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

We spend a lot of time working at home or shuttling between home and office, so when we set up the office phone we wanted to make sure it was available anywhere. After looking into several VoIP options, we decided Skype was the way to go. It had a lot going for it: we could set it up on the home computer and the work computer, so it’d be accessible from both, and when we were away we could route calls to the cell phone. And it cost way, way less than regular phone service. Way less – even when we got a SkypeIn number, which we then, giddily, handed out to all our contacts, feeling as we did that we were giving the metaphorical finger to The Man. Sure, the call quality was a little spotty (especially with our cheapie USB phone, which we thought would work with the Mac but were fantastically mistaken) but: free.

Unfortunately, free isn’t synonymous with good. The first hint of ungoodness came when we realized that the call-forwarding feature wasn’t so much forwarding calls. This was baffling, since a) it had been working just fine for months and b) we hadn’t changed anything. We verified that none of the settings had been inadvertently modified, made sure we weren’t mysteriously logged in to the service (forwarding only works when Skype is not running) but – nothing. Calls were just not being forwarded. Huh.

Then we tried taking advantage of the promotional pricing offer for unlimited calling. Half price until January 31st: what a deal! Except not so much, since our order confirmation, sent on January 20th, showed that we were charged full price. Interesting. All the pre-payment screens had showed the promo price, right up to the point where we hit “buy.” Bait-and-switch? Processing glitch? Vast conspiracy between PayPal and Skype?

We sent a support request to Skype, since it’s the only way to contact them. The request went unanswered for a week, at which point we got the following e-mail from Skype: “Unfortunately, we have been experiencing extremely high volumes and as a result we are very sorry that we have not been able to get to your request for Billing Support in as timely a manner as we would like. As many issues have been resolved already, we are hopeful that your request is among them.” Um. The e-mail went on to suggest that if our issue had not been spontaneously resolved, we should contact Skype support. Again.

Our latest indignant support request has, unsurprisingly, remained unanswered. We say unsurprisingly because the Skype forums are bursting with similar stories. Yet nowhere on the official Skype site, not even the Skype blog, is there a mention of the issue. (The closest thing we found was an unsubstantiated series of forum messages from another user – not a Skype employee – claiming that credits would be issued to everyone who overpaid.) What the hell, Skype? Is ignoring support requests a good way to run a business?

We’ve got a business to run, too, and that’s why Skype is not going to handle our phone calls anymore. We’re keeping them for messaging, but we’re no longer enthusiastically singing the praises of Skype to anyone who will listen. Being ripped off will do that. Funny thing.

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

CouldBe Studios is finally live! We’re crazy excited. There might be dancing involved. We promise nothing.

Building this site has been a bit of a comedic adventure in Why Designers Should Hire A Designer. Despite all our proselytizing about keeping things simple, when it came to our own site we found ourselves trying to cram it full of every idea we’ve ever had. Seriously – the first iteration of the site practically did your dishes for you. And then, inevitably, we’d hit a wall. Pound our keyboards in frustration. Let the site sit for a while. Each time we came back to it we cut it down a little bit more, but there was still too much information and too little breathing room.

Finally, about a week ago, we started over. Clean slate, blank page. We had a brainstorming session in which we wrote down the three most important goals of couldbe studios: being able to offer affordable, quality design to people who don’t think they’ll be able to hire a designer; making accessible, standards-compliant sites; and providing complete identity solutions to small and home-based businesses. With those three things hanging out all by themselves on a piece of notebook paper, we went back to designing our site – and we knocked the whole thing out in a little over a weekend. Go, us!

We’re sort of glad it took so much work to get the site going, actually. Now that we know exactly what our clients are going through, we’ll be even better at helping them through the design process. And it is a process, you know? Getting from Point A to Point B isn’t always a straight shot.

So, yeah. Have a look at couldbe studios. Drop us a line if you want to hook up with a new site or a spiffy logo. And enter your name and e-mail address in the form on this blog to get our newsletter and stay on top of our latest happenings.

Everyone knows the best way to stay organized during the holiday season is to make lists. Lots and lots of lists. (OCD? What OCD?) We’ve got lists for home, lists for work…sometimes we’ve even got lists that keep track of our lists. There’s nothing wrong with that. Why, what have you heard?

