Agile Tortoise

Our new iPhone/iPod Touch App, Tweeku is live at the App Store.

Tweeku is a twitter writing tool, designed to let you concentrate on writing the best status updates. We hope you’ll check it out!

Tweeku, our new iPhone Twitter writing tool, is in private testing now and should be hitting the App Store in coming weeks. Keep a look out! We’re really excited about the App.

BoxFinder v1.1 is now live on the AppStore. Main addition is contact list integration, for looking up letterboxes near your friends and family!

I had an incredible experience at the first Dallas Startup Weekend this week. Startup Weekends are taking place around the country, and I encourage you to look into it if one is coming near you.

The concept, in a nutshell, is to get together a group of developers, entrepreneurs, marketing people, etc. for an intense weekend of business building. Friday night anyone and everyone pitches ideas. The attendees vote on ideas and divide into teams, then spend the weekend honing and implementing it…and hopefully coming out of the weekend with a new startup business.

I teamed up with John, Matt, Mike, Jake and Joey on John’s idea for a social recipe website that could learn about your personal tastes.

The result was PickyPlates. From concept to up and running site in about 20 hours working time. Still lots to be done, but the team was awesome and plans to keep moving forward with the project. We also came home with first prize in the weekend competition — which was a really exciting end to a great weekend.

Congrats and best of luck to the other great business started over the weekend, including: OpenWishLists.org, 1FTPClient, MeetupSports, ActivePub, DriveLegal 24/8, and 1-800-LawGuns.

Derek Powazek lays bare the misguided strategies of “SEO” (Search Engine Optimization):

Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned

I’m happy to announce that our first iPhone application, BoxFinder has arrived at the App Store. BoxFinder is a tool for the Atlas Quest letterboxing community, making it easier to use the location awareness of your iPhone to locate letterboxes. Check it out!

Thinking about a new website for your business? You may well need one. For many types of businesses, your Internet presence is both the entry point to a relationship with new customers and the primary conduit between you and your existing customer base.

But before you decide you need a new website, you should figure out why. Seth Godin has an excellent primer on Things to Ask Before You Redo Your Website.

Are you a manager or a maker? Nothing wrong with either pursuit, but they can often be at odds with one another. Paul Graham shines a light on the differences in how managers and makers think about time, schedules and meetings. Very insightful read for folks on either side of the fence.

I’m definitely on a maker’s schedule.

In their usual quality style, technical publisher The Pragmatic Programmers have launched a magazine for programmers. First issue is great, and I look forward to a lot to thoughtful reads out of future issues.

This is a space that much needs attention, I think, after the failure of some of the prior print magazines for programmers. Great job!

Agile Tortoise is happy to announce the launch of blilt.us. blitl.us is primarily a URL shortening service, providing click tracking and easy access to data about your shortened URLs. Also, it currently provided Twitter posting integration.

blilt.us is designed for integration with other applications. We are working on completing and documenting the API and will provide more sample code in the future. Let us know if there’s anything you are looking for in a URL shortening service. We’re eager to hear ideas.

Typically ‘nail-on-the-head’ commentary from Seth Godin:

The purpose of the site is to tell a story or to generate some sort of action. And if the user notices the site, not the story, you’ve lost.

If you are looking to improve the impact of your web presence, you should be asking yourself what story you want to tell, not how much flash can I add, or how much lavish detailing I can apply.

Great article on what will likely be the future of desktop application development on the Mac, MacRuby.

Ruby on Rails 2.3 has been released. Rails continues to push forward the web application development space. With application templates, engine support and nested forms, the development experience of writing Rails applications just keeps getting better. With Rack and Metal, the deployment and performance options keep improving as well. Congrats to the Rails team!

I’ve redesigned the main Agile Tortoise website, and will be incorporating content I’ve previously published elsewhere on this site, including ServoyCasts and tips and tricks that I’ve previous posted on my personal blog. Please let me know if there are other resources you would find useful.

mod_datejs has been updated to version 0.6, incorporating the latest trunk code from the Date.js library. See mod_datejs page for details.