Cool micro sites and businesses

I have Apple’s iPhone demo game Puzzler and encoded it using the techniques from clawpaws article here.

This allows you to store the full game in a bookmark on the iPhone. It even lets you load and play the game in airplane mode.

Anyway go install Puzzler on your iPhone.

How sad, but then again I never thought they would allow it. Mind you how long before someone figures out how to cleverly disguise a ssh server as an episode of the Office?

I guess with my move and all I didn’t realize that Gravatar has been upgraded and now seems to work really well.

For those who don’t know Gravatar, it is one of those super simple yet incredibly useful little services that really help the idea of building loosely interconnected communities on the web. Gravatar maintains a image icon which is mapped to an email address. It can be used and implemented in a bunch of different web services and blogs with out much work.

I’ve had to disable gravatar on this blog and various other services before due to some serious growing pains they have had. Now I’m re-enabling it and I’m pleased.

Tom Werner the owner/founder/programmer has also enabled a premium account which only costs $10 per year and helps fund all the new iron I’m guessing he’s had to fork out for. It allows you to manage multiple email addresses easily and is very cheap. I’ve just signed up and you should too. This will come in handy here soon.

As if Geoffrey Grosenbachs excellent Nuby on Rails blog and soothing voice on the Rails Podcast he has launched a great new business idea with PeepCode.

PeepCode is a monthly series of very high quality screen casts aimed probably mainly at rails developers. Each one costs $9 and is sold via Lulu. It really is a fabulous idea and with Geoffrey’s usual top funky style is brilliantly executed.

I bought the TextMate Basics for Rails screen cast as I know I have only scratched the surface of it. To be honest I also wanted to give something back to Geoffrey as his blog, podcast and funky plugins are always incredibly useful.

So in the first part of it he covered all the basic stuff in TextMate, that I’m ashamed to say I never was aware of. I’m going to have to go through it again to make it stick.

There is also great in-depth coverage in how to customize TextMate to follow your own usage patterns and environment using custom snippets and commands. I knew most of these already, but I really like Geoffrey’s approach to covering it. He’s persuaded me to immediately create my own bundle and add to it as I go along. It really is very easy todo and also very powerful.

I wish him lots of luck with this project. It really is a great twist on selling content.

I’m happy to report that Tractis has now launched into beta. Tractis is a Spanish startup that I have been helping out a bit. Early on I was advising them on a few things like rails vs java. Lately I have also been helping them out more hands with a bit of coding.

Tractis is a platform for negotiating and signing contracts electronically. Yes these are legally valid digitally signed contracts. I have been and will continue to be working on the digital signature part. We are trying to make it fully legal within European Union legal context but at the same time work outside as well.

Currently lead developer Manuel Santos and CEO David Blanco have been able to digitally sign contracts with their official Spanish digital DNI (Identity Card). These are smart card based and will as far as I understand be rolled out in Spain shortly. It should work with most other signing smart cards as well, such as Estonia. You will also be able to use other certificates such as Thawte email certificates. I have personally used my Danish state issued digital certificate for signing contracts.

Technically speaking Tractis is rails based. It is also highly localized into various languages. If you understand Spanish their Negonation Blog is pretty good reading.

Otherwise I would like to say that it has been fun being part of the team. I have never been in a project with as many SVN commits per hour before as they do.