Hopefully i don't steal any names with this one :P.

As the title aptly puts it, Tribby is a tiny flash app that displays a user's contribution to a repo, much like the nice bar thingies do on github. The nice thing about it, though, is that it makes it dirt easy to just roll your own contribution visualisation dingies, since all the cheesy data transfer-conversion part is done for you, so you're just left with an array containing the number of commits belonging to the user and the total number of commits.

My ugly first attempt at getting something showing looks like this:

That shows Sam Smoot's contribution to the datamapper core repo. Much love to mr. Smoot !

It's fully scalable, so if you want it bigger or smaller, just change the width and height and you're all set. The danger is that if you make it too small you won't be able to make out crap, and if you make it too big it'll just make people cry and call you a meanie. Whichever works best for you.

The level of actionscript you need to know to start making your own visualization isn't really that high so you could start experimenting armed only with the AS3 LiveDocs and the awesome Sprouts gem. Big tanks to Luke Bayes for a fantastic job on that project.

Anyway, that's about all there is to say for now, feel free to check out the readme in the Tribby repo, fork it, kill it, make it bake cookies and such. Any questions or whatnot, hit me up on twitter or just leave a comment.

For the past month or so i've been doing ActionScript 3. It's typed, it's compiled, and it has this 'dynamic mode' that allows you to basically code it like it's straight javascript, but that incurs some sort of performance penalty, but nobody knows the exact value of that penalty. Long story short, it's ok.

This would pretty much justify the lack of posts since the amount of new information i could share on ruby topics has dropped by quite a bit. But, i digress.

So it's easter and i'm having a beer and snooping around the interwebs looking for pictures of monkeys arm-wrestling, and one thing leads to another and i notice that Github has an api, and aforementioned api works with json as well. Being the go-getter i am, i start pondering about stuff i could possibly do with this new-found gem, and the first thing that pops out is "some sort of thing that displays a person's repos !".

Ten or so minutes later, just as i'm setting up and grabbing another beer, dr. Nic starts showing off the javascript badge thing that he'd done. Epic cryface ensues, but then, with renewed force, i decide to make mine not bigger, not better, but DIFFERENT !.

Nic made his with TDD ? Well screw that, i'll go hardcore, NO TESTS WHATSOEVER.

Nic made his using jquery ? I'll... well, that doesn't really count, since i'm using a different language. BUT it's different nonetheless !.

Also, it has rounded corners. Rounded corners are always a big win.

So anyway, without further ado, here's the repo. It's in pretty much what i'd call 'early alpha' right now, or in layman terms "LOL IT KINDOF WORKS !", but it gets the job done. I'll put a post up with a test so you can check it out for yourselves in a bit. ( no clue about the name tbh, at first i thought it would be cool to have it be like, "badge" + "banjo", because banjos are inherently cool, but now i think it's rubbish, so meh :'[ )