Productivity

Have you ever wanted to view or edit a file that wasn’t sitting on your own hard drive? Sure you have.

It’s either on your work machine, or on your mom’s machine, or it’s on your brother’s Alienware gaming machine in the basement and you just don’t want to get up to deal with it. You wish you had a network drive for all of these machines.

That’s where ExpanDrive comes in (Mac only).

The great thing about external drives on the mac is that they show up on your desktop immediately. Like this little USB thumbdrives. We love how they JUST WORK.

Basically, ExpanDrive is a souped up SFTP client. You don’t have to set up any configurations, you can log in to any machine with its current credentials to access files and edit them seamlessly.

Just like they were on your own drive.

If you get disconnected, no problem…you’ll automatically reconnect when you’re able to.

This basically lets you use any computer that you have access to as an external drive for storage. As long as that computer has an internet connection and is turned on…you’re set!

Currently, the cost is $29, and that’s an introductory price, so it could go up in the future.

Let’s pretend you read this column and agree that it’s time to embark on a Web site overhaul for your small business. You understand a little about Web 2.0-ness, want some interactivity, are considering using new online tools and have created a real job for the webmaster to do site updates. What’s on your Web Overhaul Due Diligence To-Do List? What steps should you take to ensure that your site gets architected, designed, programmed, launched, and updated correctly?

HOMEWORK – let’s start browsing sites and making favorites/bookmarks out of the ones that catch your eye. Note that you like the drop-down menu in one and the fading background in another. Make a “how did they do this?” list of snazzy features to ask your designer about implementing. In fact, build a spreadsheet and make column headings such as: URL, feature, forms, Flash, menus and more so you can keep your design notes and questions in a handy electronic document to share with all the design firms you interview, and we want you to talk to more than one.

WHO DONE IT? – make an extra column on your spreadsheet to note which firm build the site you like. Most classy sites have a small credit near the footer (although some site owners forbid that). Paste the design firm’s URL into your spreadsheet because you might just want to send your site’s RFP to them.

YOU DESERVE AN RFP – yes, your site is big enough to warrant an RFP (Request for Proposal). Take some time with your RFP and be sure to include what your site really needs and not a laundry or wish list of over-the-top features that you can’t afford and don’t intend to buy. There are several online outlines for sample web site RFPs but please don’t copy and paste a $100K site build for your design if your budget is $5k. Let’s be a reasonable, shall we? (Download or review free RFP templates online at SiteLab – free registration), free toolkit – registration required, Emerald Strategies)

DESIGN PLAN MAGIC – plan thrice, write a check once. When the eager design companies (and you’ve sent your RFP to those most appropriate for your business) reply to your RFP, read each proposal. Skim the background data to ensure the firm is using real people to build your site and pay attention to what is promised.

• Will you see mockups of your design? What if you don’t like the mockups?
• Are you guaranteed a delivery date? What if the design firm misses that date?
• What are you obligated to provide (logos, content, photos)? What if you don’t send them on time?
• What are the extra charges after you change your mind after approving the design (and you WILL, so read this part carefully)?
• Are you paying for logo design? What formats will the logo be delivered in (print-ready, Web ready, signs, banners)?
• Who owns what when it’s done? If it’s not broken out, get an itemized list of what the deliverables are, including copyrights and original artwork (please promise me that you will get your original artwork!).
• Are you charged by the page? If so, are all the pages listed? What do extra pages cost? What happens if you decide to combine two pages into one?
• What are the payment terms? Are you offered options? (Please, do NOT pay for the entire design up front; there’s no incentive for a firm to finish on time if there’s no check dangled at completion.)

UNIQUENESS – Do they promise that your site will be unique and not generated from a purchased template? (”Template” is not a dirty word. Custom site designs are often turned into templates. There’s a difference between buying pre-designed templates and custom designs templated so you create new pages later on.) Let’s not instruct a firm to make your site “exactly like IBM” and then offer them $1,500.00. Both ends of that sentence will make designers shake your hand and walk away.

TOOLBOX – What online tools are being built, purchased, rented or incorporated into your new site? There are free, rented and custom-built tools and the price naturally goes up as you move from left-to-right. Do your due diligence: if they propose to build and charge you for form delivery, is there a free alternative? (The answer is “yes.”) Demand they include Google Analytics) and make sure you are authorized to see the results. Don’t get talked into a ListServ when a free online group will do (Google Groups, Yahoo Groups). If they don’t suggest using free online tools up front, find another firm. Really, a good firm would try to save you money so they could charge more for design and programming without fatal sticker shock.

