Our Geek Space

This past june 24 Moove-it won the contest “Best ideas for Ceibal 2010” organized by Rayuela and the Ceibal Plan (One laptop per child), presenting its idea “Together with Ceibal”.

Follow this link to read the official information (spanish) Rayuela Web site of Best ideas

Moove-it was selected by the Ceibal Plan as the company who will develop the first social network for more than 400.000 students of primary and high school.
The idea is to build a web-based tool which will allow students and teachers to interact inside and also outside the classroom. The platform will provide virtual classrooms where teachers can work directly with their groups using all the benefits of the Web, Internet and XOs. Students will also be able to use the tool to meet each other, share their interests or even play together.

This video shows a brief idea of what the “Ceibal Plan” is.

It feels really good to be part of something like this!

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Currently we are the developing team of blahsports. Since January 2010 we have been developing several new functionalities and administrating the whole Site.

Blahsports – www.blahsports.com

Blahsports is a social content website. As a user, you participate in determining all site’s content by providing, selecting, sharing, and discussing articles, pictures and videos that you like and feel that would be interesting to other people.

see the site …

Blah and technology

This project is based on PHP, codeigniter (www.codeigniter.com), Python and MYSQL.
It uses RSS and Web crowller application developed in Python to share all the sports content of a hundred sites.
We create a tag module which searches and identifies the language, sports and a set of tags for each content. For instance, if the content is “Forlan plays very well against Mexico” then the module will find out that the text is about Soccer, Forlan, Mexico and that the main language is English.

blah and a marketing campaign

We are making a marketing campaign to acquire and activate users.  We have a Maradona t-shirt as a prize for the winner among all the registered users … see the site … http://maradona.blahsports.com

This application was developed based on rails.

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We showed the first prototype of the game developed for the “Plan Ceibal” (www.ceibal.org.uy). The game is web based and specially designed for children using a XO computer.

Plan Ceibal

The One Laptop Per Child Association, Inc. (OLPC) is a U.S. non-profit organization set up to oversee the creation of an affordable educational device for use in the developing world. Its mission is “to create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.”

“Uruguay is the first country in accept the challenge”

Worldbank.org – Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal: The world’s most ambitious roll-out of educational technologies?

The Game

Moove-IT and El Abrojo (a Uruguayan Social Organization who works with poor children) are working in the development of an online game for the XO computers.

This game is financed by the IMM (Government of Montevideo) and his main objective is promote good habits between children. This tool is an online game in which the children works with themes relative to the daily environment care. Each child works in groups with their classmates and also with other schools in any location of the country.

They will be able to: build houses, create commercial areas, create rural areas, maintain clean the neighborhood, and manage parks, among others things.

The points are generated by answering simple questions and doing simple tests. The tests and the answers are validated by the collective. This means that players themselves determine whether an answer is correct or not.

Here you have an initial slide of the game with some screenshots. (The slide is in Spanish)

We will put this Game on production in April 20, 2010

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In order to conmemorate the Worl Usability Day the Intendence of Montevideo is inviting every to participate of an event at “Sala Zitarroza” here in Montevideo.

We are proud to say that Moove-iT will be opening the event with me and Damian Moretti talking about “Usability in Social Networks: Facebook vs Twitter”. After us there’s a talk about “New tendencies in the Interaction Design” and the last one is about “Developments and Adaptations for the inclusion of childred with disabilities at the Plan Ceibal”. Plan Ceibal is “one laptop per child” applied here in Uruguay.

Hope you can join us, but if you can’t we’ll tell how it went anyway

AG

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As Rails developers we are all in love with keeping things simple. As Einstein said: “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler”. You may not agree with the theory of relativity, but you should really agree on this one.


A couple of months ago I started my final major project: an iPhone based application. It’s been a really great journey so far and I’ve learned so many amazing things about iPhone development. I found it very similar in some ways with Rails, being the biggest one the way they both keep things as simple as they should be. Well they both use the MVC architecture, but right now I’m talking beyond that stuff. It’s more about an ideology on how to build stuff, web and mobile applications in this case.

As an idea here at moove-it we thought of having an iPhone application for our faltauno.com project, kinda like facebook does. So the research began on how this could be done, the first (and probably definitely) answer appeared quickly. The guys at iphoneonrails.com have developed ObjectiveResource.

