Sometimes working on one thing gets pretty tedious.

Last night while taking a break from Cashboard I had some fun and wrote a simple web app that was inspired by a design board I frequent often.

Kill the lazy dog is a small Ruby app written with Sinatra.

The objective is to come up with a pangram – a phrase that uses every letter of the alphabet.

Substruct, the Ruby on Rails e-commerce and content management software just tagged and bagged the last release before we go 1.0.

The version number is seriously misleading as the project has been active for over 2 years. Oh well…

Major changes

• Update to Rails 2.1.0
• Lots of bug fixes and updates from our community

Get the good stuff

• See all of the latest changes
• Download the latest version from SVN, or a tar / gzipped archive
• Discuss Substruct with us at Google Groups

Enjoy…

Just dropped a redesign on subimage.com after four years of stagnation.

It was time for a change.

Substruct v1.0.a3 was just tagged and bagged.

Lots of bugfixes and a mostly working test harness. Next step, fully working tests :)

Go to the home page to download, or get your fix directly from here.

Late announcement, but a few weeks back I moved the Substruct project to GoogleCode.

GoogleCode is replacing the crusty on Trac system I had in place, which was slow, hard to maintain, and got spammed so much I had to shut off issue tracking.

During the push, multiple changes were made, and a pretty stable archive distribution has been placed on the site.

Issue tracking is now alive and well again – along with a user-commentable wiki.

...Just got done prepping a fairly major release of Substruct, the first and only open-source RoR e-commerce platform.

This release updates Substruct to Rails 2 / Engines 2, replaces file_column with attachment_fu, AND is the initial release that will be distributed in archive form. Sorry no PayPal IPN support yet – within the next few days hopefully…

Shouts out to Luke Ludwig for his contribution of the attachment_fu patch.

From now on, all new people to Substruct are recommended to download the latest tar/gzipped archive avaliable here.

New install instructions have been placed on the site…and are much easier than before.

Now the project even includes a rake task that checks if you have the correct gems installed.

I have only tested here on my OS X box, so hopefully things will go smooth on Windows as well.

Version 0.97
---------------------------------------
Added: 
  1. Added nice installer rake task
  2. Upgrade to Rails 2.0.2 / Engines v2
  3. Images and uploads switched from using file_column and rmagick to 
     using attachment_fu and mini_magick.

Upgrade steps:
    1. Make sure you have the mini_magick and mime-types gems installed.
        a. sudo gem install mini_magick
        b. sudo gem install mime-types
            * Note: mime-types gem is only needed to upgrade, but is not
              needed after the upgrade is complete.
    2. Back up your database just in case.
        * mysql example:  mysqldump -u USERNAME -p DATABASE_NAME > backup.sql
    3. script/generate plugin_migration
    4. rake db:migrate
        * All of your uploads and images will be copied to a new location.
          Since it is a copy it is non-destructive, leaving the originals
          in their place.
    5. Check out the new environment.rb file in the 
       vendor/plugins/substruct/config directory.

Entering your time into Cashboard just got a lot easier.

Cashboard Timer lets you log time without keeping a web browser open.

This was my first widget, and a lot of fun. It took longer than I expected (around three days) but I’m really happy with the results.

There were some quirks debugging with dashboard widgets that I didn’t expect, like errors being logged to the console.

At least the rails part was easy using ActionWebService...

Could a Cashboard open API be coming soon? Hrm….........

You heard right…..our first hosted application just launched!

If you’re managing estimates, invoices, payments, and projects any other way – you need this software.

Check out the announcement or – get Cashboard now!

Took a few minutes out of the day today to tweak the design of this blog.

Theming Typo was quick and painless…Now at least the UI fits in with our home page a little better…

Just a sneak peak….work is continuing as planned. If you haven’t signed up for the announcement list yet, you might want to.

Here’s a spy photo of the Estimate Creation and Customer Preview screens open at the same time.

Did I mention everyone who signs up will have first crack at the Alpha release?