AFTERCARE – what happens to the design firm when the site launches? Do they run away and hide? Do they want a monthly fee for “maintenance” but insist that you do the site updates? (Exactly what are they maintaining?) Are they offering you a back-end editor to update your site? If so, try it out before signing. They should have a test site but better yet, talk over using a universal editor (like Adobe Contribute) because site editors are tricky little devils and can be browser dependent (and die when new browsers come along or don’t work with your browser. Yes, I’m talking to you, you Mac user!) Will they help you work with the editor or are you charged for that service? If there’s nothing set up for you to edit and update your own site, run the other way!

A chunk of good process is missing from the above admonitions: watching the site build and testing before the whole thing goes beta. We’re a highly visual society and need to SEE the pages develop, as opposed to gaining 100% insight from a printed proposal. Wait for my next column on the build process but let’s talk over your suggestions for the design process in comments. I know there are Web designers reading and I value what you have to say.

When it comes to tracking down some icons for a project — nothing real fancy, and preferably under some kind of open license — image searching on Google doesn’t always do the trick. ICONLook is a search site that you can try instead: it’s specifically for icons, and it has some useful features that make it worth a peek if you’re in a pinch. These are generally OS-type icons, for stuff like apps, documents and search buttons, so don’t get your hopes up for anything too fanciful. Heck, we couldn’t even find anything as wild and crazy as a cat icon on ICONLook.

Selection is not ICONLook’s strong point. Even within the categories it’s designed for, there’s not a lot of variety. On the plus side, many of the icons are available in a number of different sizes, and there are links to the source and the license for each one. This puts to rest any worries that this might be some kind of hack job, or the work of nefarious icon pirates. Instead, what you get is a legitimate, middle of the road selection of licensed icons that will hopefully expand to become more useful.

UPDATE: An astute reader was able to find a cat on ICONLook. We stand corrected, but we still feel the site could use a bigger library. Thanks, Jeff_RE!

A lot of digital cameras are great for taking photos, but pretty shoddy for naming files. Sure, it’s alright to have them listed by date and time — at least that keeps them in order — but we think it’s a lot nicer to rename a batch of photos so you remember what they’re actually of. That’s where NameChanger comes in. It’s a lightweight renaming app for OS X, with a focus on images.

NameChanger can append, prepend, replace, or rename all kinds of files with whatever input you give it, but it really shines when it comes to pictures. Drag a batch into the image browser, switch to sequence mode, and “DCP_16739″ becomes “Hawaii01,” or whatever you want it to be. Let NameChanger keep the numbers straight for you. And, at a tiny 1.9mb, you probably have pictures that take up more disk space than this useful little app.

Do you often repeat the same HTML code, form emails, or text? jfSnips might be up your alley then. With jfSnips you can manage all of the text you regularly paste over and over again, as well as re-use everything you’ve copied in a clipboard, much like Windows does. Except this is for all of you Mac OS X lovers out there.

You can place clips of text in whatever categories you like, so you could have one for PHP code, Javascript, HTML, or whatever tickles your fancy. Just don’t tell us about your fancy tickling, that’s way TMI.

Keyboard shortcuts make it even easier to insert text wherever you like. A simple SHIFT-CTRL-V pops open the jfSnips drop-down that sits up in your menu bar. Easy.

So if you repeat multiple email signatures that go a little something like “Sincerely, Thurston Howell IV” over and over and over, then give jfSnips a whirl. You can download it and give it a 15 day try or pay $15 for a full license. If you’re looking for a free option, or a commercial utility with a different feature set, check out our recent rundown of clipboard applications for OS X.

Snackr is an Adobe AIR-based RSS ticker that pulls random headlines from your RSS feeds and scrolls them along the bottom or the side of your screen, letting you click through to read anything that looks interesting. It’s not a replacement for your regular RSS reader, but it makes a great supplement. Snackr’s well worth checking out if you’re an information addict who has to have the fire hydrant open at all times.

Because it’s an AIR app, Snackr is cross-platform and sports a look that won’t feel out of place on your OS. Ticker speed and position on screen are adjustable, and you can force the ticker on top of your other windows if it suits you. Snackr supports OPML files, so it’s very easy to populate with the feeds of your choice. It also minimizes to a tiny tab when you want to put it away for a while, and shows a preview of each story you click on, instead of going directly to your browser. Snackr doesn’t interrupt what you’re doing unless you want it to.

