Over the past few years, one of my largest annoyances as a Rails developer was sending email. Why? Because it’s slow. The client often has to wait 5-6 seconds for a response, which is unacceptably long, be it a normal page reload or even AJAX.

To combat this issue, one of the most common solutions was to use a background processor. You would send your mail to the job processor, it would queue it up, and send them out later, while your application can return a response right away.

I stopped using this method 2 years ago. Background job processors in Ruby were a bit of a mess. You would have to watch them, monitor them, code around them, and I found it to be just to much overhead for simply sending mail. The instability of long-running Ruby processes meant that running this queue was a bit of a job on it’s own, requiring babysitting or your mail wouldn’t be going out.

Instead, I found tra’s excellent spawn project, letting me fork calls to ActionMailer to be executed immediately. Sure, sending a TON of mail at once instead of queueing it could turn into a theoretical problem, but I’ve never encountered it. After we migrated our Rails deployments to Ruby 1.9, I modified the spawn library to be compatible with the new version of Ruby, and have been copying it into vendor/plugins for every new project I start. It’s one of the few tools that has stayed with me from project to project for such a long period of time.

I was excited to hear that similar functionality would be included in the next Rails release. Up and coming in Rails 4.0 is a new Queuing system, which on the surface provides a DSL very similar to how I use spawn. This makes it extremely easy to run asynchronous code ‘out-of-the-box’, without having to depend on external libraries, processes, or daemons. On top of this new Queue, a dedicated Asynchronous ActionMailer is being released to specifically address sending mail asynchronously.

While I love the idea, I wanted to address one aspect of it’s implementation. When you are passing variables from your code to the mailer, you “should” not pass objects, instead you should pass something that can uniquely identify the object to be picked up again on the other side (for example, an id to be used with find()).

I can’t decide if this is good or bad design. On one hand, I can’t help but think the additional code is just a needless repetition. You are quite literally repeating yourself, calling the same (or similar) code to fetch from the database an object you already have. Additionally, this will keep one implementation incompatible with the next. You can’t just ‘switch on’ asynchronous ActionMailer without refactoring your code.

Is it bad to be passing mutable objects around between different threads? In theory yes, but in practice, I have yet to be bitten by a problem because of this. Be careful with your code.

Pros:
– Not passing around mutable objects to separate threads
Cons:
– Not 1:1 compatible with ‘synchronous’ ActionMailer code
– Additional database calls
– Not DRY

So there we have it. No more background job-queue overhead to send mail or do simple asynchronous tasks. Just one of the features that’s going to make Rails even better in 4.0. Let us know what you think in the comments.

This brings us to Steam, a digital distribution system and multiplayer communication platform developed by Valve which houses Counter Strike along with some 1500+ other titles.

To me, Steam has always been about statistics and the multiplayer aspect of games, or should I say, I wish Steam was more focused on statistics and the multiplayer aspect of games.

Let’s leave the desktop app out of this as I’d like to bring focus to the Steam iPhone app, specifically the lack of game and multiplayer centric features. I remember back in the day, being able to go to a Counter Strike server website (a server I’ve often played at) and immediately be able to look up some very interesting statistics; how many hours I’ve played the past week, the different types of games I’ve played, be it a regular game or a gun game death match. Seeing my rankings, my kill statistics, my per weapon kill statistics, and much, much more. This functionality does not exist in Steam, desktop or mobile.

When the Steam App came out on the iPhone, I was quite excited. I thought that perhaps Valve added some mobile statistical information over their desktop app (which I think on its own needs a significant overhaul in both usability and what it brings to its users). I thought I would finally be able to browse my rankings across the different servers I play at, see how many times I’ve knifed the last round I played, or how many headshots I got in the last game. Well, to keep it short, I was quite disappointed. Not only was none of that available, but to actually get to any statistics on a game I play is next to impossible. There does not exist a dedicated “Games” section… and there aren’t any interesting stats for any games I play available on the app, at all! Sure I can chat with friends… and I can purchase a desktop game… on my iPhone… but I can’t casually browse what interests me most… game statistics. Why would I want to buy a game on my iPhone, to play on my desktop? I’d rather do that on my desktop, where I can immediately download the game after the purchase. When I’m on the iPhone, where I can’t play games, I want to be entertained. What will entertain me about games when I can’t play them? Checking out stats on the games I play. I want to see what’s been happening on the servers I play. I want to check out how my kill to death ratio has been improving over the last few weeks. I want to see how my accuracy is doing with the shotty. Unfortunately I can’t.

