Part 2 of 2

Matt’s list of must-have apps: I work with both Mac and PC for different things. While I definitely prefer the Mac, I haven’t been able to do away with the PCs in my life completely yet. Note: Jessica already summed up all of the collaborative tools that we use, Highrise, Basecamp, Google Docs, etc. So I’ve left those out of my list. They rock, we both use them, let’s just leave it at that.

Mac Software and Web-Apps:

Firefox extensions

My must-have list: firebug (of course), web developer’s toolbar, fireftp, pdf download

Textmate

I’m not going to repeat everything that is on Jessica’s list, but this one is worth it. There just aren’t enough ways to say how much we think it rocks.

Adium

I use Adium instead of iChat. This is hands-down my favorite IM client. It just does everything I want.

Key Fixer

These little tools change the behavior of the home and end keys to what you might be more used to if you also use a PC or have switched from a PC. Since I write code on both platforms, keeping my keyboard working the same way on both is vital.

PC Software:

SQLyog

If you are doing much development with MySQL databases you probably already know about this, if you don’t you should really check it out. A lot of tasks are made easy while still giving you all of the power and flexibility of a command-line. By far my favorite GUI for this sort of work.

Multiple IE

If you are doing web-work, especially anything with UI Design/CSS, you need this. We keep an XP Pro machine on hand just to run this (and, um Netflix streaming movies, shush).

Pidgen

It’s like Adium for PCs. It bundles all of your IM accounts together in one application with minimal fuss. I’ve tried a bunch of them, and used Trillian for a long time, but Pidgen works better for me.

Foxit Reader

If you are old enough you may remember a time when .pdf was not a four-letter word. If you use a Mac, you have probably experienced how lovely it is to see them pop open in Preview almost instantly. Foxit’s reader has made the .pdf a viable document format for me on PC again. It’s fast and lightweight.

Last year we did a round-up of the apps that make it easy to run a design company on the fly, and it’s high time we updated that list. Some things have changed, some have stayed the same, but one thing’s for sure: we’d be lost without these!

Part 1 of 2 (Matt will post his in the next few days).

Jessica’s list of must-have apps: I work exclusively on a Mac (well, two, actually) so these are all Mac-friendly.

Transmit

I was pretty meh on the subject of FTP clients until I tried Transmit. Now I don’t know what I did without it.

Fluid

See above re: FTP clients and switch for site specific browsers. I finally installed Fluid on a whim and…wow, was I ever wrong. It’s given me a whole new appreciation for my Dock.

TextMate

Can’t rave enough about my love of TextMate. Makes coding a breeze.

Google Docs

We keep the majority of our paperwork (contracts, contract templates, etc.) on Google Docs. We can share amongst ourselves and access files from anywhere – handy when you’re constantly shuttling between office and home office. Also: it’s not Word!

Google Apps

We finally switched our couldbe studios email over to Google Apps, and it’s been great.

Basecamp

For all our project management needs.

Highrise

Keeps track of our contacts.

Ma.gnolia

Social linkage.

Firefox

And, of course, what’s Firefox without extensions? I use Firebug, Foxmarks, 1Password and ColorZilla.

Campaign Monitor

Not only does Campaign Monitor make it easy to send and track email newsletters, it makes setting up managed accounts for clients a breeze.

Reinvigorate

I personally loathe Google Analytics, but none of the other free or low-cost offerings seemed much better. Enter Reinvigorate. They’re in private beta right now, but we were lucky enough to get in. And I do mean lucky: Reinvigorate is a fabulous service, and I can’t imagine switching.

DropSend

When we’ve got to email huge files to clients or printers, DropSend is invaluable.

Blinksale

Simple and easy to use. We looked at FreshBooks, but given our requirements Blinksale is a better fit.

Last night I went a little crazy and decided to try my hand at using the twitter API for something.

I love twitter, and much of the time the group stream of consciousness that is displayed is great, but… there are times when following a conversation can be a little tough.

I have found myself wishing that there were a way to sort it into easier to follow pieces.

So i figured that would be a good place to start. What I ended up with is TwitterThreads.com.

TwitterThreads.com

The idea here is to connect the dots of the @replies in your twitter stream.

