Yehuda wants to develop an easy to use and install Mac app, to help make Rails easy to develop with on the Mac (again)

"I am planning on taking some time off of work to work on this project. I will dedicate sustained effort until I can ship an initial release, and then dedicate a number of hours a week on the project during its initial bootstrapping phase.

My goal is to use this time to transition the project over to maintenance by the community in the github rails organization."

Check out the details on Kickstarter.

ar-extensions 0.8.0 is finally released! ar-extensions adds some nice features to your ActiveRecord models, namely mass inserts and some other nice stuff (converting models and arrays to CSV format, working with temporary tables, control foreign keys). All known bugs and compatibility issues with Rails 2.1.0 have been resolved. 0.8.0 does not work with the latest Rails edge due to some additional features on edge that weren’t in 2.1.0
0.8.0 should not be used with Rails 2.0.2 or below

Don't like to do sys admin stuff - especially intial host server setup? Well if you're on Slickhost or some other Ubuntu host, Chris Turner wrote some cool tutorials on using Mike Bailey's deprec gem (well deprec2) for linux and windows. deprec is a collection of automated recipes for installing, configuring and controlling services on remote servers (built on capistrano). It's original purpose was to automate the setup of production ready Ruby on Rails servers. This included everything from creating admin accounts, setting up your ssh keys to compiling and installing packages like mogrel/ngix on a freshly installed ubuntu server. Geoffrey Grosenbach has a free mini peepcode deprec screencast [mov] too.

Open Flash Chart Plugin for Ruby on Rails - Graphs

model_stubbing: a good fixture killer

couple-rater an open example of a Rails facebook application using Facebooker

Ruby on Rails Security Project - Exploring the Security of Rails and friends.

The Future of JRuby with Thomas Enebo - Core JRuby Developer

Pool Party - Cloud EC2 Computing Made Easier

Time#advance now uses :weeks, :hours, :minutes, :seconds options - Rails 2.0 a feature a day #1

Declarative exception-handling in your controllers - Rails 2.0 a feature a day #2

Clustering JRuby with Open Terracotta (open source software that clusters the Java Virtual Machines)

"Rails Widgets is a collection of UI widgets for RubyOnRails that you can put in your own application at the speed of light! With them you can add tabbed navigation, tables, tooltips in a snap." (It's the cleanest way of doing tab navigation that I've seen.)

endless_pageless: An unobtrusive pageless pagination in Rails plugin

3 color variations of the Ruby on Rails folder icon in 5 different sizes. Also includes a squared version of Rails logo in 5 different sizes.

SWFUpload + Paperclip + Ruby on Rails = Awesome File Upload UI

Palmist: A Handy Tool for Finding and Fixing MySQL Bottlenecks in Rails

A code snippet that lets you "iterate over large collections of Active Record objects without having to load them all at once, thus reducing memory usage".

In the past, importing Gmail contacts was a bit of a hassle. One of the previous options was to use the Contacts gem, but now that the Google Contacts API has been released, it offers a more secure way to retrieve contacts. The Contacts API allows redirecting and authenticating users through Google, instead of forcing them enter their Gmail password into a third party application. Here is a quick tutorial to get up and running on Rails with the Gmail Contacts API.