Business Startup Week 9: From Moo Cards to TestUnit

The Plymouth Software business cards turned up this week from moo.com. I couldn't be happier with how they've turned out - the logo and colours matched perfectly, and Moo's 100% recycled green cards have a fine finish.

Plymouth Software Business Cards

Amberleaf Gets a New Look

Amberleaf finally saw itself updated with the new look screens I have been working on for the past few weeks. With the update comes a complete refresh, less clutter on screen and an improved user experience.

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Amberleaf Screenshot

Coming Soon: Outlime 1.1

A lot of code went into Outlime this week, completely rebuilding some parts of the app to be more stable and add some new functionality. Amongst the changes are a separate layer for background images (letting you erase over your sketch without erasing the background), and some additional pen colours.

Open Source Contributions

In between coding Outlime and Amberleaf, I found some time to start working on my github account again. Working on open source is a great way to try out new code techniques, and improve your developer karma. In pushing a few updates to my fork of the cPanel Gem, I had to to learn TestUnit which I'm now tempted to use in any projects.

Although I've been a fan of RSpec for a long time, TestUnit is a much lighter approach. Whilst both frameworks approach testing in different ways (TestUnit for test driven development, and RSpec for behavioural driven development), I've often found myself battling with

Get Started Quicker with a new Rails 3 app

Despite that, I also updated my template Rails 3 project to use the release version of Rails 3.0. The template is a kickstart project, setup to use jQuery, PostgreSQL, FactoryGirl, Shoulda, Mocha and RSpec 2.

What's Next

The coming week will see a major update to Outlime, adding new and improved functionality for sketching over photos. I've also been asked by Mark Stocks to redevelop his photography website for selling the 2011 Vistas de Murcia calendars.