For the past few weeks I’ve been spending my weekends mostly working on homescreen.me – a simple web app for showing off your iOS device homescreens. Last week, it went live. This is a joint effort by myself and the folks at iXyr media who also runs Smoking Apples and Beautiful Pixels.

At this point of time, homescreen.me is a place for you to show off your homescreens, but there are many viable features that you will see there in the near future. Think of it as a great resource for iOS wallpapers, to discover new apps on the app store, find out what apps your friends are using on their devices, a history or archive of your homescreens and lot more.

We already have a dev blog where we have a brief on the present and future of the app. Currently, homescreen.me is invite-only but we are sending out invites as much as we can, so please request an invite at the homepage. Your suggestions and feedback would be much appreciated.

Have a look at my homescreen for a preview: http://homescreen.me/tinu

As you may have probably known that Tr.im, the URL shortener that I have been using with Twitnews – an applescript that helps to share news items from NetNewsWire to Twitter has been shut down. It is too bad that they had to take this decision for reasons I don’t understand. Anyways, if you are wondering whats next, don’t worry, there is this script by @sean808080 who has improved it to work with Bit.ly URL shortener, which is by far the de-facto standard for URL shortening on Twitter. So, you should probably use it and abandon the original script.

I look forward to use Sean’s changes on the next updates to the script.

Just discovered this pretty nifty gem that works very much like pretty_print but is awsomer. It works right out of the box as a gem in your rails console and is very handy while checking on objects.

Here is what it simply does:

Basically pretty prints the object in a very clean way with pretty colors (in the Terminal).

Moreover, it supports a lot of other custom options. Head over to the GitHub page for more info.

The first ever Ruby conference in India happened last weekend in Bangalore and I’m glad to have attended it. It would have been a big loss if I had not. There were a few good speakers who gave some very interesting talks and I think the whole crowd was amusing too. Every time a session ended, there were many sensible discussions that happened between the audience and the speaker. Me and my friends reached Bangalore early morning on the day of the conf and we reached very late, apparently we missed the first talk by Ola Bini. So, my day one of the conference started with Obie’s “Blood, Sweat and Rails 2010″ session. It was quite knowledgeable how Hashrocket as a company works. Some pretty good tips there on entrepreneurship and how better startups can work using the right tools.

Next notable session was Rails vs. Django by Shreyank Gupta, pretty interesting stuff he discussed there on what and how different Django is from Rails. I’ve been eager to know about Django since I started on Rails and this quite gave me a hint. Interestingly, the final word from Shreyank was “Rails is better”. *happy me* *crowd applauses*

We then hurried to the next hall where Matz was about to start his video conf call. As opposed to my expectations, this session turned out to be very fun and amusing. Matz spoke about the future of Ruby mainly and he also announced that Ruby 1.9.2 will be released in August and the community will start working on 2.0 after that.

Another interesting session was about the Rhodes mobile app development framework. This was something I was looking forward to. The talk was interesting but I was disappointed that using this framework does not really produce a really “native” iPhone app. It is more like a web app that works locally on the phone and uses sqlite to store data locally. We could then use libraries like jQTouch to make it feel native. I’m yet to give this a real try though.

Overall, RubyConf was a great success, enjoyed every minute and was great pleasure meeting a few great Rubyists and some fellow developers. I think there were a lot of developers who mostly did not work with Rails but worked with Ruby in some way, which is amazing. I see great future for Ruby in India, and look forward to more similar conferences in and around.

Here’s what people still talk about the conf.

I have been least interested in enabling tethering on my unlocked and jailbroken iPhone 2G, mainly because I felt tethering the EDGE connection to my mac would not be a good idea. But today I took the plunge and decided to give it a try. I googled for long and I could not find much help on how to enable tethering on the 2G, but rather a couple of ways to get it working on a 3G or 3GS. So this is a very simple and straightforward method to get it working on the 2G. You need a jailbroken iPhone running OS 3.1.2 with Cydia installed.

• Fire up Cydia and add a new source – http://cydia.iphonemod.com.br/
• Once Cydia has finished reloading, search for – iPhone 2G: Tethering, MMS, bluetooth profile
• Install the package and reboot.

Thats pretty much to do about it. You should have the option of ‘Internet Tethering’ under Settings > General > Network. Turn it on and connect it to your PC / Mac with the USB cable and configure it. The mac would instantly recognize it as a new Networking device called ‘iPhone USB’.

I did not really want MMS but this fix instantly did that too. I sent an MMS to my friend (for the first time ever) and it just worked !

If you use a 3G or 3GS, you might rather follow this.

Thanks GadgetDNA.

FYI my iPhone was jailbroken using blackra1n.