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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