Category Archives: Technology

Get Yer Invoice On(line)

BlinksaleWe need an upstart challenger to bring simplified, elegant interaction design to the consumer financial software market and, in no uncertain terms, to completely upset the dominance of Intuit. That company’s industry-leading software is powerful, useful and ubiquitous, but it’s also clunky, overly-accreted and no fun to use. I have a contemptuous relationship with their business accounting package, QuickBooks, whose menu item for closing an accounting file is labeled — I’m not making this up — “Close Company,” and I have only moderately more affection for its personal accounting package Quicken.

So I’m happy to see the talented folks over at Firewheel Design produce a product like Blinksale, a soon-to-be-released, Web-based invoicing tool for small to medium size businesses. I was lucky enough to get a sneak peek at its extremely well-designed interface, and picked up its basic principles in literally just a few minutes — five minutes from log-in to sending out my first test invoice. All told, it’s a beautiful piece of work.

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The Road Ahead

CaminoAs a delayed response to some boosterism over at Jon Hicks’ weblog, I was inspired to download and install the Camino Web browser today. It’s slow and somewhat awkward and it lacks the polish of Apple’s own Safari, to say nothing of the outstanding feature set of the Omni Group’s superb but flawed OmniWeb. Still, the browser remains in development with regular builds of its code, working up to its official 1.0 release, and it would be unfair to characterize it as anything less than a terrific piece of work.

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Is That a PDA in Your Pocket, Or…

palmOne LifeDriveI spent a good forty-five minutes this morning debating over whether or not to buy myself a palmOne LifeDrive Mobile Manager, the latest hardware incarnation of what’s still colloquially known as a ‘Palm Pilot.’ It’s bigger, stronger and faster than the Palm OS device I used to carry, and sports a 4GB micro-drive that offers the promise of a deep and vast repository of teeny tiny documents that I need desperately for some reason or other. There’s something sexy and alluring about its metallic form factor, and an unexpectedly good deal on it at Buy.com led me to start rationalizing new reasons why I really need one.

Ultimately, after doing some consumer research at Cnet, I came to my senses and remembered the reasons why I’ve stopped using a PDA entirely. First, I always found synchronization between Palm devices and my Macs to be rather unreliable and lackluster. Even with the availability of Markspace’s The Missing Sync third-party ‘bridge’ software, I’m not convinced that there will ever be completely seamless and reliable PDA synchronization — at least until Apple releases its own, Apple-branded iPDA.

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Is That a PDA in Your Pocket, Or…

palmOne LifeDriveI spent a good forty-five minutes this morning debating over whether or not to buy myself a palmOne LifeDrive Mobile Manager, the latest hardware incarnation of what’s still colloquially known as a ‘Palm Pilot.’ It’s bigger, stronger and faster than the Palm OS device I used to carry, and sports a 4GB micro-drive that offers the promise of a deep and vast repository of teeny tiny documents that I need desperately for some reason or other. There’s something sexy and alluring about its metallic form factor, and an unexpectedly good deal on it at Buy.com led me to start rationalizing new reasons why I really need one.

Ultimately, after doing some consumer research at Cnet, I came to my senses and remembered the reasons why I’ve stopped using a PDA entirely. First, I always found synchronization between Palm devices and my Macs to be rather unreliable and lackluster. Even with the availability of Markspace’s The Missing Sync third-party ‘bridge’ software, I’m not convinced that there will ever be completely seamless and reliable PDA synchronization — at least until Apple releases its own, Apple-branded iPDA.

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The Problem with Fireworks

FireworksEvery time I complain about Adobe Photoshop’s handicapped suitability for web production, people tell me to give Macromedia Fireworks a try, so today, I finally did. I spent a few hours in the program re-creating a layout that originated in Photoshop, and, after acclimating myself to the new application’s interface, I was generally pleased. It is indeed faster and more flexible in terms of shifting elements around, and it does in fact match a web designer’s frame of mind better than does Photoshop — I’ll almost certainly use it as the primary comping tool for my next project. However, I’m still not completely sold on Fireworks as the solution for all the problems that web production presents to a designer.

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World Wide Webster

Mac OS X Dictionary Application
I’ve done a lot of trash talk about Mac OS X Tiger but I still resolutely insist that it kicks ass, and one of the reasons why is the operating system’s new Cocoa-based dynamic dictionary and thesaurus lookups. This feature has barely been publicized by Apple, oddly enough, but even on its own, it would be fair to say that it accounts for at least thirty dollars’ worth of the US$129 Tiger sticker price.

You can invoke a dictionary lookup within any Cocoa application — one of the best indicators of those is the presence of the notorious font panel, but Safari counts too — by holding down command-control-D and simply hovering over any given word. What results nearly instantaneously is a contextual display of that word’s definition as recorded in the Oxford Dictionary (or synonyms as culled from the Oxford Thesaurus). Both the dictionary and the database are stored locally on your hard drive, so the feature is thankfully not contingent on the presence of an Internet connection.

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Out of Sync

iSyncFor no good reason, I continually get my hopes raised up over the idea of clean, seamless synchronization across multiple databases and devices via my Macintosh. For example, I just want to be able to maintain a single store of contacts, at least, and have it reflected across all the various applications I use: Entourage and Apple Mail, iChat and Adium X, my mobile phone and my PDA if I ever use one again.

This just isn’t the reality, though, not even in the latest and greatest iteration of Mac OS X. In fact, if anything, synchronization has gotten markedly worse; not necessarily less reliable, but less sensical and more de-centralized. I realize there are several third party utilities designed to ameliorate the situation, but I’m frankly disappointed in the infrastructure that Apple provides in the operating system. We seem to be in a kind of transition with Mac OS X, an unfinished state wherein synching functionality, though perhaps more prevalent that ever before, remains regrettably paltry and conspicuously lacking for a clear interaction model.

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Throw It in Your Backpack

BackpackAs if you could avoid hearing the news: the prolific 37signals launched their latest online application today and it’s called Backpack. As a beta tester, I took a crack at helping the company craft its messaging for this hard-to-describe product, and the best I could come up with was this: “It’s perhaps the most convincing Web answer yet to the power, flexibility and simplicity of a spiral-bound notebook.” You can tell that I had my little marketing hat on for that particular brainstorming session.

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