At Cloudspace we have always drawn inspiration from the great entrepreneurial spirits that came before us. When I say entrepreneurial spirits I don't necessarily mean dead people or even entrepreneurs. I mean people who looked at the world around them and saw something that needed to be changed and then actually did something about it. Who better to learn from, right? Unfortunately we... Continue reading »

Mock It Out

Check out our newest project: Cloudspace Mockups, an open-source tool that allows users to collaborate on mockups, which can present value to product teams and startups that need to throw around feature ideas quickly and easily for their engineers and designers to build upon.

A good example of a lo-tech mockup would be to draw a wireframe on a whiteboard. Pictures... Continue reading »

I know we're already coming near the end of the first quarter of 2011, but I wanted to share some predictions for the upcoming year from Fjord, a design consultancy. From my experiences talking with startups over the past 3-5 months, I think they're spot on with a number of these predictions. Check out their slide deck below, and leave your thoughts in the comments.

If you're a developer that wants to be able to test without having to deploy to a remote server, or if you work with different projects that have different configurations, this screencast is for you.

While we use Ruby-based tools for this (Vagrant and Knife), the same directions can be applied to set up any type of server: memcache servers, Python, PHP, etc...

I use Rdio for some of my online music needs (though I still turn to our pals up in Gainsville at Grooveshark for harder-to-find music).

They do something in their UI that I really like. It's sort of a "user interface, user experience, product" decision -- it shows that they have a good understanding of how people... Continue reading »

Let's say you're doing a salvage project where you have to recover someone else's awful code. Sometimes, you'll see poorly-formatted HTML, because the generating code behind it was built in a way that makes sense when you read the generating code, but not when you read the output.

Everyone loves HTML Tidy, because it helps out with reformatting HTML. Still, it's a command line tool.... Continue reading »

The advent of Rails3 + Bundler makes gem versioning easy and mostly painless. Simply edit your Gemfile, bundle install, and you're done.

In other, non-Rails Ruby projects it's almost as simple: repeat the steps above and then include the require 'rubygems'; require 'bundler/setup' lines in your code.

But what about your standalone Ruby scripts (like this one)? Gem versioning is still... Continue reading »