Author Sarah Lewis discusses some counterintuitive pathways to breakthroughs.

The path to a great achievement—whether it is a technological innovation or a masterwork of art—is almost never direct. On the contrary, creative breakthroughs often come after wrenching failures. That idea animates The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, a book by Sarah Lewis, an art curator who is completing her PhD at Yale. Based on 150 interviews with artists and explorers as well as scientists and entrepreneurs, the book is neither a self-help manual nor a bundle of case studies. It’s a meditation on accomplishments that come from seemingly improbable circumstances and the connections between art and science. Lewis spoke with MIT Technology Review’s deputy editor, Brian Bergstein.

Why can't I edit my tweets?! Twitter should allow that.

It's so simple right? CRUD apps (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) are app-building 101! What a gross oversight. But wait. Just as a fun nerdy little exercise, let's think about what a feature like this might take for the Twitter team. I don't work there or have any inside knowledge, so this is all hypothetical for the sake of understanding app development.

• Should you be able to edit any tweet you've ever tweeted at any time?
• Or should you just have a few minutes to do it until it locks?
• Do you offer this to everyone? Opt-in? Opt-out?
• Should you be able to edit tweets or direct messages also?
• What does it look like to edit a tweet? Can it be simple and obvious? Does it need additional UI? How do you expose that UI? Is it worth the extra UI?
• Does the tweet go out to the public timeline immediately or after the editing grace period?
• What if someone favorites a tweet and it is later edited? Does it shed the favorites? E.g. a tweet that originally said "I like pancakes!" could be later edited to "People that favorited this like clubbing seals!" (or much worse).
• Same question, with retweets. And with replies.
• Are there any social or moral implications of this?
• How does tweet editing affect the overall feel of using Twitter? Would a time delay affect that feel? Would people think of tweets differently?
• Does tweet editing make hacked accounts an even more dangerous prospect?
• How do third party clients handle tweet editing? Is there a public API for it? How complex is that?
• Or do you only offer tweet editing through the web? How does that move go over with developers?
• How do you ensure third party editing offers an up-to-par UX? Does that matter?
• If tweets aren't time-delayed, how do you handle edited tweets through the API? - How do you tell third-party clients to update a tweet they are currently displaying rather than show a new one?
• Where do edited tweets go? Back on top of the timeline, or stay where they are?
• Should it be visually displayed that a tweet has been edited? How do you enforce that in third-party apps?
• Are there legal implications here? What if someone tweets something illegal and then changes it to something legal?
• Does tweet editing open up any kind of bad guy behavior? What kind of mis-use can be expected?
• What are the infrastructural concerns? Are all revisions saved? How much additional web server and database load is this?
• Do you throttle editing like you presumably do for tweet creation?
• How actually requested is this feature? Is it just a vocal minority?
• What's in it for Twitter if they go down this path? Happier users? Is that a guarantee?
• How much time, effort, and money is this going to take? (Design, development, UX, testing, etc) Are they prepared to support this for the life of the product?
• Is the team into the idea or would it be grueling and not-fun?

We could probably double that list on our own and that's just looking from the outside. Software is tough. Being smart and responsible with the features of that software is even tougher.

Features Are Complicated is a post from CSS-Tricks

Imagine the scene — you walk into a church, expecting simple pews and a cross at the altar.

Instead, you’re faced with a fight ring surrounded by bleachers filled with families.

Two men lumber down to the ring — their biceps are splattered with tattoos of crosses and windy Bible verses.

Welcome to Fight Church, where you “can love your neighbor as yourself and then at the same time knee him in the face as hard as you can.”

This new documentary (premiering in Boston on April 24th) explores various churches that add Mixed Martial Arts  to their activities bulletin, alongside yoga classes and Bible study.

In the trailer, one pastor explains his feelings about the feminization of Mainstream Christianity.

While Jesus never endorsed violence, Biblical legends like David and Samson were renown for their physical strength.

MMA attracts the stereotypical “tough guy” to a church where he might not feel as welcome when services include feel-good messages and soft guitar music.

The directors intend for the film to generate conversation about the connection between fighting and faith – another example of post-modern Christianity in our society.

Paul Burress is one of the fighting pastors featured in the film. His father was also a pastor and ran a martial arts program called “Karate for Christ.” Burress described the program in an interview with FOX Sports:

We would break bricks and bend nails and we’d play a game called ‘Kill the Preacher’ where we’d let someone put a knife to our throat and we’d take it out of their hands and stuff like that.

It sounds silly, but Burress said it was a great way to attract people to church who wouldn’t go otherwise.

Winners at the matches first thank God when they are finished fighting and feel more comfortable at church knowing they can be the same person in and out of the sanctuary.

Burress explained how people shouldn’t feel obligated to act differently from who they are when they walk into church:

I don’t think you should be ‘this is my Sunday me, and this is my Monday-Friday me’.  Like God made you… for a reason.  If he made you a computer guy, you be the best computer guy for God and use it for him… He made me a fighter so I’ll fight for him.

