Echo lake, view from my house. Taken with my iPhone and enhanced with the free Photoshop.com app…

Posted via web from arnab’s posterous

Just learnt from @IndianGuru’s tweet about RubyRef – it’s an iPhone app for Ruby Doc.

Sound like a nice idea – however redundancy was already a thought by the time I went to the Appstore to check it out. However I am spoilt by free iPhone app already – and seeing a tag of $0.99 I didn’t care to even try it. Here’s why -

1) There’s hardly any time I am coding Ruby/Rails I am not online. And there’s really great free doc (rubybrain, railsbrain, and the excellent one stop shop gotapi). When I have these at a keypress away, why will I turn to the iPhone?

2) I find myself copy-pasting most of the time I am looking up some obsecure Ruby functionality. Agreed, Ruby makes it concise. It’s not like you have to a) code up an Iterator, b) have a while loop to go thru it c) and finally iterate, like in some other languages – Ruby is good at being concise. But still, you gotta cut-paste sometimes right?

3) I find myself working with different Ruby/Rails versions all the time. Ruby 1.8.7/Rails 2.2 at home, Ruby 1.8.6/Rails 1.2 at work (don’t get it started on why) – so I find rubybrain/railsbrain very useful for this purpose. I haven’t tried RubyRef yet – but looking at the screenshots it probably supports one version. Especially with Rails evolving all the time, we definitely need something like that

4) I haven’t talked about ri/irb combo yet – I find them very useful for Ruby docs. Right in the shell, no context switch to move to the browser/phone. Even if you don’t use them, having a downloaded copy of the doc (from rubybrain for example) will probably be much more easier to refer to than the iPhone.

I mean, I don’t see myself coding Ruby/Rails without a computer (at least now). As long as I have a computer won’t ri/irb/rubybrain/downloaded-doc be easier to refer than the iPhone?

I had all the intentions of trying the app out – but given so many good, free alternatives I don’t think I’ll try a 99 cent app.

What about you?

You guys know my love for gmail – I just love the cool features it gives me – shortcuts, awesome search features and the like – I love doing things fast and without ever touching the mouse. But I do use Outlook in office, let’s say for the lack of a better or maybe more popular e-mail client? I tried some Linux clients for some time but I am so used to Outlook that I will have to wait for Gmail’s corporate adoption before I switch.

I agree outlook is an awesome app and very popular at that, but like most Microsoft products, it is intended for the layman, not the developer. Just as Firefox (with it’s addons and the hundreds of GreaseMonkey free scripts) compares to IE! You just can’t do things fast enough without these things. And Dialog Boxes (with questions like “Do you REALLY want to exit?” I mean, come on!) or views to navigate which you must use the mouse are common.

But to come to the topic of this post, Xobni does not add these things to Outlook (and so these things still remain on my wish-list for Outlook). It does something else – Just check out the awesome demo video the Xobni folks have created.

I bet you’ll love it. Yeah it probably does not make Outlook anymore developer friendly (and that probably will never happen anyway) – but it does make it cool! It brings the elements of social networking to Outlook (among other things). And when you get to work/play with fun/cool things you are happier (and so more productive).

The whole point is, it looks like it can make Outlook fun. Oh wait, that’s not the whole point, wait, wait, wait!

I usual have good motivating factors for writing blogs, and most of the time they are selfless. You agree? So once in a blue moon I am allowed to do something for myself? Right, read on.

Xobni is in beta right now and is invite-only. You can sign up and you will _eventually_ (you know how eventually usually goes with free, cool and fun?) get it. Or you can advertise it and if enough (that you figure out) people use your advertising to get to Xobni you get it faster.

Yeah that’s the whole deal – So go ahead. I have put a Xobni widget right there on the right side of my blog (and that too on top of “About me”) . Please click it and add yourself to the beta list. “Show me some love”, as they say

The faster you do it, the faster I get to try it – so help me out. And remember if you get onto the Xobni beta list any other way (other than clicking my idget and signing up) I get nada! So please, guys.

And that’s the whole point of this blog

And yeah in case you still have not figured it out, Xobni is… you guessed it now, Inbox reversed!