If Steam can’t bring us all of these features, we can at least do a hypothetical redesign to bring them to Steam. This kind of functionality will probably never see the light of day, but the least we can do is hope.

Today I’ll be introducing the general art direction of the app, as well as a streamlined navigation and the part that excites me the most… an introduction to games! And so we begin our journey of our pretend Steam iPhone app redesign, which we will be bringing to you over the next few months. This is the first post of many in the Steam redesign series.

We’ll start off with the login screen. If you are using this app for the first time, you have to log in. We’re keeping with Steam’s branding and the use of the app’s official colours of predominantly grey with accents of blue.

The guts of the Steam iPhone app: We would like to introduce the “Games” section. You’ll also notice a new, very streamlined navigation, listing only “Profile”, “Games” and “Friends”. No more buying games, viewing catalogues, wishlists or news feeds. Steam is about games, and the people you play them with.

The “Games” overview screen gives you a quick and easy access to all the games you play. The blue “activity” indicator gives you a quick visual indication that there is new activity in a particular game. This could be a new achievement, a new comment, or a new forum post. We’re envisioning additional social elements to engage you when you can’t actually play the game (more on that in later parts of the series).

Your feedback is greatly appreciated, especially if you’d like to suggest how you would improve the current Steam iPhone app. Leave a post in the comments below. How would you change the Steam iPhone app?

function camelCaseSpaces($s){
    return trim(preg_replace("/[A-Z]/",' ${0}',$s));
}

Using this custom function you can now convert strings such as “iAmSuperCamelCaseString” to “i Am Super Camel Case String”. One day while working on a CodeIgniter project, I needed a quick access to list links to all available methods in one specific controller where most of the methods where in a camelCase format.  To achieve my goal I came up with the above function and the following sneaky code within the “index” method of a controller named “Buildout”:

//Get all method names:
$m=get_class_methods($this);

//Unset the ones I do not need:
unset(
$m[array_search('index',$m)],
$m[array_search('__construct',$m)],
$m[array_search('get_instance',$m)]
);

//Print all links to my methods:
foreach($m as $n)
   print '<href="/buildout/'.$n.'">'.ucwords(camelCaseSpaces($n)).'</a><br />';

Thanks for reading and feel free to re-use this neat trick.

<div id="user">My name is Pedro</div>

$('user').wrapInner($("<span class='red'></span>"));

will produce:

<div id="user"><span class="red">My name is Pedro</span></div>

I’ve tried doing the same in mootools using Element.wraps but it doesn’t accept html, it only accepts the id of an element or an element itself. There was no other Element method that could accomplish this task so I decided to write one.  And here goes the implementation of wrapInner for Mootools:

Element.implement({
     wrapInner:function(e){
          this.clone(false,true).adopt(
               $(e).set('html',this.get('html'))
          ).replaces(this);
     }
});

and the same example using mootools wrapInner:

<div id="user">My name is Pedro</div>

$('user').wrapInner(new Element('span',{'class':'red'}));

will produce:

<div id="user"><span class="red">My name  is Pedro</span></div>

The above implementation is very simple, it does not accept function as a parameter but it does accept an id or element.

I started brainstorming and trying to think what would be the best way to make that application to look realistic, fit within the budget and meet the deadline. Firstly I thought to maybe find a photo of female hand and then match up band and diamond position on top of it and use different hue colors for band however after 15 minute search for such photos I’ve realized that that approach would not work. Diamond perspective position (for 10 different diamond shapes) could never be matched up and resizing them would be a lot of headache.

I decided I’ll make everything in 3d. I’ve purchased some diamond 3d models and female hand 3d model from turbosquid.com.

