Beginning Rails: Now in 2nd Printing

posted by pete on September 20th, 2007

The Unspace team is so proud of Jeff, Cloves and Hampton. Like the title suggests, in just under two months, the book has flown off the virtual shelves and Apress is printing more to supply the demand.

A viable alternative to the ubiquitous AWDwR, it’s targeted at people who are interested in getting up to speed with a new tool. It assumes some familiarity with programming, but we know many people with no programming experience are following along just fine. Also it seems quite popular with designers working on Rails projects, who finally know what all of those variables are actually doing.

Check it out: Beginning Rails: From Novice to Professional on Amazon.

TheScore launches iPhone app

posted by pete on September 10th, 2007

I’m pleased to direct the attention of your iPhone to ScoreMobile iPhone Edition.

Unspace worked with TheScore, a sports network based in Toronto, to build a great real-time score ticker application. I believe that this is the first commercial iPhone app built in Canada, which is significant considering that the iPhone is not available in Canada yet. We flipped the switch on Thursday, right around the same moment that Steve Jobs announced the iPod touch - an iPhone without the phone. We suspect that this will spur huge growth in iApps. As XHTML/Javascript developers, we applaud Apple for not attempting to create Yet Another Web API.

First up is support for Major League Baseball, with NFL to follow soon and planned support for most major league sports in the next while. Also exciting is the potential to experiment with embedding TheScore’s video and radio network content.

We’ve learned a lot about baseball, and professional sports in general working on this project. One of the coolest things about being Unspace is that we never know who’s going to walk through the door next. Developers, keep an open mind about jumping into new domains.. learning something completely new is very rewarding.