I set out to find a good wireframing app, and while free software like Pencil were great, it just didn't have what I was looking for. I tried out a few others, and the one which fitted my taste best was iPlotz. There are about 87 reasons I like this application, and only 3-4 things I would change or add, all in all, not a bad ratio, so let's take a closer look at it!

If you work in a team, the biggest advantage you have is that iPlotz has a Desktop version via Adobe Air, and an online version. You can also share your work in numerous ways, the easiest is to simply create a preview URL and send it to someone. Since iPlotz supports page linking, your mockup will function like a navigatable webpage.

In the editing area it surpassed other application, simply because I connected more with it, it was more intuitive, easier to handle, and most of all, very quick. Choose from the left side list, drag and drop onto the canvas, change properties if necessary, and you have your element. The most wonderful thing is probably that the application supports some common shortcuts. Select an element, click CTR+D, and you duplicate it, CTR+C copies, CTR+V pastes, and so on. These controls enable you to rapidly build and deploy a mockup which your co-workers can work on as well, or others can comment on easily.

The one feature which will save you about a hundred hours is the master pages. These are templates, containing elements which are common to many pages. You just need to create these elements on a master page, and whenever you want these to be visible on wireframe pages, just link it to the wireframe page, and the contents of the master page will be visible on the wireframe page. This is perfect for headers, sidebars, and so on, which are on most pages of a site. You can create more master pages in case some pages on your site have a different configuration.

iPlotz also allows you to build your own library. If you have an image or an icon to add, just select it from your harddrive and it will be added to the pallette on the left in the My Library section. Apart fro your own library, iPlotz comes with some pretty great icons of its own, so take a look at those before uploading your own, the idea here is to have a mockup, not a design, so you shouldn't actually be using your own design elements at all.

If you don't find what you need in the library, and you don't have something ready-made on your harddrive, iPlotz offers some basic drawing tools, rectangles, polygons, circles, stars, lines to be exact. You won't get Photoshop quality results, but they more than siffice for wireframing.

Now, let's take a look at the dark side of the application. I'd rather call it gray in this case, there aren't any things wrong here, only some features I would tweak a bit, or add to. The thing that bothered me the most was the way elements like menubars, lists, and so on are handled as links. You can create a link from any element, which is a very goo feature, but you can not create links from members of a menu bar. When you create a menu bar, you can create the items on the bar by just typing text, so you either create a link from the whole thing, no link at all, or try a workaround, like putting buttons next to each other, and creating links from those.

Apart from this, the only functional problem I had was that if you switch between pages you always get a "do you want to save" dialog if you haven't saved it. It would be more beneficial if the app doesn't support multiple pages open, to just autosave stuff when you switch, or have this as an option at least.

Overall, iPlotz is what an application should be. To me it's pretty obvious when a team sat down and thought about how they could add usefulness and "ergonomics" into an app. I love the design of the application, the visual style of the mockups, the way pages ara handled, and so on, iPlotz gets way-way more things right than wrong, it's a breeze to throw together a multiple page mockup (and fun), it is well worth the low-end price tag of $75.

In that spirit I decided to just shut up and use the easiest solution for most of my needs, a simple spreadsheet in Excel. While this may only give me 95% of what I need, at least I am spending 1% of my time organizing myslef, instead of 5-8%, which is a great timesaver. In addition, I really don't need fancy features like geo-tagging tasks, automatic expense tracking and so on, Esxcel is always at hand, I can enter a task, an expense, a project in about 5 seconds, and just forget about it.

The reason I think this simplicity works is that even the most complex project is composed of very simple bits. If you can find the right way to put your data into tables, you will end up with a complex system, but very simple information input, lowering your workload, while increasing your tracking capabilities.

Excel (the same goes for Open Office Calc, and even Google or Zoho spreadsheets) allows you to customize your tables, filter them, order them, export the data in countless ways, create dynamic tables with equations, share your work, and so on, so it's not as if it was featureless either!

If you're keeping track, you know I am working on an open source software site, and I plan to catalogue a bunch of apps in advance; my first idea was to use an SQL database. It is quicker to quickly write an HTML page where I can enter each software in a form, but as my requirements grew, this became more and more work. I have to have the flexibility of a dtabase, but it's not a hugely important task, so I don1t want to spend ages and ages on it. Access can help you a lot in this.

Since it's more user-friendly from a user interface point of view, you can create some great tables very quickly, along with a form to input data into them. If I want a really good form in an HTML page I need to write a lot of queries, populate select boxes and so on, and any time I think of a new feature, I need to do some coding. This takes me away from my real task, which is to just build a list of apps.

