Testing out the new Collector app on Windows 10

I was very happy to see a post from ESRI appear in my feed this week about the new beta for Collector on Windows 10. It has irritated me that the only app available for Windows Phone was the ArcGIS app, which was pretty much a Collector app designed according to Modern principles anyway.

I am very pleased with this development, and am even more pleased that the app did not crash after I loaded it up on Astro. It only crashed while my colleague was attempting to navigate out of the Measure screen, but that could also just be my tablet acting up.

I will continue testing the app, hoping that related tables will appear soon, and that ESRI will turn into a universal app.

Installing Ruby on Rails on Windows

What a nightmare. I didn’t quite believe the lecturer’s notes on the Web Apps MOOC when he said that it may be a bit of pain installing Rails on Windows, and that we should follow this other guy’s tut on how to do it.

I think the problem with the installation process (at least for me) is that everything appears to be working fine, until it isn’t fine. I got as far as getting Ruby installed, Rails and other gems loaded up. The first mistake I made was not completing the installation process (I was using my VM). I then decided it’s probably not a good idea to mess up my pristine VM, especially if Rails was going to mess up my Python environment, so I decided to install it on my tablet instead.

This install went smoother, until I attempted to create a test app. While trying to install the required gems for the app, it broke in a very specific way. After following the steps in the highest rated answer on that page, I tackled my next error.

Once it was evident that the setup clearly wasn’t working, I went nuclear and did a clean uninstall of RoR, and started again. As expected, the installation failed again, in the same manner.

At this point I gave up and jumped to the lecturer’s 3rd suggestion: Using Nitrous.io. To be continued!