Innovation Lab


The best way to learn is by doing. Each week, we dedicate time to working with technologies on the cutting edge—launching our own web applications, contributing to open source software, authoring books on new technical innovations.

Below is some of our most recent work.

Web Applications

Scout - Web Analytics and Monitoring Platform

Scout

Like people, web applications and servers have unique personalities. Scout makes it possible to tailor your analytics and monitoring, building a tool that's flexible enough to adapt to your changing needs.

The heart of Scout is a plugin platform—anyone can create a plugin that interacts with Scout. Existing plugins monitor for slow web requests, send alerts when a server is under a high load, and report back unique application statistics.
Placeshout

PlaceShout

When looking for a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant or a park with a softball field, we usually just want a quick suggestion, not a lengthy review. We want to know if a place is worth visiting in 30 seconds.

Placeshout isn't about volume—it's about trying to express the positives and negatives of a destination in as few of words as possible. If people agree, that "shoutout" moves up…if they don't, the shoutout moves down and begins to disappear.

Books

Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax

Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax

Andre Lewis
Assumes no previous experience with the Google Maps API. Proceeding far beyond simplistic map display, you'll learn how to draw from a variety of data sources such as the U.S. Census Bureau's TIGER/Line data.
The Best of Ruby Quiz

Best of Ruby Quiz

James Edward Gray II
Compiles some of the best quizzes and feedback from the first year run of the weekly Ruby Quiz with expanded coverage. This is a great tool for expanding your Ruby chops one challenge at a time.
TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac

TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac

James Edward Gray II
For all the programmers out there who love TextMate as much as we do. This book is just loaded with every cool TextMate trick we know of and details for designing your own new tricks.

Open Source

Elif

James Edward Gray II
A simple tool for efficiently reading files backwards. This can be helpful for large files with the interesting information at the end, such as log files.

FasterCSV

James Edward Gray II
Started out as just a speed boost for the standard CSV library, but these days it has many more features too. If you need to work with CSV content, odds are great that this library can help.

GeoKit

Andre Lewis
A Ruby on Rails plugin for easier mapping applications. It provides geocoding, location finders, and distance calculation in one cohesive package.

Google Maps DragZoom

Andre Lewis
A custom Google Maps control, DragZoom has been incorporated into the Google Maps Utility library.

HighLine

James Edward Gray III
HighLine can help you build complex command-line interfaces quickly, with input validation and conversion, menuing functions, and wrappers for complex OS interactions. HighLine is now a dependency for Capistrano.
Highgroove Studios LLC. San Francisco, CA | Atlanta, GA
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