Ryan's Scraps

I’m not big on publicizing commercial works due to the obvious bias involved, but we’ve recently finished up the Oxford American College Dictionary and Thesaurus for the iPhone and our client was nice enough to give us a few free download codes. Never one to waste free stuff I thought I’d offer them up to my readers.

So here’s the deal – to distribute these free downloads of our Oxford Dictionary for the iPhone (appstore) I’m going to run a little contest: Post your favorite word in the comments along with your preferred usage of the word (like an example sentence). I’ll pick my favorite five entries after a week or so and will email you your promo codes (so be sure to leave your email address in the comment form). Note: I am a sucker for humor and wit, so be liberal in your application of them.

Most real iPhone dictionaries (from respected publications) go for upwards of $20 – $30 so this is a pretty decent value.

Now wow me with your vocabulary.

You guys should be getting your promo codes in a few minutes. Thanks for the submissions everybody! (and, yes, all these words are in the dictionary app)

tags: iPhone, dictionary

The iPhone is cool and sexy. Rails is cool and sexy. Shouldn’t they be a little more compatible?

We think so and have released the first version of ObjectiveResource, our port of Rails’ ActiveResource to Objective-C for the iPhone. We’ve used it extensively on some of our iphone projects and have gotten a good response from others that have stumbled upon it.

Basically, it provides an easy way to consume and integrate with Rails’ standard XML and JSON RESTful web-services (just as ActiveResource does for Ruby).

iPhoneOnRails.com is where we’re going to keep the development progress and planning for the framework as well as the various resources we’ve established for those that have questions and concerns. So have a look, play with the source yourself, join the mailing list and keep track at the iPhoneOnRails blog.

And let us know if you’re using ObjectiveResource and want to be featured on the site, or have a quote about using the framework you want us to put up.

If any of you Rubyists are going to be attending the FutureRuby in Toronto this July and have an interest in learning how to work some magic on the iPhone, I encourage you to check out Mobile Orchard’s Dan Grigsby and his Beginning iPhone Programming For Rubyists course taking place before FutureRuby. In addition to the iPhone basics, he’ll be covering our ObjectiveResource framework.

You can get a discount on the course if you register before June 9th so head on over and give it a peek.