libpsd and PSD.rb both have features that the other doesn't have. For example, PSD.rb parses text/font data, while libpsd can handle images with zip compression.

libpsd was actually a great reference in building PSD.rb, especially since it was correct during the times that the actual file spec was wrong and more explicit in the type of data being read.

The file spec released by Adobe (http://www.adobe.com/devnet-apps/photoshop/fileformatashtml/) is actually outdated, wrong in some places, and can be incredibly vague at times.

I can't speak to its accuracy, but, June 2013 wasn't yesterday. It isn't that old -- and it isn't like there's been a release of Photoshop in the past month and a half, so, it seems pretty recently updated.

recent publish date != up-to-date content

A bit off-topic, but is there a spec for Illustrator files? It seems the only one I see on Google is from an old version of AI...

As noted, newer illustrator files are just PDF's (perhaps with extra data for editing).

Older illustrator files are in fact, EPS files. This is somewhat tricky since, an EPS is not actually so much a data format as it is a turing complete programming language. Sooo... yeah, who knows what black magic they did to pull off reliably reading and writing it.

You can read an EPS file by interpreting it and remembering the shapes it renders on the page.

You can write an EPS file by emitting your list of shapes without using the turing-complete features of the language.

Not that hard, at least conceptually.

That's all fine and good at least up until you have to kern a line of text. Then what?

Not yet, but there's always next week...

Some AI files can read as PDF (try to rename them and see if your reader can open it).

There is certainly the potential for that. The library still has a little ways to go until that's possible.

If anything, I think it would be a cool project to build on top of PSD.rb instead of bloating the core library.

I can see where you're coming from, and on one hand I agree because I like to keep a tidy profile, however I think it shows great character to see improvement in code over time.

I would assume that your poorly coded projects haven't been updated in some time, so they will likely be much further down on your Github profile. If you have much more mature projects to compare those old crappy projects against, it shows a real passion for learning, which is massively important to a recruiter.

Also: I added a clarification to the blog post at the end regarding your question.

Yeah, that's exactly what I meant. If you wrote an actual book on programming, then that's pretty awesome. Writing a book for a résumé, however, is not.

I'm considering doing a Git/rsync hybrid, or something similar to avoid this problem.

Yeah, I'm looking into inotify to see how I can implement that with Ruby. Would definitely be nicer than simply polling the directory.

Try rb-inotify (linux) and rb-fsevent (os x):

https://github.com/nex3/rb-inotify

https://github.com/thibaudgg/rb-fsevent