Save icon 💾

Not so long ago I was back in an organisation that was using Outlook Webmail. It may not have been the latest & greatest but I noticed this server (semi-cloud) based e-mailing app still used a floppy as a save icon. Being a mac user for years it felt weird…

As you can see the icon that the webmail client features is a floppy

I didn't pay much attention to the issue, until my friend lent me his Windows-phone:

This total redesign (Metro-style) of how a phone could work and look still featured a floppy icon(!). And even though I'm not a skeuomorphism-hater, I prefer the simple label "Save" that Apple uses in iOS. The floppy icon on a Windows telephone is completely alien to the device. I guess you've all seen the joke about the 3D printed save icon somewhere?

Still, do a [simple Google image sea…

Introducing Workbook, a new rubygem

Sorry non-techies, this is really for (ruby-)techies.

For some time I've been working on a ruby gem that helps me on my project work, and may also help other ruby programmers, to work with table imports and exports more easily. Although there are other gems that allow you to read and write to different formats, of which the roo-gem is probably the most well know, I was particularly interested in writing Excel files based on templates.

I wanted to offer my clients more user-friendly Excel files that used some of the more advanced functionality of modern Spreadsheets (AutoFilter, printer styles) that couldn’t be offered by just manipulating styles and formatting using the existing rubygems. Which got me started to think about creating templates to start from, instead of starting from scratch using one of the Gems. Using another Excel file, however, wasn’t as easy as expected and here is where the Workbook gem comes in: to make that easier. Ad…