Archive for Reviews
With Macs now controlling 14% of the US market share (up from 9% in 2006), it’s clear that the world is quickly going Mac.
This is especially evident here at FreshBooks. When I joined last year, we were a strictly PC/Windows shop. Since then, we’ve added 6 iMacs to the grid — and more are on the way.
Resistance is futile
I, for one, welcome our new Mac overlords. To help kick-start the indoctrination process, I’ve begun using an Apple keyboard with my Windows box here at work. Sure, the buttons don’t match up perfectly (where’s the print screen button?), but with a few easy steps, you can re-map your Windows keys such that you’ll hardly notice.
Introducing AutoHotKey
AutoHotKey is freeware software for Windows XP that lets you create easy-to-write scripts that define alternate key mappings in Windows. You can do the same by hacking the Windows registry yourself – but that’s just plain silly.
The script
After you’ve installed AutoHotKey, download this script and run it (either by double-clicking or right-click -> “Run Script”). This will load a set of pre-defined rules that will make your Apple keyboard operate like a Windows one — but way sexier.
Here’s the rules I’m using:
; Swap Windows (Command) and Alt keys
; These button locations are reversed on Mac keyboardsLAlt::LWin
LWin::LAlt
; Map F13 to Print screen
; Mac keyboards don't have a print-screen button!
F13::PrintScreen
To have this script run every time Windows boots up, save it in your Startup folder (Start -> All Applications -> Startup).
That’s it! Happy typing.
We don’t do many software reviews here at FreshBooks, but every once in a while there is an application deserving of note, and CSSEdit is most certainly one of those apps.
If you hadn’t guessed, we really, really like our accessibility and standards here at FreshBooks. We’re always working hands-on designing our application, our Web site and our blog. This means a lot of our work flow involves tweaking and adjusting the little things in our CSS.
There are several options in both the PC and Mac worlds that allow you to visualize your work before you take that latest layout live. Many show great promise but are stuck in the dreaded version one, or even beta. Some are just too complex, making the simple jobs complicated, all the while hoarding valuable system resources while you switch between Photoshop, Illustrator and whatever else you run during your standard work flow.
Enter CSSEdit, which has everything one could want in an application. Simplistic design, easy learning curve, visual styling, lightweight footprint and a host of features to increase your productivity and allow you to focus on getting your work done. Designing is a visual world, and CSSEdit allows you to code, reference and see your designs in real time, easily and powerfully.
Features
Preview: Gone are the days of make changes, upload, refresh, repeat. CSSEdit’s built in preview and X-ray features make finding errors or locating erroneous code as simple as using your eyes. X-ray determines where the element is on your page, so you can discovering how elements are interacting.
Selector Builder: If you work in Web standards you can imagine creating more advanced selectors can become quite the learning experience. Selector Builder is a feature that removes the guessing game and lets you work in plain English.
Powerful source editing: Repetition be gone! CSSEdit automatically adds brackets, (semi-)colons and appropriate spacing for you. If you encounter a style sheet from someone who didn’t have that luxury, you can always do a re-indent to immediately apply your spacing settings. Tada!
Milestones: We all have faults and can obviously make mistakes — and web browsers, like people, are no exception. If you happen to break something while trying to adjust for one of these “browsers” you can use CSSEdit’s milestones to go back to a previous time and figure it out. It lets you fix bugs without fear of losing your valuable work.
Verdict
I’ve been using CSSEdit in conjunction with TextMate leading up to this review. With the switch I’ve managed to remove some of the much larger and more expensive Web design behemoths from my repertoire. The big application companies would do well to look at the way apps like CSSEdit can slip so smartly into a designer’s work flow, removing overhead and streamlining production.
With a price point of $29.95 USD, creating Web sites has never been so rich, or affordable.
The FreshBooks headquarters can be a busy place. At any given moment there are phone calls, product discussions, and programming banter clogging the airwaves. Combine that with our open-concept office, which means no cubicles, walls, or other sound-dampening barriers, and you’ve got (at times) one distracting work environment.
I’ve found that I work best when I’m totally focused on the task at hand. Any little distraction, and that huge chunk of code I was juggling in my head — it’s gone, and my productivity with it.
My solution? A pair of studio headphones from Audio-Technica I picked up on eBay back in August. Now when I need to get something done, I pop on my phones and blot out the world with tunes from my iPod. I can’t hear my co-workers and they can’t hear me, even with the volume cranked — which is great, because I listen to some pretty embarrassing stuff.
My self-imposed “audio prison” has become a shining beacon of productivity around the office. Mike’s joked about buying sets for the entire office, and Justin’s test-driving a pair of heavy-duty Sennheiser’s as we speak.
Earlier this year (February-ish) I switched to Vista Business. When I switched I started using Microsoft’s native spam filtering software. Microsoft’s spam filtering software downloads updates nightly, and for a while it worked fine, but recently I’ve been barraged by spam and I finally snapped. I needed a solution, so I went back to Cloudmark Desktop — the service I had been using for the past four years.
