Blog Stuff we're discovering, learning, reading, watching, enjoying...

I figured one of these would be coming along from somewhere soon. I nearly threatened to do one myself but, presumably like so many others, have battled on with a varied mix of GUI elements used in creating Android screensflows/wireframes and never quite feeling that I had a ‘kit’ that was worthy of sharing. Well, good old Smashing Magazine have done one for us! This Android GUI PSD Vector Kit will be an invaluable resource for anyone needing to design Android flows and screens.

I’ve been suffering a little lately from the information overload swell that occasionally comes upon us all. Hence, blogging, tweeting, FBing, etc has all taken a back seat whilst I reorganise. In doing so I thought I might share a couple of handy Twitter tools I used in the process. ReFollow is an excellent system for managing your Twitter account - allowing for really obvious features such as “show me people that follow me but that I’m not following”. It also allows you to see who’s following any twitter username and instantly follow all of them too… handy for immediately following all of your competitors, a fair number of whom will probably respond by following you and hence giving you a dialogue with your competitors customers! TweetLater is a set of power tools all of it’s own, overlapping in some ways with ReFollow but also adding functionality such as timed Tweets. Some of this functionality is available in various Twitter clients but both the above services added at least some features that helped me get my Twitlife back on track!

There are some excellent Fireworks extensions available from johndunning.com. Some of the older one’s are now rendered obsolete by recent Fireworks releases but mostly the extensions add some great features that can significantly improve your workflow if you’ve been using workarounds. For instance, Smart Knife, the latest extension, allows shapes, text or bitmap to be split into two just by defining a curved path [the built-in Fireworks knife only allows for straight splits].

Web usage has changed dramatically over the past couple of years, with even the average user now utilising web services alongside informational resources. As most of the major browsers have moved towards tabbed browsing, many web sessions now involve hopping between your ‘web service’ tabs such as rich email client, project management service, image manager, etc and other websites. Well, if you’ve ever found yourself thinking “I wish I could just run my web services as an application and separate them from this tabbed browser model”, you actually can. [Of course you always could just by running them in a separate browser window but that often results in even more confusion].

Fluid is an excellent little freeware app for Mac OS X that enables websites to be run as applications. The site is shown without the usual browser clutter around the edges and is presented as a standalone application in your App menu. The execution has been thought through excellently - such as web links to other sites being launched in your preferred browser, rather than the ‘app window’ losing the original app. For instance, I run the project management web service Basecamp as a Fluid app. This means that I can flick back and forth to it with ease, it never gets lost amongst other tabs in a browser, links to client sites/resources open appropriately in my browser, etc. Give it a try!

Looking forward to seeing whether the Adobe® BrowserLab cross browser testing solution works in real-time. Browsershots is an excellent tool for final browser checks before roll-out but tends to be a “last minute check” due to the time delay before seeing the results. BrowserLab could potentially fill this gap if it’s real time.

Here’s one for the keyboard shortcut lovers out there. When I moved back to the Mac 18 months ago the only thing I really missed was Launchy. I’d always been aware that Launchy was known to be inspired by Spotlight on the Mac, yet when I finally got to use Spotlight I found myself wanting Launchy back as Spotlight just doesn’t do enough. It’s fine to quickly find a file, email or contact but doesn’t have the contextual actions that Launchy did.

Well, even better, Quicksilver on OS X improves massively on Spotlight and, after a few months usage, I’d say is even better than Launchy too. This is one OS modification that I think everyone with a liking for keyboard access should use. Initially it feels a little bit of an effort but once you’ve persevered a short while you’ll never look back. Open the last document an app opened, find a contact and start a blank email, add something to your calendar, etc. It’s all merely a few key presses away. Once you’ve downloaded Quicksilver and tried the basics, there are a few tutorials out there but here’s a good one to get started.

The Quirksmode Compatibility Master Table is so handy that it often gets overlooked as blog-worthy, maybe because it’s assumed that it’s already in everyone’s CSS toolkit and daily practice. Along with A List Apart, these are two CSS resources that are almost everyday visits when CSS coding. However, an interesting new service might help minimise some of the reasons for visiting those two essentials. The IE6Fixer offers the ability to automatically analyse your CSS and provide known fixes that should help with IE6 compatibility. The site clearly states that it’s not a one-stop fix, but might be of help in short-cutting the often similar steps we have to go through to make things work properly in IE6.

We’ve blogged about this before but having adopted the 960 grid system for the majority of our web designs for some time, the resources at 960 Grid System look invaluable. To have ready-to-go templates for Fireworks, Inkscape and OmniGraffle is excellent and ensures the consistency needed to move between design apps effectively, followed by easy transition into  development using the supplied CSS.

Well, I say apologise. It’s not exactly a “grovelling on your knees” apology by any means. In fact, in Google’s apology for Gmail being down for two and half hours they are actually “sorry that it disrupted your working day”. I guess that’s why Google Apps comes in two flavours - free and premium - though from what I can understand the premium version was also affected.

If like me you’ve ever moved from a PC to a Mac you are probably freaked out by uninstalling apps on the Mac e.g. just dragging the relevant app to the Trash from the /Applications directory. But what about all the DLLs and Registry entries? No such thing on Mac. True though that is, there’s still a bit of other related clutter that each application keeps somewhere else. Usually just small Preferences files and the likes but still, if something’s worth uninstalling then it’s worth uninstalling properly! In this case, AppTrap. comes to the rescue. It’s a small freeware app that pops up when you trash an application and prompts you whether you’d like to remove the app’s related preferences etc.

Ever since I started using the iPhone I expected there to be a glut of decent Basecamp apps due to both being slanted towards a design and tech savvy audience. Also, due to a very capable API, Basecamp seems the ideal focus for an application that could offer high-productivity benefits and hence demand a fairly high price on the App Store.

However, I’ve been largely unimpressed with all the offerings I’ve tried. I’ve used Minivan for a while but it has often suffered from poor responsiveness and isn’t easy to use across multiple projects. Outpost appears to be flavour of the month with a slick website and top billing in a recent 37Signals mailshot but the reviews on App Store are dreadful [though it's fair to say the app may have been through several development cycles since]. And hence I’m currently trying out Groundwork, which seems good so far though there’s definitely room for improvement.

In short, none of the apps tested yet seem to be clear winners and I’d even go so far as to say none are yet worthy of anything other than infrequent or urgent access to your Basecamp projects.

One of the biggest issues we found with Google Apps as a genuine business/enterprise mail and calendaring solution was the difficulty of synchronising calendar clients with the Google Calendar server. For example, it was straightforward to set-up a calendar application to pull in events from a GCal using the iCal format but ‘publishing’ events involved a convoluted workaround or use of 3rd party syncing software. Recently this has changed however and having followed the instructions from Google on getting started with CalDAV we now have a much more savvy centralised calendaring system.

Nothing like a live demo to destroy an otherwise stable system so here goes… a live test of wordpress’s own iPhone app. It’s feature set is adequate as opposed to desirable but it’s simple to use and has some good offline awareness of your blog settings (such as categories). Shame it doesn’t handle tags the same as categories though. Many users would miss posting images too, though this is not a problem for me. So, if you’re after amazing features then maybe try one of the 3rd party paid-for alternatives but for something a bit better than just posting by email (and with the official Wordpress badge on) the app seems worth a free install.