This month we are having a PET FOOD DRIVE for the NASHVILLE HUMANE SOCIETY! So many pets are finding themselves in need because their families are facing hard economic times. Please make a donation of an un-expired and unopened dog or cat food. You can help make a difference in their lives.

It’s getting pretty hot out there! Come in, cool off, and mingle with the Nashville Interactive Community. Great food, great conversation - don’t miss it!

RSVP for the Mixer at http://mixer.centresource.com/.

Nashville’s Top 30 Under 30 recognizes the city’s most active young philanthropists while benefiting the CFF. Honorees were nominated by co-workers, friends and family for their charitable and professional endeavors. The top 30 honorees were then selected by the Top 30 Under 30 selection committee during the month of June.

“This honoree class has once again shown that Nashville is full of young professionals that care about their city. We hope the community will help the CFF congratulate and honor them by supporting the Top 30 Under 30 celebration in September,” said Top 30 Under 30 co-chair Anne Elizabeth McIntosh.

Nashville’s Top 30 Under 30 will be on Sept. 11, 2010, at Public Square Park downtown. Tickets can be purchased in advance for $50 or $75 for VIP entry. Evan will be selling tickets to help this great cause. If you are interested please email him at evan@centresource.com

Visit www.nashvilletop30.org for more information.

We are really excited to announce the launch of a new interactive portal for Coastal Carolina University’s Athletic Department to help promote football ticket sales. They shared with us this press release they sent out earlier this week about the site.

You can check out the site at www.CoastalTix.com.

CoastalTix.com Interactive Fan Site is Live

The easiest and best way to purchase 2010 Coastal Carolina football tickets at www.CoastalTix.com.

The easiest and best way to purchase 2010 Coastal Carolina football tickets - as well as getting all of your relevant game-day information for the upcoming season - is now live at www.CoastalTix.com.

The site, a supplement to the main athletics site: www.GoCCUSports.com, will explain in detail and give pertinent information for fans to purchase season, and later, single-game football tickets. Also, www.CoastalTix.com will give fans all the information they will need to enjoy the full game-day atmosphere.

Also, the site will give details to a new feature for Coastal Carolina football, the Family Fun Zone. The designated area in the north endzone, next to the newly-built Adkins Field House, allows one adult and three youth or two adults and two youth season tickets for just $99.

Other advantages to the new interactive site include the ability to share the site on social networks and reach the ever-growing, technology-savvy customer.

CoastalTix.com is a collaborative effort between Chanticleer athletics and Centresource Interactive Agency in Nashville with Coastal Carolina being the first university to partner with Centresource in this medium.

“Our partnership with Centresource Interactive gives us the opportunity to not only be dynamic with our ticket sales, but also gives us a hub from which all of our online ticketing can branch out,” said Coastal Carolina athletics director Hunter Yurachek. “Seeing and feeling the game-day experience is an important part of why customers make their decisions. With the expansion of the stadium and the new Family Fun Zone season ticket, we felt it was important to find something that reaches younger families and computer-friendly audiences. This use of technology is the best medium to accomplish our goals.”

8 Ways To Optimize Your Mac’s Performance

1. Clean Out Startup Items
   • Apple Menu > System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items
2. Turn Off Universal Access, Bluetooth, Speech Recognition, and Internet Sharing
   • Also in System Preferences - this will save you some valuable RAM and processor resources.
3. Clean Out “Other” System Preferences
   • How many items are down there? Do you know what they do? Do you use what they do? Turn them off!
4. Get Rid of Languages and Translations you won’t use
   • Use a utility like “Monolingual” to get rid of Catalan, Farsi, and Klingon.
5. Cool Off
   • Use utilities like “Fan Control” to keep your computer running cooler (though it does shorten battery life a little bit).
6. Evaluate Your Widgets
   • It takes RAM and Processor Power to keep these Widgets running, even when Dashboard is hidden.
7. Keep An Eye on Activity Monitor
   • Activity Monitor will tell you about CPU Usage, RAM Requirements, Virtual Memory Usage, etc.
8. Clean Off Your Hard Drive
   • Sometimes a little more free space is all you need to be a peak performance again!

Our downstairs fireplace mantel is getting a bit more crowded. We picked up a Silver Telly Award statuette for our work in creating the online video for the Two Futures Project. This is the second major award for the site, the first a “Best in Show” from the W3 Awards. The second Silver Telly Award is given for our work in creating a video called “No Charity” for Blood:Water Mission.

More than 11,000 entries from all 50 states and five continents were received for the 2010 competition, honoring the very best local, regional, and cable television commercials and programs, as well as the finest video and film productions and work created for the Web.

All New Router

The router has been completely re-written and borrows heavily from the Merb router, but has a more developed DSL.

Regular Routes

Regular routes are more concise, but I’m not sure how I feel about the “controller#action” syntax yet…

Named Routes

Very similar to regular routes, just with an extra :as variable at the end.

Restful Routes

I think restful routes get the biggest improvement. The new syntax is MUCH easier to read than in Rails 2.

ActiveRecord and ActiveRelation

This is probably my favorite addition to Rails. The new ActiveRecord syntax is very similar to Doctrine (which we use with symfony). Instead of passing options as a hash to your find() method, they’ve created a bunch of new methods you can chain together.