What do you think?

Is this new type of Fight Church a holy outreach or wholly illogical?

Ratchet is a front-end framework for building mobile web apps in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Ratchet 2.0 was recently released, so it’s a good time to start learning how to build Ratchet apps. If you just want to see Ratchet in action, click this demo button on your mobile device (or enable touch events in your browser) to see what it looks like: See Demo (Mobile Only)   Download Example Code

About Ratchet

Often it’s best to use responsive design for building websites that work across mobile, tablets, and desktop devices. However, in some instances, you may want to provide users with an experience that’s custom-tailored to their current device context. Additionally, there are plenty of apps that might only make sense on a mobile device, such as apps that rely heavily on geolocation. Finally, if you’re building native apps, then it could be helpful to rapidly prototype in a web browser first.

Ratchet aims to provide designers and developers with a framework for building mobile web apps that feel native. The framework is brought to you by the same team that created the popular Bootstrap framework, which means that Ratchet is very high quality. Whether you want to target iOS, Android, or both, Ratchet 2.0 is up for the job.

Free trial on Treehouse: Do you want to learn more about front-end design, mobile apps, and frameworks? Click here to try a free 14-day trial on Treehouse.

Getting Started

Step 1: Download Ratchet

To download Ratchet, head over to http://goratchet.com/ and click the big download button. You didn’t think this step would be difficult, did you?

Step 2: Start a Server

Even though Ratchet is front-end code, it still needs to be running on a web server for Push.js (some JavaScript included with Ratchet) to work properly. If you’re on Windows, I recommend using WAMP to start up a server for local development. If you’re on Mac OS X, starting a Python server is straightforward. Open the Terminal app and navigate to the directory where your Ratchet files are stored using the change-directory command. You’ll need to modify the path so that it maps to your project directory: $ cd ~/dev/MyRatchetProject

Mac OS X comes with Python preinstalled, so just type this command to start a server: $ python -m SimpleHTTPServer By default, this should start a server on port 8000. Type the following address in your browser and you’re good to go: http://localhost:8000

Step 3: Enable Touch Events

Ratchet won’t work properly in a desktop browser with default settings, but there are a few things you can do to set up a development environment. The easiest method is to simulate touch events in either Chrome or Firefox. However, I recommend developing using a mobile phone simulator.

On Mac OS X, you can install XCode and use the iPhone simulator to see what your site will look like in Mobile Safari. Alternatively, you could even just use a real phone. If it’s connected to the same WiFi network as your computer, type in the IP address of your development machine along with the port you’re using to develop, and you should see your site. Your IP address and port will vary, but the address would look something like this: http://192.168.1.0:8000

Step 4: Download Examples

I’ve combined several of the Ratchet templates and components into a Ratchet Example Project that you can use to help jump-start development.

In the Ratchet Example App, there are examples of several components and common types of pages.

The example project includes Ratchet 2.0.2 (the latest version as of this writing), but if you want to do more than just experiment, it’s a good idea to go to the Ratchet site and download the latest version. If you’d like to see more templates of different types of apps, check out the official Ratchet example page.

Basic Structure of a Ratchet App

Each view in Ratchet is a separate HTML page that can be linked together like normal web pages. On each Ratchet page, there are three rules to remember:

1. If you want to add a fixed bar (using the .bar class) to the page, make sure it’s the first thing inside the <body>
2. Anything that’s not in the .bar class should go inside a div with the class .content
3. Make sure to add the proper <meta> tags (included in the examples)

Ratchet has decent basic styling, but if you want your app to look like a native iOS or Android app, you can include additional CSS. Simply add either ratchet-theme-ios.css or ratchet-theme-android.css as needed. Here’s a code snippet that gives an example of what should go inside the <body> element:

    <body>
    
      <!-- Make sure all your bars are the first things in your <body> -->
      <header class="bar bar-nav">
        <a class="icon icon-left-nav pull-left" href="/index.html" data-transition="slide-out"></a>
        <h1 class="title">Typography</h1>
      </header>
    
      <!-- Wrap all non-bar HTML in the .content div (this is actually what scrolls) -->
      <div class="content">
        <div class="content-padded">
          <h3>h3. Heading</h3>
          <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.</p>
        </div>
      </div>
    
    </body>
    
    

Ratchet Components

Ratchet includes a huge variety of pre-built components that come in the form of CSS classes. Below are just a few of the highlights. For the complete list of components, check out the official Ratchet documentation.

Typography

Almost every front-end framework includes good default typography, and Ratchet is no exception. Simply use headline elements and paragraphs as you normally would. Additionally, if you want to pad content so that it doesn’t run up against the edges, you can wrap elements in the .content-padded class.

Table Views

To create a table view, add the class .table-view to an unordered list and add the class .table-view-cell to each list item. By default this will create a list that spans edge to edge, but you can optionally wrap the unordered list in the .card class to add some padding. Here’s a code snippet from the example project mentioned at the beginning of this post.

