Yesterday Google announced the release of Chrome 11 beta.  As usual Google Chrome team continues to push the limits of the web.  With this release they made public their use of a little known Web API for decoding speech into text.  The new API from google is not documented and has probably been in existence since early 2009 when they opened up more of Google Voice and made know their use of transcription for voice mail.   These features are all very interesting.  Thanks to the good work from “don’t panic”, it was very easy to put together a ruby library that helps make it even easier to use the speech API.  Check out the source a github.com.

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Static asset bundling in Ruby on Rails is super easy with assemblage.

SSL is important when dealing with user data. The rails 3 router makes it easy to mark specific sections of your application secure using the :constraints option within a scope block.

Nearly all our client projects require some sort of email.  We make it part of our standard process to always have a staging environment for each of our applications.   The merits of a staging environment ensure that we always validate and can redeploy our applications at moments notice.   To that end occasionally we’ll want to transfer some portion of production data into one of our staging environments.   When we do that we never want to risk having an email triggered via crontab or user action that inadvertently sends an email to a client, from the staging server instead of the production server.   To avoid and allow validation of email transactions,  we have released a very simple rails+smtp service that allows us to have our staging environment talk to a real smtp server that can record each email.   This allows our QA engineers to easily verify emails are sending from crontab or specific user actions.   Here’s the project on github.  Deploying the service is just as easy as deploying a normal rails application.

cap deploy
cap smtp:start

The cap file would need to be modified before as we keep our host keys private and they’re targeted to our named hosts.  e.g.  o1 and tools

Planning to release more software in the coming months hopefully this is useful for others as well.

For a number of our web design and web development clients (like liberty central, spms, and pliris) we had a need to build an easy to use interface for managing a rotating header. We really liked how Wordpress 3.0 added the ability to configure a custom page header, and so we extended on that to build an interface that can be used to configure multiple header images that rotate. We have since made it a free plugin to share with other Wordpress users.

The Holiday Season is upon us! You may have noticed that Captico.com is experiencing some wintry weather – our developers are making it snow! Now the design team is getting in the festive spirit with an animated gif tutorial designed to make all of your images sparkle and shine!

What is color? According to the dictionary, color is defined as: The characteristics of light by which the individual is made aware of objects or light sources through the receptors of the eye, described in terms of dominant wavelength, luminance, and purity. Thus a color can be represented from white to black with all the colors in the rainbow in-between. Now that we defined the word color what does each color represent? Let’s separate the colors into color families: warm colors, cool colors, and neutral colors.

I recently was using Omnigraffle and realized that I wanted to use my own custom icons for a client that was specifically related to fishing. I had already created the custom icons for the client in Illustrator. So I had to figure out how to create my own stencil in OmniGraffle so I would have access to my icons. It was surprisingly easy. If you find yourself in a similar situation here is how to do it and hopefully this is of some help to you!

I don’t know about you but it is an everyday battle with designers, developers and clients on what the proper terminology for a box that holds content on the website is called. As a designer I know it as a module, for developers it is known as a widget and for clients it is known as the whatchamacallit/box/thing.

How can one simple box have so many different names for it? Why can’t the world wide web use one name instead of a range of names?

Sprites originated from video game design from the early days of computers. The computer would grab one image at a time from a large group of images. Contrary to popular belief they are all not all sliced separate images. It is easier to create one large image; you can combine an unlimited number of images into one. In CSS it is the same principle when applying a navigation or buttons in regular and highlighted states.