A List Apart, Issue #257, has two articles on Ruby on Rails. Both articles are targeted toward Rails beginners and curious designers who may have heard the buzz but few details.

The information may be old news for many developers, but both articles are up-to-date, well-written introductions that are still worth bookmarking. Save them for the next time a beginner asks you for an explanation. Forward them to co-workers who don’t understand what you’ve been raving about. Print them out and leave them laying around so your most earnest PHP/.NET/Java friends can sneak a peak at them when no one is looking. Maybe they can even help explain to your parents/friends/significant-other what you do for a living.

• Creating More Using Less Effort with Ruby on Rails by Michael Slater
• Getting Started with Ruby on Rails by Dan Benjamin

A List Apart has released their 2007 Web Design Survey results.

They received 33,000 reponses to their 37 question survey and massaged all that data into 80 pages of interesting findings. Not only do they share the summary of age, ethnicity, salary, and job field, but they also dive deeper to examine questions such as how many women felt their was a gender bias and is that bias reflected in their salaries. It is an impressive undertaking and worth a read.

Even though “Developers” seem to be well represented in the survey, keep in mind that the ALA audience skews toward designers, designer/developers and those interested in CSS, accessibility and usability, instead of hard-core code heads. If you surveyed enterprise Java developers or Oracle database administrators you might get different results.

Here’s some of the exciting things I didn’t blog about while I was on vacation last week.

• PHP 5.2.4 has been released. The improvements are mostly related to stability and security.
• The first release candidate of Prototype 1.6.0 was announced.
• dev_mode_performance_fixes is a Ruby on Rails plugin to improve development-mode performance by only reloading files that have changed.
• Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor, a Dreamweaver extension for generating CSS, was released.
• A List Apart posted “CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing” by HÃ¥kon Wium Lie. Though the title doesn’t say so, it’s a call to action to get full font support into CSS.
• A List Apart posted “Put Your Content in My Pocket“, by Craig Hockenberry, which has tips on designing web pages for Apple’s iPhone.
• The Ruby East Conference will be September 28, 2007 at Penn State, Great Valley Campus, PA (just west of Philadelphia). Tickets are $100 and limited to 300 people.
• Dmitry Stogov’s PHP namespace implementation has support for constants and David Coallier provides a usage example.

This year Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman and the crew at A List Apart have been putting on series of web standards conferences called An Event Apart. They’ve held events in Boston and Seattle already. Chicago will be later this month and, at least right now, tickets are still available.

This week they announced a fourth event: An Event Apart San Francisco will be held October 4–5 at The Palace Hotel. Tickets will be $795 through September 7 and $895 after that. Their events have been selling out, so if you want to go don’t wait too long.

(Full disclosure: they are clients of mine too.)

A sample of the font Georgia

Apple and Microsoft have renewed their font licensing agreement. The agreement gives Apple users continued use of Microsoft’s core fonts which include Andale Mono, Arial, Comic Sans MS, Courier New, Georgia, Impact, Times New Roman, Trebuchet MS, Verdana, and Webdings.

Here’s the backstory. Back around 1991, Microsoft licensed TrueType font technology from Apple. (There was a “font format war” going on between Adobe PostScript and Apple TrueType at the time.) Microsoft worked with Monotype to develop several TrueType versions of classic fonts—Arial (based on Helvetica), Courier New, Times New Roman—for release with Windows 3.1. These were “fine tuned” for screen legibility but they were also an example of Microsoft’s “embrace and extend” policy—they couldn’t own the original fonts but they owned their new versions.

In 1996, Microsoft started an initiative dubbed “Core fonts for the Web” whose idea was to create a standard pack of fonts that would be present on all computers so that web pages would have a consistent appearance from one computer to the next. Along with this initiative, they developed more fonts. They hired Matthew Carter to design Georgia and Verdana and designed Trebuchet MS, Comic Sans MS and Webdings in-house. They also licensed Impact, a font released by font-house Stephenson Blake in 1965. In 1998 they added Monotype.com which was later renamed Andale Mono. From 1996 to 2002, these core fonts were available for free download.

The license agreement for the core font package said that one could freely download, use and distribute the fonts but could not bundle them with commercial software. Software companies like Apple needed a license from Microsoft to include them. So Apple licensed Microsoft’s fonts to include with every Mac.

As a result, over the last ten years, these fonts have become considered “web safe” fonts because most computers have them pre-installed. That’s been great for web designers because they can design using one of those fonts or at least use them as a backup font if another preferred font isn’t installed. We’ve all come to take them for granted.

Luckily Microsoft and Apple struck a new license agreement and we won’t have to worry. No word on the terms or how long the new license lasts. I’d guess ten years, but that’s just a guess.

Bet you didn’t even know you were in danger of losing them, did you? Imagine being limited to designing web pages using only Helvetica, Times and Courier… ew.

A List Apart #242 is out and focuses on writing for the web.

• Better Writing Through Design by Bronwyn Jones
• Reviving Anorexic Web Writing by Amber Simmons

I’m a developer, but I also have at least half the skills of a designer. Unfortunately, that also means that I am missing half the skills of a designer… For example, I know some color theory basics, but pulling together a color scheme for a whole website can be a challenge. Especially when I’d rather be coding instead of playing with color chips.

TechCrunch introduced me to a new color website this week: COLOURlovers. It looks interesting. There are user-submitted color combinations to browse. Colors are searchable and there is even a link to find iStockphotos with the same color in them. And I like how they watch and discuss color trends on magazine covers and websites. As for developing a palette you can use, they give you some great ideas or you can mix-and-match on your own.

Here’s how they describe themselves: “COLOURlovers™ is a resource that monitors and influences color trends. COLOURlovers gives the people who use color – whether for ad campaigns, product design, or even in architectural specification – a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.”

Up until now I’ve been using Adobe’s kuler to find or create good color combinations. I still love kuler—it’s super fast and easy—but I am going to start visiting COLOURlovers too until I figure out which one is the better fit for me.

Whether it’s Agile Software Development or Test Driven Development, every year new systems of code and project management spring up like tullips. Each one comes with loyal devotees who swear by it and denounce all the other heathen religions.

Scott Berkun feels that none of the current models accurately describe the way software development actually happens. Sure, you may be aspiring to adhere to the tenants of the Rational Unified Process (RUP), but isn’t Asshole Driven Development (ADD) a more accurate description? Or maybe Cover Your Ass Engineering (CYAE)?

Check out Scott’s full list and be sure to read the user submitted additions.

A List Apart issue #239 is out:

• Frameworks for Designers, by Jeff Croft
• You are Not a Robot, by Jonathan Kahn

I found Frameworks for Designers to be especially helpful. It makes perfect sense: if we all agree it is desirable to adhere to the principle of “Don’t Repeat Yourself” in our code then why shouldn’t the site design follow the same principle? You may be using CSS to not repeat yourself within a site, but what about between projects? Jeff Croft gives some concrete examples of how to build re-usable CSS frameworks.

This week Ask.com got a new, minimalist user interface that includes search in eight different categories including blogs, video and maps. It borrows from what Google does so well but Ask.com search pages include peripheral results grouped by category (so that web searches for text also show related images, video, music, etc. off to the sides) as well as suggested ways to narrow a search further.

While the clean interface is winning a fair amount of praise, the Ask.com search engine is generating bad press for being slow to return results. In the long term, that seems like a fixable problem. Overall, I think it’s an impressive rewrite with quite a bit of future potential. It’s a good lesson in how a languishing competitor can rally unexpectedly, and on the importance of good UI design.