The problem with this approach is, there’s a huge gap between paper-prototype and HTML mockup. Paper is quick and easy, but not very compelling to look at. HTML looks better, but it’s not very malleable — once you place something, it’s often a pain to move it around and get it right again.

So I’ve started using a drawing tool to do these wireframes. I may sketch something out on paper first (because that is still the fastest), but before I share it with anyone, I’ll open up my drawing program and draw boxes and text on the screen. I’m on a Mac, and so far the best tool I’ve found for this is OmniGraffle Pro. Usually used for drawing flow charts and the like, there are some add-ons that make it great for wireframing. Like the OmniGraffle Web Design Template by Michael Angeles. He also has a wireframe palette containing a bunch of useful shapes and text, and a greeking stencil for ‘lorem ipsum’ text.

Using these tools, you can draw some useful mock-ups of web pages for your next project. I do not know my way around Photoshop or Illustrator, but I am fairly comfortable using OmniGraffle with these extensions after only a bit of trial-and-error. Now I can create drawings and mail them around to colleagues without fear of them laughing at my stick figures.

OmniGraffle is a commercial product, but you can get a trial for their Pro version. You need the Pro to take advantage of the plugins I linked above. It’s about $99, so it’s far more affordable than Photoshop and other art-oriented drawing programs.

It turns out, ruby compiled wth gcc 4.0 on powerPC macs — which my laptop is one — is known to exhibit these strange behaviors. David Heinemeier Hansson himself mentioned this in this blog post.

Turns out, the solution is to set gcc to 3.3 mode, rebuild ruby and any dependent libraries. You can do this with ‘gcc_select 3.3′, then running configure, make, make install as usual.

On the way to finding this fix, I tried updating to Ruby 1.8.5 patchlevel 2. To get this to work, I had to configure, make, and install, then go into the source tarball in ext/readline and run :

cd ext/readline

> ruby extconf.rb

> make 

> sudo cp readline.bundle /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/powerpc-darwin8.9.0

Those instructions came from this mailing list archive.

So if you’re running ruby patchlevel 2 — which is the latest ruby that works with rails 1.2.2 — make sure you compile with gcc 3.3, and copy over the readline bundle as described above.

I’m pretty disappointed this much hackery is required to get ruby working on my machine, which is a fairly standard platform. Ruby should “just work” with gcc 4.0, and the Makefile should do the right thing with the readline module as well. Grrr.
In the near future I hope to get an Intel mac to develop on, and have access to all the latest ruby/rails goodies on that. But at least now all my tests are passing, and I’m not getting any more strange Fixnum errors.