cam macrae - blog

Número uno:

Duels.com

Launched in Q4, Duels is a seriously addictive online fantasy dueling game where players collect items to kit out their characters and challenge each other to a battle shadow fight style. I came across it via TechCrunch and now can't stop signing in for a sly duel or 10.

The beauty of it is the asynchronous game play, which means I challenge a bunch of players and then come back in an hour or two to check the results or respond to any challenges issued to me. Perfect.

Do yourself (and me) a favour and sign up using this link. You'll have the satisfaction of knowing you're helping me earn a nifty service badge - just don't blame me when you lose a week of your life!

Nummer twee:

Twitter (and twitterific)

Ah twitter! Strictly speaking twitter belongs in 2006, but I can't help but include it here. Part chat, part mircoblog, part txt, twitter is a communication platform that informs the future. Or something.

Someone far smarter that me will soon come up with a killer app to push the platform, but until then, it's an integral part of my day. I've met quite a few cool tech people face to face through twitter.

My favourite client for twitter is Twitterific

Numéro trois:

Skitch

I was lucky enough to meet Cris and Keith from Plasq at a Melbourne tequp last month. They've got a great new product called Skitch which allows you to share (annotated) screenshots, pictures, sketches etc. via the skitch.com site. The client is really nice to use, and allows all sorts of image manipulations before embedding, saving or sharing.

I've got one invite to the beta left: if you want it let me know. You'll never use grab again.

Numero quattro:

Django

After an awesome 2006, Django has gone from strength to strength in 2007.

As well as the completion of the much anticipated Djangobook we've see a rash of improvements to my favourite framework including newforms, testing and unicode not to mention countless bug fixes.

Much kudos to the contributors for keeping the trunk rock solid. Django is simply brilliant. All that's lacking is the rails PR machine!

Signing off

That's it from me for the year - I hear a beer calling my name. Happy New Year!

P.S. The main benefit of living in the far Eastern hemisphere is that we get to start drinking earlier ;)