One of the most satisfying thing about lists, of course, is being able to cross off finished items, and the ultimate evolution of crossing things off is the ticky box. We admit it: we love to tick.

With that in mind, we thought we’d test out some different applications and methods for keeping track of things online – both for the company and for our personal lives (which, lets face it, could use some organization). The three we tested were: a wiki, hosted on our own server; Goplan; and Backpack.

We signed up for a bunch of hosted wikis before installing our own. Some had features we liked, but all had features we didn’t, and eventually we decided it would be a good learning experience to set one up from scratch. We went with MediaWiki, the same back-end that runs Wikipedia. The installation was much easier than we expected; just a little databasing and some configuring and viola.

The learning curve for actually using the wiki was a lot steeper; it uses a sort of proprietary code which limits its functionality, and although we’ve overridden it in places, it’s still kind of a pain to update on the fly. Also: no ticky boxes. We need our ticky boxes! We tried working without them, but it’s just not the same. The lists we put up got updated once and have sat, stagnant, for the past few months.

On the other hand, we found that for things like Christmas lists, (static) link collections and biographies, the wiki is ideal. We’ve added pages for each of us and included picture links for our families, who know our shipping address but are looking for a little inspiration, and have embedded copies of our Google calendar so that anyone who visits can see what we’re up to. We’re in the process of creating link lists to compile all of our various online identities in one place. The wiki is taking off, just in a different direction from what we first envisioned. How much fun is that?

Verdict: great for what it’s great for, but not a to-do list.

We got invited to the Goplan private beta a few months ago. Goplan is a project management service (a la Basecamp) from the folks at Webreakstuff. Although it touts itself as a perfect place to manage everything from party planning to home finances, our first impression was that it would be much more useful for keeping track of business projects than personal projects. We started tracking the behind-the-scenes stuff we needed to do in order to get the business going.

Unlike other project tracking applications, Goplan is relatively bloat-free, which is perfect for a small business like us. We love the smooth interface and the ease of updating; new projects are a snap to create. Also, they’ve just released a developer API, and we’re excited to see what this could offer in the future.

There are some bugs, however, which don’t delight us. These include weird text formatting (it claims to support Textile but doesn’t actually) and an RSS feed which isn’t customizable. The RSS issue is a big one: the feed reports every little change, which makes it functionally useless; after skipping past another “task opened” and “task closed” it’s too easy to miss an actual milestone (as we’ve done several times). These are easy to forgive in a beta. Less easy to forgive? Temperamental ticky boxes. Yes, you heard right. Sometimes the subcategory ticky boxes do not properly tick. Our hearts are still healing from the trauma.

Verdict: Promising, but more business-oriented than personal.

Which brings us to Backpack. (Full disclosure: if you sign up with Backpack using the links in this article, we will get a small amount of account credit. They’re not giving us kickbacks; it’s just an affiliate program. But we will smile like monkeys and possibly do a little dance if credit appears on our account, and isn’t that worth it?) We decided to try it out, since the bottom-tier account is free. Within five days we had upgraded to a paid account so that we could add more pages. And we needed them, since we quickly decided to use Backpack for, you know, everything. We’ve got lists of things we need for the office, lists of ideas for future posts (we actually wrote this post on Backpack’s writeboard), and lists of client-related tasks. But it’s not all business: we used Backpack to keep track of the myriad accessories needed to travel with a toddler when we took our recent vacation.

Backpack’s interface is deceptively simple; the real power is in the application’s flexibility and lack of unnecessary bells and whistles. We can create one list for each page or many; lists and items can be reordered and edited painlessly, and the ticky boxes – oh, the ticky boxes.

In addition to all that, there are writeboards, image collections, notes areas and file uploads, and pages can be shared with individual people or made public with the click of a button.

Everything works exactly as it should. It’s easy to overlook just how much the application is actually doing because it does it so elegantly.

Verdict: We heart Backpack.

Technorati Tags: backpack, basecamp, goplan, mediawiki, wiki, lists, ticky boxes