Edinburgh Conferences

Feb 26

Ian FieldhouseConferences, Internet, Ruby on Rails, Web Apps, Web Standards No Comments

Recently two Edinburgh conferences of interest to me have opened for registration.

The Highland Fling

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The Highland Fling is an annual one-day conference aimed at web developers and businesses with an interest in web standards and accessibility.

Now in its second year, this years event takes place on Thursday 3rd April at the Symposium Hall, part of the Royal College of Surgeons, and focuses on the topic of "The Browser & Beyond". Here's a summary from the Highland Fling website outlining what will be discussed:

In the world or modern web development we can no longer consider the browser as the end point of our product which is our content. More and more devices and applications are being released that can access our information and more importantly do not even require a browser to do so.

For The Highland Fling 2008 we're bringing into focus how the landscape is changing. API's, desktop apps, ambient devices, mobile and much more are helping us break out of the browser and potentially reaching an entire new audience as a result.

How do we embrace this, how do we take our existing skill set and transpose it into new mediums? How do we expand our skill set? What is our skill set going to be? Where is it all going?

The sessions look quite interesting and I'm particularly looking forward to hearing what Aral Balkan has to say as I saw him at d.Construct in 2006 and was exposed to Flex for the first time.

Scotland on Rails

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Coming hot on the heels of The Highland Fling is the inaugural Scottish conference on Ruby on Rails — Scotland On Rails.

This is the first UK-centric Ruby on Rails conference and is a two day event on Friday 4rd and Saturday 5th April. When you consider that this is a regional conference the organisers have pulled off quite a coup with the quality of talent that they have assembled to present.

This will be my first conference I have attended that concentrates more on the back end of developing web applications and I'm looking forward to learning some exciting new things and meeting some interesting people.

If you're attending either of these events don't feel shy about saying hello.

Ruby on Rails will ship with OS X 10.5

Aug 08

Ian FieldhouseApple, Mac OS X, Ruby on Rails, Software No Comments

This is a great bit of news as the first thing I do on an install of Mac OS X is download compile and install all the various bits and pieces to get Ruby on Rails up and running. My ideal situation would be that this will be upgradable through software update and that setting up Rails apps with Apache would be handled through the Server Admin tools, but I won't hold my breath on that one.Anyway, this is great exposure for Rails so hats off to Apple for including this and congratulations to all the Rails team.

The developer seed that was distributed today at WWDC contains Ruby 1.8.4 and Rails 1.1.2, but we fully expect to have Rails 1.2.x along with Mongrel, SQLite bindings, and lots of other Ruby goodies on the final gold master when it goes out in spring.It’s been no secret that Apple is held in very high regard by the Rails community. Every single Rails Core contributer is running on Apple and the vast majority of Rails developers are too. To see Apple acknowledge this and return the favor is very rewarding.

Ruby on Rails will ship with OS X 10.5 (Leopard) (Via Riding Rails)