All in all, this is one of the most useful, best-designed AIR apps we’ve seen yet. It’s essential for heavy RSS users, or anyone who wants to stay on top of breaking news. Don’t ditch your full-featured feed reader, by any means, but do supplement it with Snackr if you’re looking for a faster, more dynamic way to consume information.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

EDIT: The URL for the first link is fixed. It’s Snackr.net, not .com. Thanks Ian, Jake and David!

Things, the popular personal organization application from Cultured Code, is still in testing, but it already has a large userbase that is thoroughly addicted to its attractive to-do list features. It’s no surprise, then, that when the clock turned to midnight in Australia and Things suddenly expired, users were up in arms. Hours later, users in the US experienced the same problem. Several people congregated on the official Things help forum, which had nearly 50 postings on the problem as of 2:30 this morning.

Cultured Code hasn’t yet responded with an explanation of why Things was set to expire. The application is still free, but users have already come to rely on it, with more than one person posting that they would gladly pay the $49 pricetag Cultured Code will charge for the 1.0 release to continue using Things right now. Why the expiration, though? We expect to see either a quick fix or an update pushed out this morning — as the app is currently at version .9.1.1, the highly anticipated 1.0 release is possible, but not likely.

If you’re a Things user, visit the help forum for some unofficial ways of resolving the problem. So far, most people are either setting their computers’ dates back or using a hex editor to change the expiration date. Despite all the fuss, this could end up working in favor of Cultured Code. Our take: any publicity is good publicity when people are this frantic about your product.

Update: Version 0.9.1.2 is now available.

[via Duncan Riley]

Speed is all about perception, so any tip that makes a computer feel faster is gold as far as we’re concerned. Today’s tip is a doozy from Raymond Chen, the venerable Microsoft developer and blogger.

According to Chen, a number of user interface timers in Windows key off of the double-click speed registry setting.

The default double-click speed in Windows is 500ms , or exactly 1/2 of a second. Try dropping that down to 250ms — about three-quarters of the way towards Fast — and watch the rest of Windows feel just a bit snappier, since a number of other Windows user interface timings use that setting as a reference. Cool!

For some reason when a page is loading in Firefox, it doesn’t seem to respond to user interaction immediately. For example, say you’re loading a very long page (maybe you’re using a free Backpack account), and you know that the content you need is half way down the page. By default, Firefox will ignore user interaction in favor of giving all processing power to page rendering.

It may well be that Firefox’s engineers made this decision for a very good reason, but what if it bugs you that Firefox ignores you when you know exactly what you want to be doing? Well, it turns out there’s a hidden setting in Firefox that will allow you to bend it to your will.

Firefox uses two priority modes when rendering a page: a low-priority mode that often checks for user input, and a high-priority mode that prioritizes page rendering over user input. There is a timer that determines how long Firefox will wait for user input before switching to high-priority rendering mode.

The Geek at How-To-Geek researched this setting, and determined that switching the default value from 750000 to 1000000 is a good balance that allows for a more responsive feeling browser, while still giving an adequate amount of time to the high-priority mode.

To make this change yourself, type about:config into your Firefox address bar, then type content.switch.threshold into the Filter field. You will likely not have any results returned. If the setting already exists, simply switch the value from the default 750000 to 1000000. If it doesn’t, right click anywhere in the window and choose New > Integer. Use the following setting:

• Key Name: content.switch.threshold
• Key Value: 1000000

To reverse this tip, simply right-click on the setting and choose Reset from the context menu.

PreviewConfig is a utility that gives Vista users the power to add file type support to the Explorer preview pane, which can be activated via “Organize.” Though the preview pane can be an interesting and useful feature of the OS, it really lacks in file support. It’s possible to add support for more without a 3rd party program, but that requires some risky and time-consuming registry tweaking.

But fear not lazy and/or less-advanced Vista users! PreviewConfig makes it easy to add support for more file types. Simply open the application, choose the file type on the left and select how to preview it on the right. In the photo above, you can see the results of adding support for a multimedia file — in this case an MP3 — which is previewed through Windows Media Player.

Though it was easy to add support for MP3 files, adding more would require the user to go through the process again. This isn’t a big deal if you’re looking to add a few more, but adding support for 20, 30, or more file types could prove to be extra boring. Then again, it beats doing the registry hack over and over again.

[via the How-To-Geek]