Railsday 2006 results are out, at long last. The winning applications are impressive, and especially, very fun. There’s no universal demo server though so unless you go to quite a bit of work, you can’t see what the winning projects actually are like.

best solo project: rails wishlist

Rails Wishlist is a sort of a social feature-requester for Rails itself, by Hampton Catlin. It lets users vote up or down, Digg-style, on proposals for changes in Rails core.

This entry is very interesting because it’s one of the few whose success wasn’t driven by the quality of its design; it was carried mainly by its features (I assume).

third prize, most useful: profilr

Profilr is a sort of account aggregator for your information-sharing sites, by Terence Haddock and Mark Chadwick. Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to work very well.

I never managed to get the application past this point. I don’t know if the accounts are disabled, or the sites are changed, or what. It tries to use Selenium to automate browsing and collect the relevant information.

second prize, most useful: regex tutor

Regex Tutor gives you a live environment in which to solve regular expression problems. Regex Tutor is by Ryan Bates.

Actually, this application was really fun and I wish there had been more fixtures. It has the constrained environment and instant gratification of a good puzzle game, while leading you lessons about different aspects regular expression.

You have to make the input set on the left turn into the output set on the right. In the middle the results of your current attempt are updated automatically as you edit it.

The application includes glossary and FAQ infrastructure so that it can be fleshed out into a comprehensive teaching tool.

This is my personal favorite of all the winners. Excellent functional use of Ajax.

first prize, most useful: heartbeat

Heartbeat is a server monitor. It combines an internal tool like Monit with an external uptime checker like Montastic. Heartbeat is by Charles Brian Quinn and Derek Haynes.

It connects via SSH to monitor process status.

third prize, best interface: c.umul.us

C.umul.us (make sure I got all the dots) generates a public view onto your iTunes collection. C.umul.us is written by Jae Hess. You upload your iTunes .xml library file. The interface is adorable and solid. Unfortunately when Railsday ended it didn’t do more than display a tag cloud of your genres and artists.

The small cloud in the background floats around via sneaky Javascript breezes.

Those are fixtures, not my real artists. I declined to try uploading my personal database of 25,000 songs.

But those little trees are so cute…

second prize, best interface: d20 online

D20 is a tool for keeping track of your card-based roll-playing games, by Tom Leiber, Jeff Mickey and Javier Cabrera. I don’t know anything about card-based roll-playing games so I have to keep quiet on this one. People can participate remotely in real time. Only having one of me, and not really knowing what I should be doing, I had a hard time testing that out.

The FAQ will help you out.

first prize, user interface: we rate stuff

We Rate Stuff is a product and service review database, although I guess you could review like your dog or something too if you wanted to. We Rate Stuff is by Frederico Oliveira, Tiago Macedo and Pedro Eduardo Lemos Freitas, who give it infinite stars (out of five).

We Rate Stuff includes full-text search via ferret, but I couldn’t get it to work.

We Rate Stuff is full of beautiful fixtures and it really makes the application seem polished.

third prize, most creative: roomind.us

Roomind.us is an expense tracker and reminder sender for apartment mates. Hopefully it did not spring from a disagreement between Dominic Damian, Ben Myles and Chris Abad.

second prize, most creative: family book

Family Book is the little seed of a future comprehensive family networking site, by Lucas Carlson and John Butler. It lets you create a family-tree-like view onto your relatives, track their details, and spam your whole extended family whenever the annual reunion is coming up.

The “lexical parser” bit refers to being able to type sentences like “My mother is Mom and her birthday is 10/3/1982” and have it add a node on the family tree for her. I typed “My daughter is a baby” and after that nothing showed up, so I stuck to the examples from then on. It was only one day, after all.

The graph is all in Flash. The suggestions at the bottom are slightly alarming, but do get the point across.

first prize, most creative: the awesome ninja game

The Awesome Ninja Game is a game, where you have this ninja, and he does ninja stuff. It was created by Tobias Lutke, Cody, and Daniel while they were standing in the sun. Seriously. Nobody saw it coming.

It seems like you can have your character fight with other people’s characters, just like Digg or Slashdot.

I don’t know the differences between them, but there are a lot to choose from.

Turns go by, and the ninjas fight, or study, or do whatever you set. Results are returned as text descriptions in the blank field to the left of the schedule, creating a little Zork-style history of your ninja’s activities.

This application was one of the really fun ones.

third prize overall: cuppin’

Cuppin’, which has become a real place, is a social site and review hub for coffee lovers. Peat Bakke and Raymond Brigleb are its highly-caffeinated creators. This really impressed me mainly because it’s something I would actually use, and all of the advertised features are fully implemented.

Mmmmmm. Catastrophy doesn’t sound good, though. Somebody probably ground the beans ahead of time, or maybe they were frozen (the horror!).

second prize overall: good to garden

Good to Garden is a garden simulator. Will Emigh and Rory Starks must have played a lot of Harvest Moon. I don’t think Good to Garden would be a good place to try out your growing strategies before hitting the dirt. It’s more like a vegetable Tamagotchi.

I don’t know why this came up, but it did.

I’ll make some carrot cake to go with my coffee.

first prize overall: freckle

Freckle is a wedding planner, by Amy Hoy and Bryan Wood. I don’t know if they’re married or not; you’ll have to direct your inquiries elsewhere. Freckle leads you through the steps of orchestrating the big day. The app is solid although I did run into “Application error/Rails” here and there.

wrapping up

Many of the applications that won are basically CRUD (Cuppin’ and Freckle included). Good design seemed to carry the day. I didn’t see any really ugly apps with awesome ideas, or notice slick code tricks among the winners. This vaguely disappointed me. Ideas are hard to come by, though, and good code is certainly harder to evaluate than good design. Seriously, though, all the winners are more than worthy.

here, take this unsolicited advice

One thing all the winners did have in common was great migrations and (usually) good fixtures. I tried installing some of the non-winning applications randomly. I couldn’t get most of the ones I tried to even start properly due to bad migrations, database incompatibilities, or dependency issues. So here is what I will be keeping in mind for next year, if I compete:

• Make it work out of the box. Consider sqlite3 for your database.
• Have fun and interesting fixtures.
• Think of your idea and sketch out a visual design on paper before hand.
• Better to leave something out than expose an application error.
• Have a good teammate with skills complimentary to your own. There’s a reason the winning apps were almost all by teams.
• Go for plain old CRUD if in doubt. It’s the heart of Rails, after all.