MockSMTP.app bills itself as “smart and simple e-mail testing for new apps and websites on Mac OS X” and works as a non-delivering SMTP server so you can trap and review any emails your application sends. The instructions describe how to set it up for a Rails app but it should be usable in many contexts.
As with so many of these things, I heard bits and pieces about the Amazon-Macmillan dust-up over the past couple of weeks, but I really appreciate posts like this that lay out a good chunk of the story
node.js has been really exciting to watch over the past few months and it’s exciting to see Plurk adopting it to serve up “Instant conversations using Comet.” Apparently they ported from JBoss Netty over to node.js and saw a 10 times memory saving! Also getting a lot of buzz is redis and Mathias Meyer has a nice piece on " When To Redis". It sounds like Redis 2 is going to adopt a Virtual Memory approach, a detailed write-up of which can be found here.
I’ve been doing a lot of work with jQuery this week and found this source viewer invaluable as a way of navigating the library.
Matthew from Bytemark–who I host numerous sites with–has been getting cross with people claiming libel but failing to supply URLs for the supposed instances, so he engaged Carter Ruck to help him work out an appropriate position. His writeup is well worth reading if you bear any responsibility for online discussion fora.
The tremors following the Apple iPad announcement continue to be felt including the ongoing debate about flash. It’s good to see a number of voices (such as Jeffrey Zeldman and Dorian Ray) pointing out that Adobe are well positioned to build tools to help with HTML5 adoption. That would seem a good way forward for them, specially as video players like this one demonstrate the goodness awaiting us.
Handling recurring payments (for subscriptions and the like) tends to be a pain. Recurly looks an interesting entry into that space and I’m looking forward to trying it out.
And then of course there’s Rails 3, now in beta. The announcement is on the rails blog, the release notes are a good place to start. Having had some deployment/gem version issues lately I’m very glad to see bundler stabilising.