Open Ended

I got a cd with a paper label stuck in my computer last night. I spent four hours fiddling around with knives, tweezers, credit cards, tape—everything i dug up on google. No Help.

I sleep in the basement, and it’s fairly arctic down there. I put my computer downstairs while I slept last night and it got nice and cold—this morning the cd ejected on the first try.

Lots of things expand a bit when they’re hot—CD’s too? ... Maybe?

Hosting rails apps on a shared server is a pain in the ass. We’ve tried both dreamhost and textdrive. The problems are the same no matter where you go—performance isn’t good and you’re not in control of your environment. We decided to start paying for a dedicated server from cari.net. Cari.net’s prices seem fair and their support has been incredible.

I’m sure there are improvements to be made—but this should at least serve as a really good start.

btw: most of the credit for this recipe goes to jeremy at jthopple.com

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The iPhone is a truly amazing product, and I can’t wait to see one in person. But I’m not convinced that it’s quite the solution I’m looking for.

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Today I emailed a friend of mine from Australia that I’d lost contact with. During our email conversation I was thinking about the things that I liked in Australia. Near the top of my list is their toilets.

People talk a lot about wasting water—and water conservation is definitely a good thing. I wonder how much wasted water we flush down the toilets?

In America we’ve combatted the toilet-water-waste problem by making toilets that flush less water every time. 1.0 gallon per flush. Now, 1.0 gpf is a good idea— but how many times have you used a 1.0 gpf toilet that didn’t really do the job? In Australia they’ve solved the problem with more complexity and more functionality. I think it’s a good solution.

In OZ they have two buttons on each of their toilets. One half flush, one full flush. Pretty obvious what they’re for. The extra complexity is worth the extra functionality, and you end up with a product that performs better in every way: it’s more powerful when it needs to be more powerful and it conserves when it makes sense to conserve.

The folks over at Freshview are doing some pretty great things in the world of email newsletters.

First they launched Campaign Monitor, a web-based system for managing email newsletter campaigns. It is geared towards designers and has a great set of tools for uploading newsletters and sending them out to a large list of subscribers (which you manage right within Campaign Monitor). A number of great extras (too many to fully enumerate here), like newsletter performance reports and the ability to send both html and text newsletters, really make it a compelling way to send newsletters.

On top of that, Freshview is a company that really listens to their customers, as we found out back in May when we sent a couple of short suggestions regarding xhtml validation.

Their latest tool is our favorite yet: MailBuild. It takes all of the great tools of Campaign Monitor and then drops a templating system on top of it. This is huge, because it puts our clients in control of the content, right where they should be. Now, every time a client of ours wants to send off a newsletter, they log into MailBuild, access one of a number of templates that we created for them (or a free, unbranded template courtesy of MailBuild), enter in their content, and send it off. All without ever having to give us a call or send us an email. That’s a big step forward from the old way of us having to receive content, go into an html file, update content and images, then go through the process of uploading and sending.

It’s a win-win for everyone involved, and we’re strongly recommending it to anyone who needs to send newsletters.

We’re also excited that they’ve chosen to highlight our WomenSpecific.com newsletter template in their gallery.

A worthwhile post by Roger Johansson about businesses looking for websites and what they should know beforehand. Visit site.

A couple of weeks ago I converted to GMail from my trusty Apple Mail. After 24 hours, any inhibitions I had completely wore off—GMail is pretty incredible for a number of reasons, and I’ve found that the web interface actually surpasses Apple Mail in my mind in a number of areas.

If you’re using GMail, the GMail Notifier is critical—it gives you a nifty desktop-based way of accessing your messages and doing some basic, repetitive email tasks. The Notifier, especially combined with Growl, saves a lot of time.

But after using it for a few days, I found myself getting really tired of a couple of things. I love keyboard shortcuts. Hitting a combination of two or three keys is almost always a quicker way for me to access something than using the mouse. This is especially true when you’re on a laptop without a mouse attached—trackpads are great, but they’re just not as quick when you’re trying to pinpoint a small area on the other side of the screen.

With Apple Mail, when I wanted to get a quick glance at my inbox, I could just Apple-Tab my way to that application to see what was in there. With GMail Notifier, because it’s not actually a separate desktop application, but rather just a menu that gets you quick access to common GMail screens, every time I wanted to check my email, I had to mouse up to the little icon in my Mac menu, click it, then mouse down to “inbox”, then click. Granted, this is not a painstaking process. But considering that I repeat that action 20-100 times a day, I was quickly getting worn out. Over the course of the day, it was adding multiple minutes to my routine of simply looking at my inbox, which was so much simpler with Apple Mail because I could Apple-Tab my way to it virtually instantly at any time.