(click)

Above is a screenshot of a threaded conversation I was having with Josh Bancroft this morning that illustrates fairly well what that looks like.

If you’ve somehow never heard of Twitter, check it out.

Twitter rocks.

Cheers,

Matt Beck
Partner, CouldBe Studios

Pretty much since Mac OSX came out we’ve been itching to try our hand at creating a dashboard widget for it. The only problem was, we didn’t have a reason to, so we just kept putting it aside.

Well, we finally bit the bullet and took a stab at it.

For our first widget, we’ve connected the new Marketplace on Shopify.com directly to you dashboard. Check it out here
.

We’re pretty happy with the results and we hope others will use it too.

Let us know what you think would ya?

Cheers!

Matt Beck
Partner
CouldBe Studios

We recently picked up a Lensbaby variable focus lens (ours is a 3G) and are absolutely having a blast with it.

Could we replicate the effect in Photoshop? Well, sort of, but it wouldn’t be easy or 100% right.

There is also a random element to using the lensbaby that we love. Often we don’t get the picture we thought we were getting, but what we do get is even better.

Things we love about it:
1. The pictures we take with this are like nothing else we’ve done.
2. Craig Strong (President and Co-Founder) of lensbabies is a truly nice guy, as are his crew and the dedicated lensbaby users.
3. They are locally made here in Portland, OR
4. It looks like a cross between a lunar lander and a vaccum hose.

These things definitely have a bit of a learning curve, but classes and workshops are available (I took one and had a wonderful time). If you get a chance we recommend you try one out, they’re just too fun to miss out on.

We’ve been loving Shopify for small business e-commerce, and it’s been great for our clients. The one thing we hear more than anything else is “Can you send a tutorial for beginners so that we know how to get started?”

We are nothing if not accommodating. Here’s a super easy, super simple guide to getting started with your own Shopify site.

Shopify Tutorial

Log in to your Shopify admin account (yoursite.myshopify.com/admin)

The first thing you’ll see is the Home screen, which shows you at a glance how many visitors your site has had, how many orders you’ve received, the last login of your staff members and your out of stock items (if any).

The green navigation strip shows you what options are available for your shop.

Orders:

Click Orders to see the details of your orders.

In this screen, you can manage orders, contact your customers, or download a spreadsheet of your orders for offline use. Since there are no orders here, we’ll move on to the next screen.

Products:

Click the Products tab. You will see a list of all the products which have been added to your shop.

To add a new product, click the “Add New Product” button (it’s red, and at the top of your screen).

Give your product a title (this can be purely descriptive; inventory control information is later) and a description.

Under “Product type” you can choose from one of your existing product types or enter a new one. Keep these categories pretty broad; you don’t want to create a new product type for each item you enter. These categories will be used later to create things like Smart Collections.

Under “Product vendor” add the name of the product’s creator. For example, if you are selling items from a third-party vendor you will enter that name here, but if you create the products yourself you will enter your own company name.

Set the price and weight (weight is used for calculating shipping costs). You can also add a “Compare at” price, which is useful if you’re having a sale and want people to know how much money they’re saving.

Under “Inventory” you can enter a product ID or SKU (this is optional) and decide whether you want Shopify to track your stock level. If you choose to have your stock level tracked, you will need to add the quantity you have on-hand and choose whether customers can still place orders when you run out (useful if you will be re-ordering based on customer orders) or if your item will show “SOLD OUT” when you run out of stock.

Add tags so that people can easily find what they’re looking for. You can add as many tags as you want. Try to be very descriptive.

You must upload an image before your product will show up on your site. You can upload several images for each product; the first one in the list will be the “featured image” and will show up on your product and collection pages. Once you’ve uploaded all your images, you can change the order they display by dragging and dropping the thumbnails.

Don’t forget to SAVE your product!

Collections:

Click on the Collections tab to see your collections.

By default, your shop starts out with the “Frontpage” collection. Don’t delete this! It keeps track of which products are featured on the front page of your shop. You can change your featured products at any time by going into the product page and checking or un-checking the “Frontpage” ticky box.

Collections organize your products into groups, which you can then link to from your shop. Create collections for all your groups of products. For example, if you sell a lot of shirts and pants, you might want to create a “Shirts” collection and a “Pants” collection as well as an “Outfits” collection, in which you can group together things that would go well in a set. You can add the same product to more than one collection.