    <div class="card">
      <ul class="table-view">
        <li class="table-view-cell">
          <a class="push-right" href="examples/typography.html">
            <strong>Typography</strong>
          </a>
        </li>
        <li class="table-view-cell">
          <a class="push-right" href="examples/tab-bar.html">
            <strong>Tab Bars</strong>
          </a>
        </li>
      </ul>
    </div>
    
    

Page Transitions with Push.js

Push.js (included in Ratchet) will listen for any clicks on the page and apply transitions automagically. To add a transition, simply add the attribute data-transition to anchor elements with one of three values: slide-in, slide-out, or fade. Using the previous table view example, we can make the pages slide by adding a transition to the links. <a href="examples/tab-bar.html" data-transition="slide-in">

Block Buttons

Ratchet includes several different button styles. The “block button” style is for buttons that should span the width of the parent container. Here’s example code from the Ratchet documentation and the corresponding button types that will render.

    <!-- Wrap all non-bar HTML in the .content div (this is actually what scrolls) -->
    <div class="content">
      <div class="content-padded">
        <button class="btn btn-block">Block button</button>
        <button class="btn btn-primary btn-block">Block button</button>
        <button class="btn btn-positive btn-block">Block button</button>
        <button class="btn btn-negative btn-block">Block button</button>
    
        <button class="btn btn-block btn-outlined">Block button</button>
        <button class="btn btn-primary btn-block btn-outlined">Block button</button>
        <button class="btn btn-positive btn-block btn-outlined">Block button</button>
        <button class="btn btn-negative btn-block btn-outlined">Block button</button>
      </div>
    </div>
    
    

Sliders

Ratchet has a built-in slider component that allows users to browse images using swipe gestures. Building a slider involves the use of several CSS classes. Additionally, I wasn’t able to get sliders to work out of the box, so I ended up checking the Ratchet examples to see what CSS had been added. I’ve included the extra CSS in the downloadable example project so that you can see for yourself. That said, the end result is worthwhile because it has the responsiveness of a native app.

Further Reading

This post is simply meant to provide a brief overview of Ratchet. If you’d like to learn more, check out the Ratchet documentation, where you can read about all the components in the framework. If you’d like to really get into Ratchet and see the source code, here’s Ratchet on Github. I think Ratchet is a pretty amazing framework that’s worthy of discussion, so if you’re using Ratchet or if you have any questions, I’d love to hear in the comments!

The post The Beginner’s Guide to Ratchet: a Mobile Web App Framework appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

During the last week, multiple internship positions have been posted to UMBCworks. Check out these new positions today!

Desktop Support Technician Intern (9265365)
Maxim Healthcare Services - Columbia, Maryland
POSITION TYPE: Internship Opportunities
POSTING DATE: April 14, 2014Summer 2014 - Project Manager (9265364)
Think Systems, Inc. - Catonsville, Maryland
Pikesville, Maryland
POSITION TYPE: Cooperative Education (Co-op), Internship Opportunities
POSTING DATE: April 14, 2014Multiple Paid Internship (9265304)
Network Building + Consulting - Hanover , Maryland
POSITION TYPE: Internship Opportunities
POSTING DATE: April 10, 2014Cyber Engineer Intern (9265270)Van Dyke Technology Group - Columbia, Maryland
POSITION TYPE: Internship Opportunities
POSTING DATE: April 09, 2014Help Desk and Systems Deployment Intern (9265272)
Franklin & Prokopik - Baltimore, Maryland
POSITION TYPE: Internship Opportunities
POSTING DATE: April 09, 2014Software Quality Assurance Intern (9265169)
VitusVet - Columbia, Maryland
POSITION TYPE: Internship Opportunities
POSTING DATE: April 07, 2014Web Design Intern (9265170)
VitusVet - Columbia, Maryland
POSITION TYPE: Internship Opportunities
POSTING DATE: April 07, 2014Internship, UX/UI Website Designer (9265158)
GtechDesigns - Baltimore, Maryland
POSITION TYPE: Internship Opportunities
POSTING DATE: April 04, 2014Summer 2014 - Paid Internship (information Systems) (9265107)
Exelon / Constellation Energy Group - Baltimore, Maryland
Houston, Texas
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
POSITION TYPE: Internship Opportunities
POSTING DATE: April 02, 2014

To access these positions, log in to your UMBCworks account (via the link

in the Jobs & Internships Topic in myUMBC) and find details and
application instructions as well as hundreds of other job postings! 

Please note you MUST have an approved resume and your internship release to apply to positions. To schedule an appointment, click on "Request a Counseling Appointment" via the UMBCworks homepage or call 410-455-2216.

During the last week, multiple full-time positions have been posted to UMBCworks. Check them out (plus many, many more opportunities) by logging in to UMBCworks today.

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