Perspective
per·spec·tive The ability to perceive things in their actual interrelations or comparative importance -American Heritage DictionaryGoogle finally integrates JotSpot!
Google has recently completed integrating JotSpot into its Google Apps suite. Its called Google Sites. Now, creating web pages and web sites has become so simple, anyone can do it! Furthermore, modifying content can be easily shared between co-workers, teams, etc. like a Wiki, but with a website structure. Impressive!
Do people still use websites?
Guy Kawasaki’s blog, ‘How to Change the World’, highlights some information on how users get information online. Especially interesting is the paragraph about users not finding information online via the company website. Here is a snippet of the post:
. . .Search, social networks, blogs, and RSS (among a host of other online sources) are driving more and more users deep into today’s Web properties. Now, the majority of consumers bypass a site’s home page completely. Read the article
Sunbutter Smoothies!
Here is my recipe, which I call Sunbutter Smoothies, inspired by a peanut butter smoothie made at Central Cafe and Organics of St. Petersburg, Fl. I, of course, substitute sunbutter for peanut butter. This smoothie is also completely dairy-free — I find the Silk Soy milk and soy ice cream provides a much richer taste than regular cow’s milk and ice cream.
In a blender, combine 1 cup Silk Soy vanilla soy milk, 1 Tblsp sunbutter spread (peanut butter substitute made from sunflower seeds), 2 tablespoons vanilla soy ice cream and 1 tablespoon honey. Blend for about 10 seconds and serve immediately.
If you have never tried sunbutter, you may be tempted to substitue peanut butter instead. However, sunbutter is delicious and tastes very very similar to peanut butter and it is rather nutritious. Furthermore, it is completely peanut free and even processed in a peanut and nut – free facility.
In a 2 Tblsp. serving, there are 7 g of protein, 4 g fiber and only 3 g sugar. Its also high in vitamin E. You can find it at Publix grocery stores and in the Super Target grocery section.
Exciting new photoshop alternative coming soon for Macs!
Pixelmator is a yet-to-be-released, beautifully designed, image editing program. Its built using open-source tools and its built to integrate tightly into OS -X (finally!). Best of all, its rumored to be very affordable. The product should be released some time in July 2007.
Google Docs now has folders!
Google recently updated the Google Docs interface by adding the ability to manage documents within folders. Until now, you just used ‘tags’ to organize your content. I guess most people prefer folders for document organization because that is how all major Operating Systems organize content. However, I was a fan of the tags and actually enjoyed a different way of thinking about document organization. Oh well, I will miss the tag concept, but I do think the drag and drop of files into folders is a nice addition.
Very cool virtual tour website
If you haven’t heard of Mapwing yet, you are missing out on a really innovative website that allows users (for free) to upload images and floorplans, sketches, etc. and then use the website to create virtual tours. The best part is that it provides a bit of code that users can copy and paste into their own website. I think this is an absolutely fantastic website and provides a very useful service. There is a pro version, too, providing additional features but the free version gets 5 stars.
Easy Hosted Wiki
Editme.com is the easiest to use and most customizable hosted wiki product I have found. Although not free, you can get started for as little as $4.95/month for 50 MB storage space and 1 GB bandwidth. Because we are using editme.com as a conference attendee collaboration tool, we needed to ‘brand’ the wiki to look very similar to the associated web site, which was not a problem with editme.com. We opted for the $49.95/month corporate account, which provides 4 GB storage space and 24 GB Bandwidth.
Overall, the wiki administration tools are thoughtfully designed and intuitive. Even non-technical users will find this product easy, especially because it doesn’t require users to learn any special syntax. Furthermore, web designers can leverage their knowledge of css to customize the site’s interface to match a corporate-branded site, if desired.
Morris the Cat
For those old enough to remember the cat food commercial, Morris was a 70′s TV commercial icon. Although our cat looks nothing like the original, she does come when you call ‘din din, Morris’.
Here’s one of the original commercials.
More than just a new iPod color
This new color is very interesting because not only is it a cool color, it is part of an initiative to raise money to fight AIDS. The RED appears to be a standard iPod 4 GB nano, but $10 from every purchase goes toward a global fund to fight AIDS in Africa. In fact, other high-profile consumer products also produce RED items. The really interesting part of this initiative is that RED is reaching out to people who buy these products by engaging them as active participants in the initiative. The joinred.com/you.asp page invites people to produce a short video that may end up on the website. Very cool!
My Top 5 Free Web Tools
I am a Mac fanatic. My new macbook is really my Swiss Army Knive and here are some of the most indispensible tools on it:
TextWrangler is the free version of BBEdit. Textwrangler is a super text editor with incredible search and replace options, extensive FTP and SFTP support, nice multiple document interface, color-coding for html and other popular programming and scripting languages and so much more. It’s perfect for light scripting and HTML authoring.
Seashore is a free open source image editor for Cocoa and is based on the popular GIMP. For basic Web Design and image manipulation tasks, it is a fine replacement for Photoshop. I have used it on Panther and Tiger on both a G5 and an Intel Mac and it has always been very stable.
Firefox is THE browser that I use. Now I can’t even imagine surfing the web with IE. In fact, if you are still using IE, you are missing out on the biggest revolution in web browsing since Netscape appeared on the scene! Tabbed browsing and extensions alone have made this the single most valuable tool on my computer. Here are some of the extensions I currently have installed:
RSS Editor
ColorZilla
del.icio.us 1.1
Google Notebook
Regular Expression Tester
WebDeveloper
Konfabulator – Yahoo purchased this novel “widget” technology that preceded Apples Dashboard Widgets on Tiger. Widgets are small, configurable applications that perform basic functions in novel interfaces. For example, some widgets display the weather forecast in your city or the latest headlines for cnn.com or search Ebay or whatever you can imagine! I prefer the Konfabulator Widgets over the Apple Widgets because Konfabulator Widgets can be made cross-platform and can reside on the desktop in the background.
My must-have widgets: phone List and To-Do list widgets
Although not technically installed on my mac, my Firefox browser would be lost without Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Since before Google purchased Writely, I have been using this very nifty collaborative document sharing tool. I have found it enormously useful and hope Google continues to develop it into a full-fledged office product. I like the collaborative feature that allows multiple simultaneous edits but the best part is that you can upload existing Word docs for editing, publishing, sharing, etc. I have found some formatting issues, especially with objects created with the Word drawing tools but am willing to overlook these issues for the collaborative ability Google docs provides.
The best thing about all of these products is that they are absolutely free.