“ObjectiveResource is an Objective-C port of Ruby on Rails’ ActiveResource. It provides a way to serialize objects to and from Rails’ standard RESTful web-services (via XML or JSON) and handles much of the complexity involved with invoking web-services of any language from the iPhone.”. What’s not to love in that sentence? I won’t get into it since I haven’t used that much, and who could explain better than themselves?. In case you are thinking it will be too complex to get started, you can download the whole package with an example application that does all the basic stuff you are probably thinking on trying to do right now.

The example is a typical Rails application that can be handled using an iPhone application, which is also inside the example, you should of course have installed XCode. You then start the rails app and the iPhone simulator running the other one, and something kind of magic starts happening. What amaze me the most is the simplicity of the code you’ll need to write (of course ). Really try it out it’s worth it.


Don’t forget to tell us about your experience!

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Hello everyone … in moove-iT we develop and management faltauno.com.
It is a social network specializes in organizing matches, managing a team and administer and manage a championship.

On August 1 begins the first championship was organized by faltauno.com “Copa CUTI” (www.cuti.org.uy).
This championship brings together all the software companies of uruguay.

We invite everyone to visit and see what are the best !

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Hey, thanks for coming back for part 2. I know it took some time to start writing this second part, it’s just that facebook keeps getting better and keeps taking my time away (don’t tell Conrado).

If I remember correctly in Part 1 we ended up with facebooker installed, configured and running. We even added the facebook connect button and explained how to use some of the great facebooker helpers. As promised in my last post we are going to explain a bit how the magic happens with XFBML, invite friends and publish feed items.

XFBML

Facebook uses XFBML as a way for you to incorporate FBML (Facebook Markup Language, an extension to HTML) into an HTML page on a Facebook Connect site or an iframe application. read more here.

This is a typical XFBML tag, it brings up the profile picture of the user with the uid=”12345″.

<fb:profile-pic uid="12345" facebook-logo="true" linked="false" width="300" height="400"></fb:profile-pic>

What’s happening here? Facebook is turning this into a typicall HTML <img> tag. They do this using a Javascript cross-domain communications library. You can read more here if you are interested. This is all done for you when using Facebooker.

Boring right? Let’s invite some friends to our connect site to keep things more interesting.

Inviting Friends

If you went through the facebooker helpers you are probably thinking about using fb_multi_friend_selector to select friends. Well you are right! We’ll be using that helper, but we will need it inside another helper that is fb_request_form. There’s also another helper that could help us that is fb_multi_friend_request, which is basically the first two together, but we are going to use the first option. Here’s the resulting code:

<% fb_serverfbml do %>
<script type="text/fbml">
<fb:fbml>
<% content_for("invite_user") do %>
<%= "Check out my brand new FB Connect site.  Lots of good stuff in there! #{fb_req_choice('Check it out!', login_users_url)}" %>
<% end %>
<% fb_request_form("GetUnbored","invite_user", login_users_url) do %>
<%= fb_multi_friend_selector("Invite your friends to check out this site", :showborder => true,
:exclude_ids => facebook_session.user.friends_with_this_app.map(&:id).join(","), :condensed => false) %>
<% end %>
</fb:fbml>
</script>
<% end %>

I don’t want to explain something that’s already out there in many places, I will just describe a bit what’s going on. We put things inside a fb_serverfbml, because we are in a facebook connect site and need users interaction with facebook directly (that is when selecting their friends). The content_for(”invite_user”) is the content that will be show in the fb_request_form. The fb_request_form is a facebook form used when we need to submit information to facebook.

And the fb_multi_friend_selector is the nice facebook like friend selector. You can choose condensed => true to show an ugly smaller one. The exclude_ids => facebook_session.user.friends_with_this_app.map(&:id).join(”,”) is pretty great, it makes the friend selector not to show the friends who are already using our facebook connect site.

Anyway, you can get much more things done, here are some of the facebooker helpers to do anything you like with them . And of course the facebook developers wiki is a great place for starting and becoming a guru. I will add in other post the publishing feeds part.

Enjoy!

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Reducing the number of request made to the server improves the performance of a web application in about 80%.

There are many techniques that allow us to reduce the amount of requests that are made on a page, among them are: the sprites, put the stylesheets on top of the page, javascripts compress, among others.