The best part is that any of the query methods just return a relation instead of running the sql query. That way, you can chain more query methods on the relation later. The actual query doesn’t run until you try to access the object(s) (such as with an iterator). This makes fragment caching a lot easier, because you can keep your query call in your action. Even if the cache is hit, it will only create a relation and not actually query the database. You can also force the query to be run at any time by calling all(), first(), or last() on the relation.

I’m very excited for the final release of Rails 3 and can’t wait to actually work on a production project with it.

The idea of “progressive enhancement” is to get a site looking the way to want in all of the current browsers, then add some enhancements that most of those browsers can understand. It’s kind of like a bonus for the users of the more progressive browsers. Since they are savvy enough to know what browsers are on top, they can reap the rewards of the polish that CSS3 allows for a website.

Border Radius

Supported Browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE9

Border-radius is probably the most useful of the CSS3 attributes. It allows you to add rounded corners to any box item. Using this new property saves a lot of time and divs from the old way of achieving rounded corners with background images. The great thing about border-radius is that it works in all of the major browsers (I’m not including Opera in this category) except IE8 and below. So, most likely, the majority of your site visitors will see your snazzy rounded corners.

You can also target specific corners.

Notice that we use the border-radius attribute (which will eventually be the standard, and which Chrome already understands), but we also include the proprietary attributes -moz-border-radius for Firefox and -webkit-border-radius for Safari.

Text Shadow

Supported Browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari

By far my favorite method for adding that last little bit of polish to your site. It’s amazing how much better a heading or body text looks with a subtle text-shadow added to it. I think it adds a nice level of depth to the text.

It’s as simple as adding the following line to your CSS:

text-shadow:1px 1px #ddd;

RGBA

Supported Browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE9

Another great example of a progressive enhancement that makes a site look great, but one that a user of an old browser won’t miss. RGBA just allows to you define a color with an opacity value (between 0.0 and 1.0) for any place you would normally use a regular RGB color (or hex color). It’s main uses are for making background or text colors semi-transparent.

Closing Thoughts

Using CSS3 to add subtle enhancements to your site is a great way to reward your forward-thinking users who are smart enough to run the latest web browsers.

Well, Sensio decided to steal our thunder by suggesting Symfony 2 Conference Hubs a few days later. Hey Sensio, we still take credit for the idea. We thought of it first. And now that’s off my chest, the sales pitch:

The Symfony Live 2010 Online Conference will explore the state of Symfony 2. We encourage you to register online (for the low price of 25 dollars) and join us on June 23rd at 10:00 AM in the centresource conference room. We will watch everything on the projector, laugh, cry, and have a very emotionally rewarding experience together. The conference will run 3 hours, from 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM.

A complete list of Symfony Live hubs can be found on the symfony blog. We hope to see you there!

1. Evernote: Its more than an iPad app, its a fantastic note management system. Almost like my second brain. Great for receipts, ideas, passwords, random info that’s important but has no place, etc.
2. Penultimate: Great hand-writing app for notes.
3. IM+: Great app for instant messaging across AOL, Yahoo, MSN, GTalk, Facebook, Skype, Twitter with Push Notifications
4. ToDo: Great daily planner that integrates with the site, www.Toodledo.com
5. 1000 Experiences: Neat travel-idea app from Lonely Planet
6. iWork Apps (Keynote/Pages/Numbers): Good apps to run/edit Powerpoint, Word Docs, and Spreadsheets. Keynote also outputs to VGA
7. ArtStudio: Nice if you like drawing
8. WebMD: Beautiful app to help you become a hypochondriac :)
9. Pulse: Beautiful RSS reader, but only as good as the RSS feeds you read. If you read mostly commercial feeds, then it isn’t as great because commercial places really limit the amount of data they’ll share in a feed
10. Wikipanion: Nice Free app for searching Wikipedia
11. Amazon: My fav place to shop and the iPad app makes the experience smooth as silk
12. Goodreader: Nice app that connects to your mail server and lots of other services for mobile file access. It can read PDF (but so can iBook) and many other file formats. I combine ‘Dropbox’ and Goodreader as my main method for reading lots of files/docs on my iPad.

And yes, I play games too - but mostly 2 player with my wife :) The most fun 2 player games (for me) are:

1. WTD: Awesome ‘Whats the Difference’ game
2. Harbor Master: Absolutely crazy when you’re playing with two people
3. Word Slam: Fun, but super intense. I start sweating when I play.
4. FriendSheep: At first I thought it was lame, but its actually hilarious when you actually play. Moreover, its physically exhausting :)
5. CheckersHD: Basic but fun. I like the fact that it enforces the ‘Force Jump’ rule
6. Air Hockey: The board is a little short, but definitely fun.

Enjoy!

This week, three members of our design team headed to 2010 HOW Design Conference in Denver, Colorado. Jason Jones, Jason O’Brien and Jared Scheel all turned in video reports to share their experience and some of the things that they’ve learned. Take a look!

HOW Video Blog - Jared Scheel

HOW Video Blog - Jason O’Brien

HOW Video Blog - Jason Jones