Happy birthday Macintosh! Twenty-five years ago today Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh to the world. What's so striking to me about the videos below is just how much is still the same. Not just on the Mac, but with all computers. While Apple didn't invent the graphical user interface, they did invent pull-down menus, cut & paste and countless other things we take for granted today.

Ok, so it's been months and months since I've posted anything, and for that I'm sorry. But what I'm even more sorry about is the thing that compelled me to write today. It's the following video for Microsoft's "Songsmith." Will they ever learn?

Now, if that doesn't convince you, then this certainly will.

As most of you know I've been a long time Macintosh user. I gave up using Microsoft products years ago, and have been much happier ever since. However this video from Microsoft on the new Windows Vista SP1 has me thinking. I mean, there's no way Apple could ever do something like this.

What do you get when you mix email with a really bad version of Second Life and spam eating sharks? Why, 3D Mailbox of course.

From their website:

3D Mailbox delivers a fantastic, smarter e-mail experience. Immerse yourself in 3-D as you read and write your mail. Relax to the sounds of the ocean, seagulls, and cool tunes. Hang with your mail poolside, or feed your spam to the sharks! Deleting spam is so much fun, you may wish you had more!

On the Mac there's a nifty little utility called Growl. It's a system-wide notification service that other applications use to display attractive popup status messages. There are all kinds of programs that utilize it, namely instant messaging apps and other small utilities. Sometimes they're really useful, other times they're fun and occasionally they're a little bit stupid.

I wrote a really stupid one. I mean a really, really stupid one. I added Growl notifications to dashing.com.

So now every time someone visits this site a little window pops up on my desktop announcing it. Is that the stupidest thing ever or what? :-)

Now I confess that it is kind of cool. But the idea of the website sending notifications to my desktop Mac whenever people visit is really a terrible idea. But it was such a neat little hack I had to do it. :-)

So for you Rails programmers who are bored, here's how I did it.

First download Growl and install it if you don't already have it.

Next you'll need Ruby Growl. You can install that via RubyGems.

sudo gem install ruby-growl

Once that's installed add an after_filter to the top of your application.rb controller file.

after_filter :growl

Then add the following code to the bottom of application.rb.

Note: I'm using the Acts As Authenticated style user model code and helpers, so you may need to change this for your app, or remove the username display entirely.

 1   private

 2   require 'ruby-growl'

 3   def growl

 4     if logged_in?

 5       user = current_user.login

 6     else

 7       user = request.env['REMOTE_ADDR']

 8     end

 9     g = Growl.new 'home.server.address', 'Website Visitors',['visit'], ['visit'], 'PASSWORD'

10     g.notify 'visit', 'yoursite.com',"#{user} visited #{request.env['REQUEST_URI']}", 0, false

11   rescue

12     # Something didn't work

13   end

You'll want to replace "home.server.address" with the IP address or hostname of your Mac. Replace "PASSWORD" with your Growl network password and "yoursite.com" with the name of your website.

You'll need to enable incoming connections in the Network section of the Growl control panel, and be sure to set a password. Also check the "Allow remote application registration" button, at least until you've received your first message. Finally, if you have a firewall you'll also need to allow port 9887 access to your Mac over UDP.

That's all there is to it. It's really pretty fun to see all of the popups...at first anyway. Though I can't imagine this would work well with even a moderately popular website. In fact even dashing.com is too busy for this and I'll likely turn it off shortly. But it was a fun hack just the same.

Maybe this will inspire someone to come up with a useful reason to incorporate Growl into a Rails app? If you do, be sure to let me know.