But what’s offered by Rails to improve the performance of our web application?

It offers a great plugin called bundle_fu (http://code.google.com/p/bundle-fu/)
It allows us with a single request obtain all the javascripts and with another request all the stylesheets  (it also offers the possibility of compress javascripts).
Using this plugin is really easy but it’s very powerfull

<% bundle do -%>
  <%= javascript_include_tag :default -%>
  <%= javascript_include_tag "javascript1" -%>
  <%= javascript_include_tag "javascript2" -%>
  <%= javascript_include_tag "javascript3" -%>
  <%= stylesheet_link_tag "style1" -%>
  <%= stylesheet_link_tag "style2" -%>
  <%= stylesheet_link_tag "style3" -%>
  ...
<% end %>

All these javascripts and stylesheets are converted in only two files when the request is processed.

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Locos x Rails is the first conference in the Southern Cone dedicated to the ground-breaking Ruby on Rails framework. Locos por Rails Conference 2009 will be held on April 3rd and 4th in Buenos Aires, Argentina. South America’s most popular travel destination is the perfect backdrop for two days of local and international presentations, networking, and fun.

Part of the moove-iT development team attended to this event. Bellow you will find some nice pictures!

See more photos on facebook group and keep the thread news at locosxrails twitter.

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I think that from the title you can pretty much guess what this post will be about, specially if you are familiar with these magic words: Rails, Facebooker, Facebook Connect. Ok they are not that magic, but you can do lots of fun stuff with them. In case you don’t live in the facebook planet I will briefly explain them, since there is a lot of info out there about them I wont get into detail. I won’t explain Rails for obvios reaons.

Facebook Connect

It’s something (who knows what and who cares anyway?) from Facebook that allows you to use your facebook login to login into other web sites.

Facebooker

It’s a gem for Ruby, and also a plugin for Rails that converts the results from the facebook API into ruby objects so you can interact with the API using just ruby.

Let the magic begin…

We want to have a site that handles users like we would normally do, except we won’t handle nor model them. We will get them from facebook. The first thing we want to do is join the developers group in facebook, go to http://www.facebook.com/developers/ and create a new application. You will then have to configure some couple of things, the main one is “Connect URL” in which you should put the url of your site like: “http://my_new_fb_app.com/”. Do not forgett the last slash, it won’t work if it’s not there (and you can spend hours trying to figure out what’s wrong). You have many other setting but we won’t get to them here.

As an advice, you may want to create two apps so that you can have one for development and one for production. the development one for example can point to http://localhost:3000/

Other thing you may see is that facebook gives you some strange numbers after you create your app, now is when we start with facebooker. Follow this tutorial until point 5, we won’t care too much for the other stuff, but you can read it. I want you to know how to install facebooker (and to actually do it),  and then generate and complete the facebooker.yml file.

Now what?

After you have that completed the first thing we wan’t is to show this little pretty blue button  . This is the login button, and when you click it a pop up from facebook asking your password and email should appear. So, let’s make that happen.

Add this to your application controller

before_filter :set_facebook_session
helper_method :facebook_session

Add the followng lines to one of your views (typically a login page)

<%= fb_connect_javascript_tag %>
<%= init_fb_connect "XFBML"%>
<%= fb_login_and_redirect(facebook_login_users_path) %>

Now you should be seeing the button after you refresh. The facebook_login_users_path is the url you want to redirect your users after they login. As usual in Rails facebook_login is the action and users the controller.

After the user logges in you will have a facebook_session variable abailable to do almost whatever you want. For example you can:

facebook_session.user, this will return you the facebook user and all of it’s methods. Everything you can do with it it’s here http://facebooker.rubyforge.org/classes/Facebooker/User.html. The typicall things you may want are facebook_session.user.first_name, facebook_session.user.last_name, facebook_session.user.first_name.id (this will return an id facebook provides. You can access with it the user any other time).

Other interesting thins you can do is facebook_session.friends to get all the user friends or  facebook_session.user.friends_with_this_app will return all the users that use this application and are already your friends in facebook.

Well, that’s it for now. In part 2 we will discuss a bit about XFBML (facebook markup language) and show you how to invite friends to your app, show stories in their dashboard, etc. Also a little example of using javascript to call the Facebook API.

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