Standard Collections are collections of items you choose as you go (like the Frontpage collection, above); Smart Collections use pre-defined values to organize your stock.

Create a new Smart Collection by clicking “Create new Collection” and choosing “Smart Collection.”

Next, set the conditions for your Smart Collection. They can be anything you want, and you can add more using the green button on the right.

You can play around with this to find the combination that works best for your shop. Once the Smart Collection is set up, the products that meet the criteria will automatically be added.

Blogs & Pages:

When you click the Blogs & Pages tab, you will see all of the blogs and pages you have created. A blog is like a collection of articles; you can create a blog and then update it, and your most recent update will be at the top of the blog’s page. Pages, on the other hand, are static; you can make a page for your shipping information, for example, or to talk about who you are and what you do. Blogs are best for information you will need to add to on a continual basis, like a news page or a list of articles.

Click “Create Blog or Page” and then choose which one you’d like to create. For this example, we’re creating a page. Give your page a title and add some text. Shopify uses Textile for its markup; you can see the examples on the left to figure out how to format your text.

Save your page. In the next step, you will add your page to your navigation so visitors to your site will be able to find it.

Navigation:

Click the Navigation tab. You will see a list of your existing navigation menus.

For this example, we are adding a link to the footer menu, but you can always add or re-order your navigation menus to fit your site’s needs. Be aware that some menus (like the footer) will show up in different places on your site, so be aware of which menu you’re adding to.

To add a link to the Footer menu, click “Add Link.” Type in the name of the link (this doesn’t have to be the same as what you named the page, but it does simplify things if it’s similar) and choose what you’re linking to. We linked to the Royalty-Free License page here, but you can link to anything from an external website to an individual product. You can also link to a collection.

This is a screenshot of our example site, in which you can see the Royalty-Free Images page on the site and listed in the footer menu.

Marketing:

This is a new section that allows you to enter coupon codes and keep track of your marketing efforts.

Next, look at the right side of the green navigation bar to find the nuts and bolts of your site.

Look & Feel:

Look & Feel is where the site’s theme information lives. You probably won’t want to change that, but you certainly can! We recommend saving a copy of your existing theme before making any changes.

Preferences:

This is where you can set up the inner workings of your store. You will see a sub-menu on the right that lists your options. Click around to see which options are appropriate to your store.

The most important section to set up is the Checkout & Payment section, in which you will specify which payment service(s) your store will use. There is also a “Bogus Gateway” for testing purposes; if you activate it, you can place a sample order without sending any actual payment information.

Account:

The Account screen is where you will go when you want to check to see how much storage space you have left on your site or, if you’re the account owner, to add a staff member to your lineup or view or change the credit card information for the shop. (Note: only the account owner can add staff members or view or alter the credit card information for the shop.)

The account owner MUST enter credit card information before the shop will accept orders!

That’s it!

If you have any further questions, check out the Shopify forums or contact jessica at couldbestudios dot com.

We’ve been using Adobe Lightroom (now Photoshop Lightroom) for months now, ever since we stumbled over the beta version in Adobe Labs. We loved the interface, the integration with Photoshop, the ease of use. Pretty much the only thing we didn’t love was the new dock icon. What is up with the new Adobe icons? We can see why they’d want to update the Photoshop feather and whatnot, but the whole minimalist typography thing? Could be done better. That’s all we’re saying.

When it came time for us to actually pony up the cash for the full version of Lightroom, we had a crisis of conscience. What if this wasn’t the right decision? What if we only thought Lightroom was All That? We’d been eyeing Apple’s Aperture for a while; the Quicktime videos on Apple’s site had been pretty impressive, and all our web searching had basically convinced us that we should at least give it a try. And there was a 30-day trial…what could it hurt?

As our Lightroom trial came to a close, we went ahead and downloaded Aperture. Unlike most trials, we actually had to get a trial license from Apple, but it was easy enough and we were up and running in no time. Well – not exactly no time. Aperture took quite a while to load and then grab our RAW files (even though we didn’t tell it to grab that many); we thought this was just because we were starting it for the first time, but future imports would reveal that Aperture, much like iPhoto, is a slow loader.