I wanted keyboard shortcuts to open my GMail inbox for me. And while I was at it, I wanted a shortcut to compose a new message as well.

So, I’ve now got my computer set up so that, no matter what application I may be in, if I hit option-apple-m, it opens my google inbox, and if I hit option-apple-n it opens the compose message form. I’m liking it way more than having to mouse up to the notifier all the time to do those things.

So, if you’re interested:

Applescript is the key. a two-line applescript can open up your browser and go to a designated URL. Since there are designated URLs for your GMail inbox and compose pages, this works great.

Here’s a sample script:

property target_URL : "http://mail.google.com/mail/" open location target_URL

Go to Applications > AppleScript > Script Editor, paste in the above code, and save it somewhere in Root > Library > Scripts.

The next step is attaching keyboard shortcuts to those AppleScripts. I’m guessing that there are multiple ways to accomplish this—what I came across was a great free utility called FastScripts Lite that makes it a snap.

1. Download and install Fastscripts Lite
2. Open it. Now you’ll see a new icon in your system menu bar.
3. Go into preferences, keyboard shortcuts
4. Drill down to the folder where you saved your AppleScript. You should see your script there as you named it.
5. Set the shortcut by clicking in the blank and typing it. I used option-apple-m. Of course, whatever you like.
6. Close it. Now try the keyboard combination you just set. GMail should open up in your default browser.
7. I don’t know if FastScripts will start automatically every time I start my computer, so just in case, I went into system preferenes > accounts > login items and added FastScripts Lite.

That’s all there is to it!

I also created a second script to compose a new message.

For that matter, I created a third and fourth script to load Basecamp and Backpack. Like I said, I’m hooked on the idea of keyboard shortcuts to open up things I use a lot.

Sounds like Shigeru Miyamoto has been reading SVN.

A few snips from Time Magazine’s exclusive interview with Shigeru concerning the new Nintendo wii:

Building Products You’ll use:

Animal Crossing wasn’t originally designed for girls. “Many female schoolchildren are purchasing and enjoying it,” [Miyamoto] says, cracking himself up. “Also ladies in their 20s. But the fact of the matter is, this game was developed by middle-aged guys in their 30s and 40s. They just wanted to create something to play themselves.” – Time

We are users of our products. We build products for ourselves. We’re not special so we know that if we find the products useful then hundreds of thousands (or millions) of others will as well. – Jason Fried

Saying No

Nintendo has grasped two important notions that have eluded its competitors. The first is, Don’t listen to your customers. The hard-core gaming community is extremely vocal-they blog a lot-but if Nintendo kept listening to them, hard-core gamers would be the only audience it ever had. “[Wii] was unimaginable for them,” Iwata says. “And because it was unimaginable, they could not say that they wanted it. If you are simply listening to requests from the customer, you can satisfy their needs, but you can never surprise them. Sony and Microsoft make daily-necessity kinds of things. They have to listen to the needs of the customers and try to comply with their requests. That kind of approach has been deeply ingrained in their minds.” -Time

37s thinks No is a good idea too

Design vs Technology

And here’s the second notion: Cutting-edge design has become more important than cutting-edge technology. There is a persistent belief among engineers that consumers want more power and more features. That is incorrect. Look at Apple’s iPod, a device that didn’t and doesn’t do much more than the competition. It won because it’s easier, and sexier, to use. In many ways, Nintendo is the Apple of the gaming world, and it’s betting its future on the same wisdom. – Time

37 has done a lot of preaching about Less Technology

It’ll be interesting to see if Getting Real works for Nintendo. With rumors of the wii selling for $249 It’s safe to say I’m on board.

I came across a Firefox extension last week that I’ve found quite useful, and thought I would mention it here for any web developers out there.

X-Ray lets you view page mark-up without having to view source in a separate window. You just right-click on any page, choose X-Ray, and the mark-up is overlayed right on the page itself. After my first couple of uses, I wasn’t convinced—it was a bit of a jolt to see all of the mark-up displayed, making for a pretty busy page. It’s not a great way to get a good feel for the overall markup for a page, at least for me.

Where it really shines is when you are staring at a particular chunk on a page, and are curious how it is marked up. Instead of needing to view source and scan up and down (or search) to find the corresponding mark-up for that chunk, X-Ray puts it right in front of you, embedded within the chunk itself, so it’s quite clear what mark-up belongs to which visual elements.

A neat tool that I see myself using quite a bit.