As the Future Ruby conference in Toronto draws near, I’m getting more and more excited about the event. Within the last day or two the full list of speakers
has been posted on their site along with summaries of the talks, and it’s eye-popping. They range from the philosophical to the far-out to the highly technical. Programming with DNA modules? What?

def MajorKusanagi
  mixin homo_sapien, cyborg

  add :xray_vision, :therm_optic_camouflage
  suppress :cancer
end

I’m particularly looking forward to experiencing another Giles Bowkett presentation, learning about the Rhodes, Cucumber and Tokyo Cabinet projects from the people behind the tech, and attending another FAILCamp.

We did a lot of chatting with people at Ruby Fringe last year, it’s a good place to put your finger in the air and see which way the winds are blowing. I’ll be curious to see how many of the folks are moving into iPhone and other mobile platform development.

I think there are still a few tickets left — you should come! You don’t need to be a Ruby programmer to dig on a lot of this.

As the regular readers and some of our customers know, we’ve been running a limited beta test of the newest version of Tempo. At this point we’ve gotten quite a few big bugs and show-stoppers out of the way, and we’re ready to let everyone have at it. Hopefully, this will help us uncover any lingering issues, nagging nuisances, and hidden bugs. It will also introduce the new interface to everyone! We hope you not only find it easy on the eyes, but more importantly that you find it extremely functional and efficient.

We worked very closely with nGen Works to design this interface, bringing to them all of the concerns and difficulties our customers have expressed over the last couple of years. It’s a radical change, design-wise, although all the functionality we know and love is still there and improving. It will take a little getting used to, for sure, but we’ve found that after even just a little time in the new interface we can’t bring ourselves to use the old one anymore.

Without further ado, you can join in the beta here:

https://beta.keeptempo.com

• Your web-browser will likely balk at the SSL certificate with a warning – we assure you that it’s safe to ignore this warning and proceed, it’s a self-signed cert.
• This is live data, your data!
• You can always go back to the current interface at this link.

So kick the tires, spend some time with it, and tell us what you think. The end-of-month is coming up, we’re particularly curious to see how it holds up for others when it’s time for billing — it was all aces for us last month (after we fixed a few bugs).

One of my favorite artists, Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, has managed to make more money over Twitter in 10 hours ($19,000) than she has from her recent major-label released album ($0). She’s got a great write-up describing how she did it, but the main points are brilliant and obvious — she’s dealing direct, she’s giving the people what they want. This isn’t so much surprising as it is one of those bell-weather moments for the music industry. It’s also the first time I’ve actually heard of anybody really making money off Twitter, and it’s nice to see it’s not one of those “Internet marketing experts.”

There were some very discouraging signs from Apple out of the WWDC with regard to iPhone developers and the App Store review process, but it sounds like the pile of online criticism is having some effect on them:

I also learned, through various statements and implications, that the App Review team tries to actively avoid major blog publicity about bad rejections, and it’s something they take very seriously. This means, fortunately for us as iPhone-dev bloggers, that we matter and we should continue to bitch incessantly whenever anything is rejected for an invalid or ridiculous reason..

Just a quick note that Stephen’s tutorial on building encrypted iPhone applications with SQLCipher has been published by the fine folks at Mobile Orchard. Thanks, Dan!