Aperture sports a weirdly disjointed interface that could use a little TLC from Apple’s design crew. The top of the screen shows a row of icons familiar to iPhoto users (Smart Folder, Book, Web Gallery, etc.) and several editing tools which seem to have been selected at random. Using the tools is a bit confusing, since clicking on them seems to have no effect; one needs to click the tool and then click the image to make a change. The sidebars seem both cluttered and insufficient. They’re different enough from both Lightroom and Photoshop that we are unable to find what we’re looking for. For example: how do we darken shadows? We wade through things like “Chroma Blur” and “Auto Noise Compensation” before we finally find a “Shadows” option, but the slider is already all the way over and our shadows don’t look the way we want them to. Clicking “Advanced” reveals a series of baffling options like “High Tonal Width” and “Radius.” We mess around with them a little, but soon give up in frustration. We miss Lightroom already.

Once we do get an image to look the way we want, we’d like to sync the adjustments with other pictures in the series. We’d like to, but we can’t figure out how. In Lightroom, there was a big, friendly button that said “Sync.” Where are our big, friendly buttons? Oh, Lightroom. We did not appreciate all you did for us.

The “Auto Exposure” button (on the right, under the histogram; it’s a little button shaped like a camera shutter) yields good results. No complaints there. However, our final images look sort of washed-out, and we find ourselves opening Photoshop just to tweak them. Isn’t that what Aperture is supposed to be for?

Want a breakdown? Here’s how Aperture fared in our battle for photo editing dominance:

• Interface elegance: Lightroom’s interface is intuitive and easy to understand for anyone who has experience with Photoshop. Aperture’s seems cluttered and confusing, and there’s a learning curve for new users. Winner: Lightroom.
• Automatic adjustments: This is where Aperture took the lead. Nine times out of ten, the automatic adjustment looked good, if not great. Lightroom’s automatic features are a bit more of a crapshoot. Winner: Aperture.
• Manual adjustments: the way Lightroom handles manual adjustments is identical to Photoshop, if Photoshop only handled pictures. All the sliders and graphs a digital photographer needs are right there. Aperture’s adjustment options range from too simple to too complex, with nothing in the middle. Winner: Lightroom.
• Revert to earlier version: In Aperture, the option to revert to the original is always a click away. However, in Lightroom, one can mouseover every step in the image’s history. Want to remove everything but the first levels adjustment? No problem. Plus, you can preview it in the left-hand thumbnail. Winner: Lightroom.
• Sync: Syncing in Lightroom? Easy. We couldn’t figure out how to do it in Aperture. That doesn’t mean it isn’t possible; it just means we’re impatient. Winner: Lightroom.
• View as slideshow: Now, you’d think this would be where Aperture took the lead, seeing as iPhoto’s slideshow feature kicks butt, and Photoshop’s? Not so much. Imagine our sadness when we clicked the “Slideshow” icon and then had to wait…and wait…and wait while Aperture built previews for each image. Ten minutes all told, and then the slideshow quit in the middle and we couldn’t figure out how to re-start it from the place we stopped. In Lightroom, you just click the “Slideshow” section and it’s ready to go. Winner: Lightroom.
• Save: Both programs make it easy to export images and customize file names. Winner: Tie.

We wanted to love Aperture, we really did, but there’s no denying it: Lightroom has our hearts.

CouldBe Studios (that’s us, in case you’re confused) is many things to many people, but sedentary it ain’t. We shuttle between a home office, an office-office, and several points in between. How do we do it? Here’s a list, in no particular order, of the apps, programs and sites that make it possible to run a business from anyplace we happen to be.

• Basecamp: Having a place where we can communicate with our clients and keep track of notes, tasks and milestones is definitely a good thing. For them and for us.
• Highrise: It’s new, but already we’re digging the ability to collaboratively add notes to contacts. Need to know who talked to the ISP last and what they said? It’s all there. Our inner OCD rejoices.
• Backpack: We still use this to keep more “lightweight” lists, and we’ve even been known to use the Writeboard feature to write drafts of blog posts. Yes, we know we can use Writeboards in Basecamp. We’re just used to them in Backpack. (Did we mention our inner OCD?)

