Their latest and greatest offering highrise has recently been released. It is described as: “Your address book doesn’t do enough. Traditional CRM software tries to do too much. Highrise is the just-right solution.�

I think this is a genuinely useful bit of kit and especially useful for sales people when working with the sales funnel.

For developers however, not so much so but I think highrise will be a success if it manages to attract the right userbase.

Also, products like these have been developed and designed by the best in the industry. I find that they are great for learning from. Seeing how certain information is presented and how the interface works. In a world of AJAX it is far to easy to go overboard. Just a sprinkling please!

Globalize is a popular plugin for Rails internationalization. There is an alternative way of doing this which I think is more powerful and easier to setup and maintain.

That is, using gettext and the ruby-gettext library. I used this method recently for translating oentries.com and followed the comprehensive manual guide over at manuals.rubyonrails.

I found that the existing document was slightly dated and designed for an older rails world so I have worked with the author to update the guide and it has been brought up to speed with the environment that we live in today.

So, if you are considering translating your web app, give the gettext method some serious consideration.

The popular rails editor has gone into hibernation is seems. The guys behind it are working on a startup project and have moved onto other things.

This is a real shame as radrails is a great IDE and in my view its only competitors are textmate and the new kid on the block the e text editor.

I am thinking it might be time to bite the bullet and get a macintosh in order to sample in the delights? of textmate.

It looks like it has been taken over by aptana but I am not sure when further work will be done on it.

Sniff, its a sad day.

Nowadays, people keep mentioning the term Carbon Footprint in conversation. The other day, Leonardo DeCraprio went to some awards ceremony in his Toyoto Prius instead of the gas guzzling limos like the other guys. I was planning on going up to Inverness (from Glasgow) this weekend and doing some snowboarding at Cairngorm Mountain Resort.

The costs for this trip was going to be: Petrol to fuel the car, food, lift tickets, accomodation, food and probably some alcohol. I had the offer to go to Stockholm, Sweden instead. Cheap ryanair flights, free accomodation and almost free activities (orienteering, xc skiing and saunas). 24 hours before I made the decision to go on the spur of the moment.

After doing some quick sums this has worked out as actually cheaper than a domestic weekend of entertainment! The carbon footprint of this weekend is far greater but as its cheaper you really feel as if you are a winner.

So next time when you are planning a weekend away, check out some cheap flight deals and make some friends in other countries. When the options for a three day trip are europe-wide, it really opens things up.

That being said if Scottish skiing was in a better state right now I would definitely be there!