About

If you're like most Mac users, you've probably been hit with "app envy" when you see an icon for an app you don't recognize. If you can't ask someone what the app is, now you've got What's That App? Just enter a description of an icon, and all the icons that fit that description will be returned in AJAX fashion with some gratuitous image-scaling fun thrown in for good measure. Simple and Fun.

It's also cool to just view all of the cool and creative application icons that the various designers have come up with. Think of this site as a little application icon museum. Hope you like my silly little app!

Development

I wanted to learn some of Rails' built-in AJAX functions, so I thought that assigning myself a project would be the best way to learn. Well, it worked and I learned a lot. You tend to think things like AJAX and email notifications are going to be a difficult undertaking, but Rails has this way of just being damn simple. And that's why I love it.

If you're curious, here's a list of resources that I used to make this app happen:

• Ruby on Rails, the best Web development framework around
• Prototype JavaScript Framework
• script.aculo.us JavaScript Effects Library
• Rick Olsen’s attachment_fu Plugin for Rails
• Dan Benjamin’s Enkoder Plugin for Rails
• RMagick Graphics Processor for Ruby
• John Berry’s iPhoto-like image resizing using Javascript
• Walter Zorn’s Tooltip Library
• TextMate Text Editor
• Adobe Photoshop CS3
• SnapzProX2 Screen Capture and Mouseposé 2 Mouse and Keystoke Visualizer for How-to video
• and all the wonderful icons, owned by their respective copyright owners, of course!

Known Issues

There are some bugs in Safari 2 that are keeping the the image-scaling slider from working properly, but Apple has fixed the issue in the beta version of Safari 3.

If you do notice something that you think is probably a bug, .