For you tortured souls who want to play with Growl or Ruby-Growl but are stuck on Windows please check out Snarl and Ruby-Snarl.
I’ll leave the coding example up to you, but at first glance it looks very similar to what I demonstrated last night at the Phoenix Ruby Users Group.
We had another successful Phoenix Ruby Users Group this evening. I believe that we once again had a record turn out, many thanks to all who gave up their evening to come support the community. To be honest I was quite surprised with the number of people who attended, mainly do the the fact that I posted to the mailing list last week stating that I wanted to take a break from focusing on Rails to demo some of the other cool libraries that tend to get overlooked.
The original intent of this month’s meeting was for me to do an in-depth tutorial on Rake followed by a demo from James on automating Trac tasks via Rake tasks. Unfortunetly due to a prior commitment by James, and a sudden lack of interest on my part to talk about Rake for 45 min, plans needed to change. Thankfully this morning Jason convinced me that it would be cool to show off some of the capabilities of RubyCocoa. Thus having never even opened Xcode or InterfaceBuilder I spent my lunch hour doing a little research and was actually quite impressed at what I was able to figure out and hack together (how’s that for being agile!). In the end I decided to stumble through a demo of Ruby-Growl for showing cool little notifications, and RubyCocoa for building a sweet little UI to manage the execution of Rake tasks.
I’ve listed some very brief code-samples below, along with some links to the references that I found most helpful. If you are at all interested in either of these libraries please contact as I’d love to continue hacking on both.
Code:
require ‘rubygems’
require ‘ruby-growl’
require ‘open-uri’
growl = Growl.new(“localhost”, “ruby-growl”, [“ruby-growl”])
begin
URI.parse(“http://joshknowles.com”).open
rescue
growl.notify(“ruby-growl”, “Error”, “joshknowles.com unavailable”)
end
References:
References:
Once again thanks to all that attended and showed your support for the local development community. I apologize for my lack of preparation, and appreciate your patience I stumbled my way through my latest pet-project, hopefully you were able to see a thing or two that interests you. For those of you I met the first time, I hope to see you again. For you old timers it’s always a pleasure. I hope to see everyone next Tuesday evening for the AZ on Rails meeting where I will be giving a demo of Capistrano.
One of the main reasons for my decision to re-locate to Phoenix was how well I’ve been embraced in the local development community. In the 3 months I’ve been here I’ve found a great group of talented developers through the Ruby Users Group, Refresh Phoenix and the Desert Code Camp. Many thanks to everyone who has made this a great transition, I look forward to helping to continue to grow the local development community.
Speaking of the Ruby Users Group… tonight was another successful meeting. Today we had 20+ developers show up! Not quite sure what exactly drew everyone in for tonight’s meeting, but whatever it was we were glad to have you there. Many thanks as always to Will and Cyclone Commerce for providing us the great space as well as to James Britt for promoting & facilitating.
Looking forward to next month’s meeting where I plan on presenting more of my plugin work as well as some in-depth Rails testing tutorials and an introduction to Capistrano