(Note to 37signals: you know what would be really cool? If all these accounts could hold hands and be friends. You know, one login to rule them all? Plz and thx.)

• iChat: While we remain highly suspicious of the A in AIM, we grudgingly admit that we feel a certain amount of affection for iChat, especially for video conferencing. Originally we thought we’d use Skype for video chats, but since our love affair with Skype went sour we thought we’d give iChat AV a try. We haven’t been sorry.
• Ma.gnolia: We bookmark obsessively, but the thing that sold us on Ma.gnolia was the ease with which we can send bookmarks back and forth without having them come up in our bookmark stream. If one of us runs across a site we want to share, we can just click the little “Send Bookmark Recommendation” icon, choose a recipient (or several) from our list, and viola. Especially handy for links we don’t need to act on right away but hope to peruse at our leisure. As a company we’re always working on a million things, so it’s nice to be able to prioritize without missing out on anything.
• Box.net: Essential for file sharing, which is a thing we do a lot of. We miss the friendly little drag and drop-able interface of the previous incarnation, but still think it’s pretty spiff. The new color scheme is definitely easier on the eyes, and since one of us is desperately myopic we appreciate things like that.
• Honorable Mention: Google Reader. We were using NetNewsWire Lite for our extensive and well-documented RSS habit, but once we moved to Google Reader we never looked back. We love the fact that we can view our feeds from anywhere – including our phone. Google, we kind of love you.

And last, but certainly not least…


• BlackBerry Pearl smartphone: Our mobile line is our business line, and we figured that since we’re going to be connected all the time we might as well be really
  connected. Being able to read and respond to e-mail on the bus? So freaking cool. Also, look how much more productive we can be during our commute!

Anything you’ve found especially useful that we didn’t mention? Let us know in the comments!

Technorati Tags:
couldbe studios, productivity, mobile office, basecamp, backpack, highrise, ichat, ma.gnolia, box.net, blackberry pearl

These days it isn’t unusual for people to have several online aliases. There’s the personal persona, hanging out on MySpace and YouTube; there’s the work persona, reading news feeds and doing online research; and there’s often a third, leisure persona, frequenting specialized bulletin boards and sites for hobbies like crafting, D&D or politics. And, of course, it wouldn’t be Web 2.0 if each of those aliases didn’t have its own blog.

As someone who manages several distinctly different blogs, I feel for people taking on the challenge of multiple online identities. The need for them, however, is undeniable. Here are some ways to make it all work (and crank up your productivity in the bargain).

Compartmentalize

The first step in managing multiple identities is breaking them down into bite-sized chunks. If you’re dealing with the line between business and personal, that may be an easy task. But what if your personal and leisure identities overlap? How do you categorize, for example, your love of a site like Dogster – is that personal, or is it leisure? Do you even need a leisure persona? The easiest way to figure that out is to look at your Dogster identity as though you were a stranger. Would you want the random Dogster aficionado to Google the alias in your profile and see, for example, your personal MySpace page or your Flickr photostream? If the answer is yes – if you’re on Dogster to invite other dog-lovers into your life, or if your life is already all dogs, all the time – then you probably don’t need a leisure persona. But if you’d rather your personal life and your hobbies remained at least superficially separate, you’d do well to use a distinct identity for each one.

Social Bookmarking: Mark ‘Em All, Let the Internet Sort ‘Em Out

If you’re going to use any sort of blogroll on your sites (and who doesn’t, these days?), you’ll want an easy way to sort the different links to correspond with your different identities. One of the easiest ways to do that is by using a social bookmarking service like Ma.gnolia or Del.icio.us. Just make sure you tag religiously and tag well, and you’re good to go. Truly compartmentalized people like me may even use different accounts for personal vs. business links, but within each account I use tags to separate, for example, my parenting links from my catch-all check-out-this-page links.

Browse in Multiples

One you’ve figured out how to define your categories and started the process of separating the personal from the professional, it’s time to put your browsers to work for you.

Only using one browser? That’s so last year. The easiest way to segregate one identity from another is to use different browsers for each. That way you can visit the same sites and collect different cookies. That’s especially useful for internet searches and news portals, but is also good for managing sites like Flickr, which requires a separate login for each alias. Think about it like this: if you want to comment on a friend’s photo, do you want to use your business login? I’m too impatient to log in and log out each time I visit a site; with separate browsers, I can stay logged in all the time, even if I use overlapping services. It’s also good for web forms and blog comments, for the same reason. You can have each browser remember a different address or e-mail – home and work, say – so you don’t have to re-type it every time.