Diamond models from TurboSquid used for custom diamond chooser

Female 3d hand model used in custom flash application

The hand was fully textured with the bump map however diamonds had no shader and were just plain polygons. Some of their face normals were flipped so it took me some time to clean them up. I needed a good diamond shader. I tried creating one but my time was limited therefore I googled it and found few diamond shaders but none of them where what I was looking for. Finally I’ve found my precious shader on cgsociety.org forum on one of the post replies by very talented 3d artist Steven Hägg-Ståhlberg.

Diamond Shader used in custom diamond chooser application

But to reuse that shading network on my diamonds gave me a little headache. When looking at the shading network it showed that diamond shape node was connected to shading groups:

Diamond Shader Network inside Maya

I’ve tried connecting my diamonds to two shading groups and it just didn’t work for me. I’ve searched the help files and I couldn’t find any answers. I’ve studied the shader in more detail. I’ve checked the perspective view and finally realized that different shader was applied to top faces and bottom faces of a diamond. Because shaders where applied in component mode it was possible for a mesh to belong to 2 shading groups .

One last model that I needed was a band. I could’ve bought it from turbosquid however project specs required a simple band which took only few minutes to model in 3d.

Band 3d model used in diamond chooser flash application

Then I just found a silver shader on highend3d.com and applied it to the band.

Silver shader used in custom flash application

Having all shaders and models I’ve rigged female hand and positioned it the way I wanted. Then I’ve positioned band on the right finger with all diamonds on top of it. I’ve grouped and organized meshes into layers so after I could render each of them separately:

Display Layers in Maya

As you can see I also have the Hi Resolution version of the hand. I’ve smoothed the mesh at the end so it renders nicely.

High Resolution 3d hand used in custom flash application

All diamonds where grouped together. I’ve used that group node to proportionally resize all diamonds at once for different carat sizes. Also group’s pivot point had to be lowered so when diamonds resize they would stay on top of the band all the time. I’ve added a custom attribute to diamonds group called “Carat_Size” which driven scale from 1 to 10.

Then I’ve created 1 plane with gradient shader. 3 spotlights (key,fill and rim). The key light was the only one that was casting raytraced shadows.

Lights Setup in Maya for custom diamond application

The first initial render looked weird and needed alot of tweaking. I had to play with light colors and intensities. The hand didn’t look too realistic:

Initial Render of 3d hand model in custom diamond chooser flash application

I’ve searched for some info on how to recreate a realistic skin shader and found that I should use a mental shader that supports sub surface scattering (SSS) such as fast skin shader… I’ve played with it and finally came up with my final render:

SSS Final Render of custom diamond chooser flash application

Having everything in place I’ve separated hand,band,and diamonds into its own render layers and rendered them with alpha channel. Then I’ve imported everything into photoshop and created alternative band colors.

My last phase of the project was the actual flash application. I’ve imported everything from photoshop to flash and programmed the interface. Some custom events where used to animate carat sizes.

Thank you for reading this article. I hope you’ve learned few things from it.

You can view the final product at www.diamondchooser.com.

In the window event “domready” you have to add the following code:

$$('.confirm').addEvent('click',function(e){
	var msg=this.title?'Are you sure you would like to: '+this.title+'?':'Are you sure?';
    if(!confirm(msg))	e.stop();
});

After the initial code is implemented all that has to be done is to add a “confirm” class to a link and title to describe the action:

     <a href="/product/delete/43" class="confirm" title="Delete item number 43">delete</a>
     <a href="/product/save" class="confirm" title="Save current product">save</a>

When you click on the “delete” link you will be prompted with a confirm message “Are you sure you would like to: Delete item number 43?” and “save” link with “Are you sure you wouldl ike to: Save current product?”.

The following example will show you how to disable the submit button on form submission using mootools and it will work in most of the browsers.

window.addEvent('domready',function(){
	$$('input[type=submit]').addEvent('click',function(e){
		this.clone().inject(this,'after').set('disabled',true).set('value','Processing...');
		this.setStyle('display','none');
	});
});

What this code does is that it simply duplicates the submit button, injecting it after the original one, changing its text to “Processing…” and hides the original one. So it essentially looks like only the text is being changed. The reason why we are cloning the original submit button is because ie6 does not let you submit the form when you disable the submit button.

Enjoy