The PDF-book of Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson has just been updated to Version 2007-5-6. It now covers the newest developments within the Rails development community. Especially the "observer" and "sessions" sections have been updated.
Although I can recommend the paper-version of the book … it’s really great for reading in the park … Dave and David really show with their PDF-version how to make innovative use of electronic books.
All standard e-books I bought before always made me angry afterwards: The rigid Acrobat-DRM treated my like a potential criminal. And the e-books had no extra features compared with the paper version – only the disadvantages of an e-book.
Dave and David used another approach with their second edition of "Agile Web Development with Rails": More …

It really get’s hot within the Rails developer community. Joyent, the creator of Rails-web-based collaboration applications from California, is developing Slingshot: By using Slingshot you can deploy Rails applications as stand-alone apps on Mac OS X or Windows. The Rails apps can be used without the browser and in an offline environment. Back online the stand-alone Slingshot application and the online server based app can be synchronized.
The project is in an early stage – although it proves again that the Ruby-on-Rails community is pure innovation in these days. Slingshot is another argument for elegant coding with Ruby-on-Rails.
By the way, also Adobe is trying to merge the Web online and the Desktop offline world with their Apollo project. However they do not use Ruby-on-Rails but their Flash programming environment Flex.

Sources & Picture: joyent.com, joyent-com/developers/slingshot, labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/

As a web developer you are spoilt for choice: Which script language should you focus on? Which one suites best for your future projects? Which framework speeds up your development? Furthermore the development of the script language and the framework are often open source projects nowadays. Behind PHP the company Zend is also a key driver. So the question here is: Which open source project is developing best over time? Compared to the established solution PHP, the community around the Rails framework written in the script language Ruby is fast-paced. And Rails promises clear, structured, elegant and above all fast coding. What road to take? More …

We had to wait for some more days after the quad-core Adobe CS3 promotion. But now, the new MacPros are here – and the flagship model is equipped with two – long awaited – quad-core Intel Xeon processors. It looks like Apple is starting to focus on the number of cores and not the number of processors anymore. When the number of cores is increasing only communicating the total number of cores is less confusing for everybody. Sure, there are several technological differences between one quad-core and two dual-core processors – and there is also quite a difference in performance. But Apple already decided to change their communication
Now, we can be anxious to the benchmarks of the new quad-core Macs. And we probably don’t have to wait too long: The U.K. Apple Store says – ready to ship in 2 days. Quite interesting, that you can get a Mac OS X Server 10-client licence without additional costs. In the US it you still have to pay 499$. A bug or a feature?

Source: store.apple.com/ukstore

Steve Jobs’ open letter, published in February, to push the music industry to DRM-free music, makes a first impact: Today, EMI Music in London announced, that they will offer premium downloads without DRM (digital rights management) and with better encoding quality within the iTunes store. Single premium downloads (256 kbps encoded ACC without digital right management) will cost $1.29/€1.29/£0.99. Purchased songs can be upgraded for $0.30/€0.30/£0.20 per track. Eric Nicoli, CEO of EMI Group and Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs presented the new concept in London, today.
It’s interesting, that the price for complete albums will not be changed for the premium version. The music industry tries to season their complete albums.
Basically, this is a real improvement on the consumer side. Until now, all "early adopters" have been punished with all these DRM-restrictions. And on the other side: the good old CD, without copy protection, with printed cover, with better quality and with an "integrated backup feature" . Let’s not talk about the hacker attacks from Sony’s "copy-protection" root kits. It would be a real step forward, if the honest customers, who buy their music legally, will not be punished for that.

Sources: apple.com, wikipedia.org, source & picture: emigroup.com