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.

We just launched the new site for Munchkin Designs, and I couldn’t resist placing an order – you know, just to test the system. It came a couple of days ago, and check out the cuteness:

Lisa Komer, Munchkin Designs’ owner, makes the most adorable custom-designed printed materials. And her site is pretty cute, too, if we do say so ourselves. Drop by and check out her new line of tees!

We were very pleased to see that one of our clients was picked as a ‘Shop of the Moment’ by Jaded Pixel today.

The Green Girls are cool people with cool, eco-friendly products, so check ‘em out folks!

We’re really proud of the site, which is a wordpress / shopify integration that we think works quite well.

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.

The folks over at Jaded Pixel created quite a big kerfuffle with their recent pricing changes for Shopify.

Like a lot of designers who work with Shopify we were mystified. We felt betrayed by people who we had previously sung the praises of, we scratched our heads and fumed. We wrote forum posts questioning their methods, sent them feedback and commiserated with other designers over the way that it was handled.

The problem we had with the situation was not the new rates which are actually quite reasonable, but that the change was carried out in secrecy, which left us in a potentially sticky spot as we had bids out to potential clients which were based on their old pricing model, and even worse projects currently being developed that had their pricing model changed! How were we supposed to handle that? We’d quoted people based on their old pricing model, started working on the site and then had it change mid-way through.

Outrage! Snarl! All of that!

Well, as it turned out the folks at Jaded Pixel grandfathered all of our projects back to the old pricing without any fuss, so it worked out all right. And, even better they are making a real effort to improve their communication with their user base and the design community.

After dropping the pricing change on us in secrecy, they have actually been fairly open about the reasons.

Tobias Lütke, JadedPixel’s co-founder had this to say:

“First of all, there was no announcement because it was not practical in our situation for two reasons:

a) There is no change to any of our existing customers. The only thing which changes to people who use Shopify is that the signup page of our brochure page quotes a different pricing structure. We grandfathered every one of our existing customers for lifetime. This includes people who were in the middle of setting up a store and had no prior sales yet. It did not however include people on demo accounts ( the ones which say that they are automatically deleted ). However we have grandfathered everyone who send us an email with a demo account if the store was about to be launched.

b) Because shopify is free in signup we could not announce this change because it would have meant that people would have set up hundreds of accounts to be grandfathered which they could then sell later on to people who feel that the old pricing system was better.

Speaking of which, i know that the feedback here on the blog is pretty negative but this is by no means a fair reflection of the feedback we are receiving here at jadedPixel. A lot of our customers are saving a good deal of money and expect to save even more when they grow bigger. The only pricing model was prohibitory expensive to some of our clients and this had to be addressed.

That being said, we are incredibly sorry about the inconveniences the switch may have caused to our designers, advocates and pitchers out there. We are establishing a new communication channel with our affiliates so that such changes can be announced in a controlled manner. Not that there are any more such changes in the pipeline, mind you.

Thank you for understanding. We launched with a pricing scheme which was unsustainable in the long run and had to correct the problem. We believe that the shopify software delivers value far greater then its cost and we hope you think the same, especially with the new pricing system.”

Perhaps the best thing to come out of this however is that Jaded Pixel is now taking a very proactive stance on improving their communication with the designers who build the themes and sell the storefronts. Today they announced the creation of what they are calling the Shopify Advisory Council. Which basically is a group of designers and users of Shopify who will act as a sort of think-tank for customer relations.

Jaded Pixel’s willingness to admit that they made a mistake with the way they handled things recently and their willingness to learn from their mistakes has done much to restore our faith in them and their platform.

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.

Mark Wyner‘s presentation on Experience Design As the Sum of Its Parts was fantastic, and we liked his tattoos, too. It’s nice to be in an industry where tattoos are just part of the everyday and not something to be hidden, furtively, like a pvc fetish or a penchant for furries. At our last “day” job, we found ourselves deeply resentful of the fact that we had to keep the tattoos on our ankles covered. Now that we work for ourselves, our intricate Tengwar runes (that’s Elvish, for the less dorky among us) are free to see the light of day, assuming said day is not drenched in rain. And isn’t that what web design is really all about?

Mark Wyner’s presentation had very little to do with tattooing (or being a big dork, although he did compare the internet to ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books) and more to do with the way design and development can learn to work together to create a more useful and comprehensive whole. Basically it comes down to Information Architecture, Visual Design, Interface Markup and Functionality holding hands and playing nicely together to create sites that are not only pretty, but also functional, easy to maintain and accessible to a wide variety of consumers.

We’ve been devouring information about accessibility and semantic markup lately, so this session was particularly topical. We’ll link to the slides once we upload the pictures from the “good” camera and can decipher the URL on his closing slide. Seriously, you’d think that all those notes would have included that one vital bit of info, but you’d be wrong.

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webvisions, portland, web design, mark wyner, experience design

WebVisions, here we come! We’re ridiculously excited to be spending the next couple of days hanging out with the best of the web. If you’re in the Portland, OR area, head on over!

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webvisions, portland, web design

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!

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