday")[day]; break;
        case 'b': return $w("Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec")[month]; break;
        case 'B': return $w("January February March April May June July August September October November December")[month]; break;
        case 'c': return this.toString(); break;
        case 'd': return this.getUTCDate(); break;
        case 'D': return pad(this.getUTCDate()); break;
        case 'H': return pad(hours); break;
        case 'i': return (hours === 12 || hours === 0) ? 12 : (hours + 12) % 12; break;
        case 'I': return pad((hours === 12 || hours === 0) ? 12 : (hours + 12) % 12); break;
        case 'm': return pad(month + 1); break;
        case 'M': return pad(minutes); break;
        case 'p': return hours > 11 ? 'PM' : 'AM'; break;
        case 'S': return pad(this.getUTCSeconds()); break;
        case 'w': return day; break;
        case 'y': return pad(this.getUTCFullYear() % 100); break;
        case 'Y': return this.getUTCFullYear().toString(); break;
      }
    }.bind(this));
  }
});

UPDATE: Bugs fixed. Thanks Andrew and Stephen

Also, some of my old and new code has been posted on GitHub. You might find something useful.

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A beautiful, organic animation by Flight404 created using Processing.

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Dustin might not surprise you at your house with a book in hand, but he’ll damn sure send you his innermost fu in the form of a shiny yellow and black book. It’s an excellent read if you’re looking to put more funk in your functions and class in your classes. Check out “Pro JavaScript Design Patterns” by Dustin and Ross Harmes.

—I’m Justin Palmer and I approve this message.
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Making an iPhone app in about a minute

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Did motion graphics jump start Ruby on Rails?

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