Category → Technical Geekery
Braintree coming to Europe later this year
For all you European businesses with web apps and services that have been having as hard of a time getting your payment processor up and running as we have, Braintree have apparently now announced their international expansion starting this autumn. Hopefully this means fewer headaches for everyone!
Braintree appears to be a good solution because it’s one of few payment processors that offers a “full-stack” solution. That means that you sign up with them and pay them a monthly fee and they handle all of your problems: processing, card handling, merchant account, gateways, recurring billing, etc. Currently there isn’t an existing service available to Europeans that matches that kind of offering, so it’s great to see them taking the next step into the international market.
Here’s the list of countries they’ll be supporting: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom.
Head over to their site to see their setup, including which currencies they accept, and sign up for their newsletter – they’ll be giving people access to their beta within the next few months.
An open letter to Stripe
Update: Stripe responded below, and if you want Stripe in Europe you can leave your name and country here
Dear people at Stripe,
Stripe sounds lovely and I wanted to add a voice from Europe calling for you guys to hurry up and get over here. The payment processing industry is probably a mess in the US, but I can almost guarantee you it’s even more of a mess over here if you’re not in the UK. Sounds like a great business opportunity, right?
In getting ours set up we went through a 3-month long nightmare/adventure and finally settled on Ogone+Spreedly. I’m sure you know of both. Spreedly is like Stripe in its elegance and simplicity, but it’s not full-stack, which means we’re required to suffer through the terrible UX and customer support of Ogone. Seriously, if there’s a company I could say I actually hate, it might be Ogone.
I wrote some blog posts about our experiences that I’d like to share with you in an attempt to hopefully convince you to expedite your trip across the Atlantic:
http://blog.handcraft.com/2010/09/the-payment-provider-shortlist-part-1-fastspring/
http://blog.handcraft.com/2010/10/the-payment-provider-shortlist-part-2-chargify/
http://blog.handcraft.com/2010/11/the-payment-provider-shortlist-part-3-spreedly/
http://blog.handcraft.com/2011/01/looking-back-on-the-quest-for-payments/
Please come to Europe as soon as possible. We’re over here waiting to give you our 2.9% + 30c.
Yours faithfully,
People in Europe who want to make money off their web-based software
Handcraft gets Zen Coding
If you’re not familiar with Zen Coding, here’s a brief description taken from its homepage:
Zen Coding is an editor plugin for high-speed [HTML] coding and editing. The core of this plugin is a powerful abbreviation engine which allows you to expand expressions—similar to CSS selectors—into HTML code. For example:
div#page>div.logo+ul#navigation>li*5>a…can be expanded into:
<div id="page"> <div class="logo"></div> <ul id="navigation"> <li><a href=""></a></li> <li><a href=""></a></li> <li><a href=""></a></li> <li><a href=""></a></li> <li><a href=""></a></li> </ul> </div>
Common Sense Code Completion is now context aware
Since we created our code completion addon for CodeMirror (see this post), it’s been adopted by several other projects, both open source and commercial. Thanks to the people at webpop we’ve been able to take CSCC further and bring context awareness to the table.
Check out the demo at http://handcraft.com/demos/cscc2
- Common Sense Code Completion, now context aware.
Prototype iOS games in the browser with ImpactJS
Googling for HTML5 game engines returns an ever-growing list (a list that even includes my own multiplayer adventure game engine Sarien.net). One of the more promising engines is ImpactJS ($99). Not only does it allow you to create some pretty cool HTML5 games like Biolab Disaster or Drop, but you can use the browser as a prototyping environment for developing games that run natively on the iPad or iPhone. But this time in ludicrous-speed.
Biolab Disaster. A game built in ImpactJS.
New in Handcraft: better performance, drag & drop file uploads and more
The past few weeks we’ve made a lot of improvements to the underlying architecture running Handcraft, which has led to several speed gains. But that’s not all; we’ve also released a new javascript library, Live.js, introduced drag & drop file uploads in the editor and file management screens, and fixed tons of bugs.
Looking back on the quest for payments
For the past two months we’ve been finalising agreements with various service providers so that we can finally, finally get our payments up and running. If you’ve been following us for the past few months, you’ll know of our adventures trying to find a payment service provider that would meet our needs while also supporting a Dutch business.
Scatter – Ajax without coding
Asynchronous Javascript and XML. With a mouthful of technical geekery, the term AJAX is actually pretty lame (no offence guys) as it mystifies a process that could’ve been described as something my mum would understand:
“Replacing webpage contents without doing a full page reload”.
Sure, Ajax can do a lot more than that, but for the sole purpose of dynamically refreshing parts of a webpage you still find yourself getting jQuery and doing javascript coding.
We think that shouldn’t always be necessary, especially when building an HTML prototype.
The Payment Provider Shortlist, Part 3: Spreedly
(This is part 3 in a series on payment and subscription billing providers. Read part 1: FastSpring or part 2: Chargify)
Over the past few weeks, things have been coming together pretty well around payment solutions for Quplo. One thing that’s been especially insightful is our growing understanding of the various services, contracts and companies involved in just being able to sell your stuff online in 2010. It’s sort of terrifying that this problem still hasn’t been solved concretely for worldwide businesses.
But that’s a story for another time. Today we want to talk a bit about Spreedly, who, as the part of the chain that our users will be interacting with, also seems to be the only part of the chain that actually knows what it’s doing and cares about how it presents itself.
The Payment Provider Shortlist, Part 2: Chargify
(This is part 2 in a series on payment and subscription billing providers. Read part 1: FastSpring or part 3: Spreedly)
In part 1 of our payment provider shortlist, we covered FastSpring, a great-looking platform that unfortunately doesn’t have support for recurring payments just yet. Today I want to talk about Chargify, the second member of the three-items-long list of platforms we’re considering for integration with Quplo.