Also, with separate browsers, you get separate bookmarks. For me, this is key; I don’t like having to search through lots of different folders to find the bookmark I’m looking for. Knowing that all my business links are in Firefox (for example) saves me a lot of time. I can set up each browser to open a specific set of bookmarks for me each time I log in, and I can easily manage the follow-up on sites I want to write about.

Yes, I said write. This is an article about blogging, remember? All of these things lead to this next thing: managing your blogs.

One Blog Per Person(a)

I’ve got a lot of blogs. A business blog, a mommy blog, and a fledgling copywriting blog, to name a few. At any given time, I have between ten and twenty tabs open in each of my browsers – stories I want to read or write about, services I want to check out, links I want to bookmark, reference material and entertainment. How do I keep track of it all?

Since I’ve assigned my personas different browsers, the first big chunk of work is done for me. I know at a glance that all the tabs I have open in Firefox are related either to writing (for Buzzverb) or design (for What Could Be) while the tabs in Flock are related to parenting, kids, or my new obsession with crafting. This makes it easy to focus my attention on one thing or the other, which in turn means I won’t be derailed in the middle of writing an article about web design by an amusing parenting anecdote. More importantly, it means I won’t lose an important link by overloading my brain with too many disparate subjects.

Since I use Flock, posting to my Cranky Mama blog is easy as pie; I just fire up Flock’s integrated blogging client and go to town. Since my mommy blog is pretty informal and doesn’t require a lot of editing (or, to be honest, a lot of research), I don’t miss the more advanced features of a robust desktop client.

For my business blogs, though, I want something with a few more options. I use MarsEdit, although there are dozens of options that are equally useful. Since all my links are open in Firefox, it’s easy to reference articles and sites, and if I want to find something I looked at a few days ago, my history is relevant to my business persona.

Don’t Forget That There Is Only One of You

Despite all this talk of multiple identities, you’re still only one person. Don’t expect that you’ll be able to maintain daily blogs for each of your personas unless you’ve got a truly ridiculous amount of time to set aside for blogging.

Decide ahead of time which blog you want to devote the most attention to, and make that your priority. Here are some ideas for managing all that writing:

• Set deadlines for yourself so that you don’t leave any of your blogs hanging. If you’re particularly anal-retentive like me, you may want to use a calendaring service to remind you which days you plan to publish to which blog. Backpack, for example, will send an e-mail each week to remind me to post an article to What Could Be. I’m not suggesting that a mild case of OCD is a good thing; I’m just saying you might as well put it to work for you. Am I right?
• Compose entries ahead of time whenever possible; this makes it easy to publish something when your creative energies have run out.
• Don’t underestimate the power of linking. On days when you just can’t come up with anything to say, put those open tabs to work for you. Tell the world what you’re reading about. The world will thank you, if by thank you you mean take a look and collectively shrug. (A caveat: make at least a token effort to describe your recommendations using your own words. If you just post a list of links, the other kids on the internet will point at you and laugh.)

Bring it All Together

Now that you’ve got everything all neatly separated, how do you bring together all your myriad online identities? My suggestion is an identity management service like ClaimID or an aggregator like Jaiku. ClaimID lets you list every single little bit of information associated with your name and compile the links in one page; you can set privacy levels for each item and arrange by importance (or however else you want). Jaiku lets you enter the RSS feeds for all your many blogs, photo streams, or whatever, and uses all that to create a page which has a constantly-updating, personalized information feed, showing you at a glance where you’ve been putting your energy. (And no, if you’re wondering. I get nothing for making these recommendations. Just the inner satisfaction of making good links, and really, isn’t that what linking is about?)

Go. Blog.

Now put all these suggestions to work for you. You’ve got the tools. You’ve got the interests. Give it a whirl and see if you can juggle more than one identity. In fact, nothing is stopping you from starting a new blog right now. Go ahead! I’ll wait.

Technorati Tags:
productivity, organization, aliases, blogging, identity, blog juggling