Entries Tagged 'web 2.0' ↓

I was just reading Jake Billo’s post These are a few of my favourite apps, and I realized that I haven’t ever discussed the different applications that I work with on my Mac. Jake breaks it into the different applications he uses on both Windows and Mac, but I’m only going to be focusing on the Mac applications I use. Additionally, I’m not going to make the title of this post a play on The Sound of Music.

Productivity and Writing

• Email - Google Mail - I was using Mail.app for the longest time, but I grew tired of the terrible search features it has. Gmail has always had superior search compared to any email client.
• Calendar - Google Calendar - I like the fact that I can access it anywhere, and that it is easy to view and share calendars with friends.
• Web Browser - Firefox - I’ve used Firefox for many years now. It crashes sometimes, but it is a very secure browser, and I love all of the extensions available.
• News Reader - NewsFire - I got this program when I purchased the MacHeist bundle. It is very light-weight and I like the ability to make smart feeds.
• Writing - Journler - I use this application for all of my writing and blog posts. It allows me to have a nice clean interface whether I’m online or offline.
• Quicksilver - A great application launche. It also makes tasks a lot easier with triggers. I can create tons of keyboard shortcuts so that I can minimize my mouse usage.

Uploading / Downloading

• BitTorrent - Transmission - I don’t use BitTorrent much at all, but when I do I use Transmission. It is very light-weight.
• Newsgroups - Unison - I don’t use newsgroups much on my main workstation. Most of this is done directly on to my file server. A great application for grabbing files quickly is Unison. It also has NZB support, which is a must.
• FTP - Cyberduck - Not the best FTP client I’ve ever used, but I still continue to use it. It’s certainly better than Fetch, which is a really old client for Mac.

Communications

• Instant Messaging - Adium - I use Adium because it’s a very light-weight client that supports almost every instant messaging protocol. This is important for me because I use almost every protocol there is on a regular basis.
• Voice Conferencing - Skype - Still the best voice conferencing program I’ve ever used. It’s great because it’s cross platform. It now has video conferencing built in.
• IRC - Colloquy - One of the best looking IRC clients on the Mac. It has every piece of eye candy you could ever want in an IRC client. It also has great integration with Growl.
• Additionally, I use Facebook and Jaiku to keep my friends updated on what I’m doing.

Programming and Development

• Eclipse - I use Eclipse to develop Java and Python applications.
• TextMate - Some people use PHP Eclipse to develop in PHP, but I prefer to just use TextMate. It is a very powerful text editor, and has some very useful bundles. It now integrates well with PHPDoc.

DVD/CD Burning / Video / Music

• DVD Ripping - MacTheRipper - This application is great because you can easily get rid of the blocks that they put on DVD that prevent you from skipping FBI warnings.
• DVD Shrinking/Burning - DVD2OneX2 - I like this application because it both shrinks and burns the DVD. No need for two separate applications.
• Music - iTunes - The best music management application I’ve ever used. It has the typical extremely user-friendly Apple interface. iTunes doesn’t necessarily run very well on Windows, but it runs impeccably on the Mac. I also purchase a good amount of music from the iTunes music store.
• Video - QuickTime Pro - I try to use QuickTime as often as I can because of the integration with Apple’s FrontRow. When I can’t run something in QuickTime, I use VLC.

Photos / Graphics Editing

• Digital Camera - iPhoto - I use iPhoto to pull all of the photos from my digital camera and make simple adjustments such as brightness, contrast and red-eye. This application makes it very easy to distribue photos.
• To upload photos to my Flickr account I use Flickr Uploader. It is a very simple tool. It also will resize your images for you in order to save bandwidth.
• Graphic Editing - Photoshop CS2 - I use Photoshop at work because it’s the most advanced photo editing tool on the market. It also has great integration with Adobe GoLive CS2, which I also use at work for the website.

That just about covers all of the applications I currently use on my Mac. For a more indepth look you can go check out my Wakoopa feed. Wakoopa is a Web 2.0 website that tracks all of the applications you run on your computer.

What is your setup? Do you have any suggestions to my setup that would help make my life easier? I would also like to invite any readers to try Wakoopa out and post their feeds here. It’s very interesting to see how other utilize technology. It has certainly made me a more productive person.

Yesterday I read a blog post on Lifehack regarding 5 Uses for a Wiki at Work. Without even reading much into it, I set one up for my projects at work and have started to use it today. Considering I’m collaborating with more than one person on a regular basis regarding different projects, a wiki seems like an ideal solution. Having random papers in handwriting thrown on my desk throughout the day causes me to get behind eventually. It is nice having one central, electronic medium for me to collaborate with my co-workers.

For instance, just the other day I received a note on my desk to make a change on the website regarding, what I had interpreted to be “the flowers of haly.” It turns out that the note actually said “the flavours of Italy.” Clearly something had to be done, fast. I’ve used MediaWiki in the past for doing similar things. It seems to be the best wiki solution out there right now.

