I've been looking for a simple method of parsing, clicking and navigation to build web automation scripts. Thankfully, Bryan Helmkamp & Seth Fitzsimmons developed the easy-to-use Rails acceptance testing system, Webrat. Through Mechanize, you can remotely select, enter data, and pull data. Now if you just want to scrape, you can use webrat-scraper, but if you want to be more involved, test through IRB. This is fairly straightforward, after figuring out how to get Mechanize going.
Fire up Webrat and get your automation goodness going:
We've been using Nanoc & Webgen for rapid static site development. Webgen seems to do a better job of on the fly recompilation, while Nanoc appeals to the programmatic side. Thanks to Hacker News, we've just discovered Serve, which will be perfect for developing front ends and dropping them straight into Rails.
We've upgraded one of our combat (shake the iPhone) laser sounds with a cooler laser blaster from a popular sci-fi movie series, which shall go unnamed. It's amazing what you can do with a Slinky, plastic party cup, book, and paper towel. Here's the behind the scenes video.
[A silly note from the writer: Our brave CEO, Jason Wong, mustered up the courage to do the video with zero rehearsing and with only one take!]
Don't forget to download zing! or zing! Free today (or update your current version).
Our designer, Katrina, entered a photo contest on Gizmodo’s site to create a fake iPhone 4.0 interface and got 2nd place! She, of course, remembered to do a bit of product placement for zing! Free.
To expand the zing! user base, we've developed zing! free! Who doesn’t like free stuff? We submitted the app during the last week of December, which coincided with Apple’s company shutdown. So, zing! free wouldn't be reviewed until the 4th. It so happens that they got to our app very quickly and rejected it that same day (the bright side is that the process is getting faster).For zing! free, we adjusted the layout to accommodate ads and an upgrade button. The buttons are smaller, and arranged into 2 rows of 3 instead of 3 rows of 2. In addition to adjusting the layout, we only used 1 combat sound per theme (instead of 3 in the paid version). To entice upgrades, we provided previews of 'bow chicka bow wow' and the shock. Those buttons are “greyed” out and only playable once per session. Once users press the button, a popup appears and lets them know that this sound can be used more if they upgraded.This is the email we received: Zing! FREE cannot be posted because it is a beta or feature-limited version. Free or "Lite" versions are acceptable, however the application must be a fully functional app and cannot reference features that are not implemented or up-sell to the full version.Luckily we got rejected because realized that there was a typo on our pop up screen (see the second screenshot). Since receiving that email, we altered our app and resubmitted it on 1/12/10. We now allow users to use the sounds without any restrictions. And as a result, our app is now in the app store as of 1/15/10! Apple's approval process is finally getting faster.
Zing! Free is out for download at the iTunes app store. What's different?1. The app is ad supported through Admob 2. Smaller buttons with a different layout (to support ads) 3. Only one combat sound for each screen (as opposed to the 3 per screen when you shake it) 4. It's FREE!
December marks the 10th year anniversary of i5labs! In honor of this month, we're going to look back at the different faces of i5labs (formerly ionami design).
Design 1: 1999 Design 2: 2002
Design 3: 2003 Design 4a: 2004 Design 4b: 2006 (this is when we decided to transition to our new company name, i5labs) Design 5: September 2009
To make it easier for people to find zing!, we decided to post some keywords to help them out.Since our most unique sound (bow chicka bow wow), could be spelled many different ways, we turned to Urban Dictionary to find out how many other ways one could spell it. There are 15 ways, or 14 ways too many.
AppAdvice gave us 15 clicks of fame as their Featured App of the Day on the AppAdvice Daily podcast. You can skip to 3:36 to hear the blurb about zing!.
Our favorite quotes:"I love the UI!"“I like this application because it’s easy to use and doesn’t have tons unnecessary sounds. It only has the ones that you’ll need for time appropriate situations.”