After three days back on Cloudmark I have to admit I don’t know how I survived so long without it. It’s indispensable.
Introducing AideRSS.
A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting the folks behind AideRSS, a truly amazing new tool for bloggers based in nearby Waterloo, Ontario. With AideRSS, you can just plug in the address of your blog and it tells you very quickly how much buzz you’ve generated. Think how useful this is: you can quickly determine who is saying what about you, where, and how much. Figure out at a glance what rocks your audience, and what bores them to death.
Give it a whirl. Here are a few examples:
Ilya Grigorik and Kevin Thomason were kind enough to invite me into the beta last week, and I have been waiting impatiently for them to go public so I can tell you about it.
Well, this past Tuesday, they launched. So I want to highlight some things that are particularly awesome.
A masterpiece of clarity.
Nothing about AideRSS is confusing. Everything about it is charming. It didn’t take long before half the company were huddled around my desk looking out how our blog was performing. The essence of its appeal is that it doesn’t take more than 1 second for anyone to understand exactly what to do, and what it’s good for.
Start at the beginning.
Let’s start with the clean design of the front page. Look how well balanced it is. The elements on the page are well separated and obvious. The description of the product at the bottom is cleanly segmented into Features, Benefits, and Video tours. The call to action is obvious. Type a blog URL and click Analyze!
Where I spend too much time a day.
The analysis is clean, direct, and uncomplicated. First, they quickly segment the blog posts into quartiles, and they use nice, simple visual cues like the bolder the colour, the higher the quartile. Second, they make it easy to figure out which posts are outperforming others with their nifty sortable table. Third, their PostRank system is fantastic at quickly visually identifying which posts are hot and which are not.
Let’s hear that noise!
The real benefit is that AideRSS subscribes to all the services that track blog conversations, and then organizes them in a handy table. This saves so much time tracking down who is saying what about you, and where. In this case, it is showing comments on our own blog, and impact on Technorati, Bloglines, and Digg. Just click on the little logos to swim in the sea of buzz your latest musings on cat pictures generated.
Why it matters to me.
For someone who is entrusted with the health of the FreshBooks blog, AideRSS is really my new favourite tool. The cold hard reality of this gig is I need to demonstrate that we’re saying what people care about. While FeedBurner gives me readership, AideRSS measures impact, and that is powerful stuff.
Although I’m currently doing marketing for the good folks at FreshBooks, I came from a tech background. Two of the bigger things I have worked on in my life are wikis and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a XML standard clone of Flash. I have an undying love for the <g> tag, which does not need your prying questions.
So, I was pleasantly surprised to find amongst our customers one, Gliffy, a company I have been watching and admiring for a long time. Joining other Office 2.0 apps like Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Gliffy is the web 2.0 version of Visio. Gliffy lets you create a diagram, share it with others, work on it together, and publish it when complete. All versions are kept. Everything is entirely web-based and so you can access and create diagrams anytime, anywhere. And it looks and feels like standard desktop drawing tools, which I found makes it very, very easy to learn.
Even better, they have released a plugin for Confluence, the current market leading enterprise wiki. And they export SVG! Too awesome. How I would have loved to have Gliffy at my last gig while negotiating message sequence diagrams with our client.
Anyway, checkout the Examples section on the Gliffy website to see what you can accomplish. Some of the diagrams are quite impressive. Gliffy has a natural fit with information architects, software developers, engineers, and architects.
Update: Gliffy suggested I mention their demo, which is très cool.
I’ve been using Carbonite to backup my desktop for the past few weeks. While Daniel got it going okay, we have encountered two problems:
- I’m on Vista, and since installing it I’ve started getting the blue screen of death. I did not want to attribute that to Carbonite, but when I went to look at some of my backup files, it happened again. Pretty sure it’s Carbonite.
- When I asked Daniel if we should stick with them, he said “no.” Pretty definitive. When I asked why he said, “I’ve sent two questions to their support team and have not received any replies.” Those questions were sent over three weeks ago.
It’s funny, but I bet if Daniel had got a reply to his questions, we would not have canceled our account. I will give them this, they sent me to a pretty good customer survey when I canceled. I filled it out. That was a good experience.
Can anyone recommend a remote file backup service? Preferably one that is Vista-safe?
I finally broke down and bought a BlackBerry. So far I have to say it’s been amazing. I bought a BlackBerry 8700, but the reason I was inspired to post is sort of unusual. I decided to post because I dropped my brand new BlackBerry 8700 three times in the first 24 hours I had it… two times on a hard tile floor, once on pavement… while I was running. All three times the device fell hard. It ought to have broken… seriously, but it’s barely got a scratch, which totally blows me away.
Having my expectations exceeded made me figure it was worthwhile to post. Truly an excellent product from a colossal success in Waterloo, Ontario.
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