ALPHA Alert -- just uploaded initial release. Linux inotify is a means to receive events describing file system activity (create, modify, delete, close, etc). Sinotify was derived from aredridel's package (http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/ruby-inotify/), with the addition of Paul Boon's tweak for making the event_check thread more polite (see http://www.mindbucket.com/2009/02/24/ruby-daemons-verifying-good-behavior/) In sinotify, the classes Sinotify::PrimNotifier and Sinotify::PrimEvent provide a low level wrapper to inotify, with the ability to establish 'watches' and then listen for inotify events using one of inotify's synchronous event loops, and providing access to the events' masks (see 'man inotify' for details). Sinotify::PrimEvent class adds a little semantic sugar to the event in to the form of 'etypes', which are just ruby symbols that describe the event mask. If the event has a raw mask of (DELETE_SELF & IS_DIR), then the etypes array would be [:delete_self, :is_dir]. In addition to the 'straight' wrapper in inotify, sinotify provides an asynchronous implementation of the 'observer pattern' for notification. In other words, Sinotify::Notifier listens in the background for inotify events, adapting them into instances of Sinotify::Event as they come in and immediately placing them in a concurrent queue, from which they are 'announced' to 'subscribers' of the event. [Sinotify uses the 'cosell' implementation of the Announcements event notification framework, hence the terminology 'subscribe' and 'announce' rather then 'listen' and 'trigger' used in the standard event observer pattern. See the 'cosell' package on github for details.] A variety of 'knobs' are provided for controlling the behavior of the notifier: whether a watch should apply to a single directory or should recurse into subdirectores, how fast it should broadcast queued events, etc (see Sinotify::Notifier, and the example in the synopsis section below). An event 'spy' can also be setup to log all Sinotify::PrimEvents and Sinotify::Events. Sinotify::Event simplifies inotify's muddled event model, sending events only for those files/directories that have changed. That's not to say you can't setup a notifier that recurses into subdirectories, just that any individual event will apply to a single file, and not to its children. Also, event types are identified using words (in the form of ruby :symbols) instead of inotify's event masks. See Sinotify::Event for more explanation. The README for inotify: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rml/inotify/README Selected quotes from the README for inotify: * "Rumor is that the 'd' in 'dnotify' does not stand for 'directory' but for 'suck.'" * "The 'i' in inotify does not stand for 'suck' but for 'inode' -- the logical choice since inotify is inode-based." (The 's' in 'sinotify' does in fact stand for 'suck.')

The code to check for the iPhone user agent is from http://developer.apple.com. This doesn't have any dependencies. - in app/controllers/application.rb require 'is_it_iphone' class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base include IsItIPhone before_filter :adjust_format_for_iphone # Always show iPhone views end You will have these functions: iphone_user_agent? Returns true if the user agent is an iPhone. (as spec'ed on http://developer.apple.com) iphone_request? Returns true if the request came from an iPhone. Override being an iPhone with ?format=xxxx in the URL. adjust_format_for_iphone Call when you want to show iPhone views to iPhone users. Note: It is recommended by Apple that you default to showing your "normal" html page to iPhone users and allow them to choose if they want an iPhone version. With Rails 2.0, you can use its multiview capabilities by simply adding this to your app: - in config/initializers/mime_types.rb Mime::Type.register_alias "text/html", :iphone Then, just create your views using suffices of iphone.erb instead of html.erb: index.iphone.erb show.iphone.erb etc. Note: you will probably want to use a Web library specific for iPhone applications. FWIW, I use Da shcode (in the iPhone SDK) to write and debug the iPhone application and then integrate it with my Rails project.