As far as keeping hard copies of important work documents handy, I quite enjoy the current setup I have. It will have to do since I don’t have a filing cabinet.

Upon reading a post on Jake Billo’s blog, I decided that it’s been far too long since I’ve written a post. School has been finished for a while now, therefore it is time to start updating on a regular basis. I find that if I put off writing blog posts, it just makes it harder and harder to start posting again. I would like to thank the Waterloo Wellington Bloggers Association for not booting me for being an inactive blog for a while.

I’ve actually been up to a lot lately. There have been many projects I’ve been working on.

• Jake Billo, Warren Gray, and I have registered our business EdgeLink Consulting
  For the past few years the 3 of us have been doing computer repair and consulting for several of our clients in our spare time. Now that business has picked up and we are conducting more sales, we decided to register the business and started operating officially. If you have any computer repair or consulting needs, please contact us through our website.
• At the end of April I started doing full-time consulting for Household China & Gifts in Waterloo
  Throughout the school year I was doing consulting on a part-time basis. Now that I am done school for the summer I have been consulting full-time. I have been working on several projects for the store, due to the fact that most of their systems are very out of date. Apart from the computer side of things, the store has undergone huge changes since it has changed ownership. The store now features a new Flower Shop, and a kitchen loft, where our full-time chef teaches cooking classes to groups. Just a few weeks ago there was a wine-tasting in the store for a group of about 25. If you haven’t been in the store lately, I urge you to check it out.
• Continuing to learn Ruby on Rails and AJAX
  I’ve been trying to keep up with all of these Web 2.0 technologies. I’m aware that Ruby on Rails doesn’t exactly match up with the power of PHP, but it has proven to be very useful in some internal web applications I’ve been developing at Household China. For the amount of users of the applications, Ruby on Rails is a perfect solution. As a result, I’ve been devoting a good portion of my time to gaining more knowledge on the framework.
• Maintaining Organization
  I’ve also been setting aside time to keep myself organized. The starting of the business has added a lot of paperwork to my calendar, and a lot of files to my filing cabinet If I don’t keep up, I can easily get overwhelmed. I’m currently using iGTD in combination with Google Calendar to try to keep track of everything. I can’t wait for the release of OmniFocus. It should make the task of keeping organized a lot easier.

I think that is about the extent of the current projects I’m working on. I’m aiming to post 4-5 times a week. We’ll see if I can keep up with this. I will make this my June Challenge.

Last night I was reading Business 2.0 magazine, and there was an article about an upcoming search engine called ChaCha. The idea of the search engine is that you type in what you’re looking for, and a live guide will do the search for you in order to get the best results. They said that eventually they wanted to enable you to phone a voice-automated system in order to conduct your searches, and that this would essentially replace 411.

I think that this idea is absolutely terrible. It’s one of those things that you try once or twice, but eventually they lose their novelty. I remember trying a similar phone service located in Toronto called VoiceGenie. I ended up just being on the phone yelling into it for 20 minutes to get one stock quote.

“N…..T…..”
“NC… is that right?”
“NO! N….T….”
“I think you said NC … is that right?”

The technology is just not advanced enough right now to make this idea useful. With pretty much every cell phone offering internet service right on the phone, this has become a better alternative.

In the article, it was mentioned that “This was going to be the next Google”, or something to that extent. Once again, this is false. Google is successful because it provides a useful service and makes it extremely easy to use. If you compare the Google and Yahoo websites, Google is 100 times more simple and clean cut. That is the sort of website you want to see when you open up your web browser. Not Yahoo, and definitely not ChaCha.

A friend of mine, Ben Steele, host of the late podcast SodOff Radio, contacted me yesterday inquiring about the best way to sell photos online. Initially, he was going to design a static HTML website and add the photos in manually when he uploads him. I was quick to mention that his probably wasn’t the best way to go about things.

Even with Dreamhost’s One-Click Installs, I was able to come up with a pretty decent solution. First, I installed Wordpress. This will allow him to interact with his customers through a blog, and show the latest photos. This will also provide him with the ability to make commentary on the photos. Additionally, I felt that a blog would be a good way for him to market his website. With all of the associations and networks available to bloggers, it is easy to get your blog noticed if you have the motivation to do so.

The next task was to get all of the photos into the same place. To accomplish this I deployed an install of Gallery 2.1, which was also available through the Dreamhost One-Click Installs. This is a very customizable piece of software that I’ve really enjoyed working with so far. It will allow Ben to organize all of his photos in to albums and then his customers can purchase single photos, or entire albums.

The final component was selling the photos. To achieve this I used a service called Digibug Pro. This is a service that will allow Ben to set the prices for his photos, and then they will print the and ship them to the customer. By using this service, Ben is able to keep 85% of the profit of the sale. The great thing about Digibug Pro is that it integrates right into Gallery 2.1, which means that Ben only has to upload his photos into one place.

Right now this seems to be a fairly good solutions. What do you use to sell photos online?