If you're looking for a quick way to store data in a structured fashion, I would advise using Access since it's much more "plug and play", and when you're done, just convert the whole thing to SQL as needed. You can find how to convert the databse in the Microsoft Knoweldgebase.

First of all, the most important thing to do, is to sit down and "research your research". In some areas they call this meta-planning, basically you stop and think about how you are going to research things, what tools/methods to use. In my case I wanted to research at least 4 other big blogs, take a look at how they do things based on a list of properties. This immediately gives me at least 3 areas to plan ahead on. First of all, I need a tool to write down the information, secondly, I need to choose the blogs, and last, but not least, I need to think about the properties I am going to base my research on.

I actually started by picking out four blogs, since I have been blogging for a while, this was not hard. I then sat down, and wrote down 20 different properties I wanted to check out on these blogs (things like ad placement, titles, categorization, general design, etc). This list has since grown to 30 items, and I anticipate it will go up to at least 50. Now all of these items generate at least a few paragraphs of text, so the body of imformation will be pretty big, hence the bigger problem, how do I organize all this info?

Choosing the mode of recording my findings was the place I needed to think most, and I suggest you do the same. The method you choose will influence how effectively you can actually use your data, since if you write everything down really well, then completely fail to retrieve info from all of it, you basically didn't do any research. In my case I wanted to be able to list the results by blog, but also by properties. In other words, I might want to see the full report for one blog, but I might want to see reports for all blogs concerning the general design.

After going through a number of applications, I went for TiddlyWiki, which is a self contained Wiki notebook. This allows me to tag my notes very well, and then list them in any way I want, so it's perfect.

So, if you are starting on some research, I strongly suggest planning the actual research methodology. In controlling, this is pretty standard, and without it, even the most simple research tasks can utterly fail, not because of the actual research, but failure to retrieve the results properly.

One reason I would do this is that I actually love applications, especially the quality open source ones. There are so many out there, among them a lot of hidden gems, so I hope I can bring something new to the table. I would not restrict myself to desktop apps, the only consistent quality of the apps Iwould review is that they should be either open source or free.

My other reason, which is way smaller, but convenient, is that this way I do not have to write 20 articles a day to compete with other blogs. There is no way I have time to spend the 3-4 hours a day I would need to research things for you guys which would add significantly to other, already wonderful blogs like Lifehacker or gHacks.

I will do some articles like I used to on gHacks most probably, but Iwould like  Hack Your Day to become more of an Open Source Repository and Blog, than a day to day tech blog.

Do you guys agree, do you welcome the change, do you like the old stuff better? Let me know, i'm interested to see what you think, as always, you can drop me a line personally via contact(@at sign)hackyourday(dotsign.)com.

While this sounds a bit harsh, it is actually very useful in a number of ways. First of all, there is pretty much chaos there, and in every case when you have to organize something. Using a phrase like this to basically wave away the troubles means that you have more freedom and flexibility, since everyone is prepared for some changes and lateness. This means that while you might need to make a compromise in your ETA, you may well do a better job.

The bigger benefit in my eyes is the state of mind this brings to people. People there are generally calm, well mannered and rarely get heart attacks. If you're often anxious or angry about situations like this, you might try and invent something like this yourself, even if you aren't religious. Stop worrying about everything, things will get done when they get done, especially if they are out of control.

Read the blog

This seems sort of trivial, but the more you visit, the more you read the blog, the more visitors I have, the more revenue and exposure I'm likely to get in turn. I think it's still marginally better if you actually visit, than if you read the feed, but don't do anything uncomfortable. Like I said above, don't refresh millions of times just to give me more pageviews, since this would distort the picture, but if you check back a bit more than usual, I won't say no

Comment on interesting articles

Comments mean activity, interaction between users, and a forming community. Once a community gets going the blog will be on its way again, but helping me form this is possibly the best thing in the long run. Feel free to communicate about anything, if there are lots of off-topic discussions going on I will install a forum for everyone.

Bookmark what you like

Whenever you see a post you really like, Digg it, Delicious it, Redd it (haha), and save it to any other bookmarking service you'd like. I'll build the buttons for all this as soon as I can for your bookmarking convenience. This gives the blog more exposure around the web, and is surely one of the best ways to get some new visitors (although ver yfew of them stay permanently). It is very important not to go overboard here. If you truly love each and every post, feel free to bookmark them, but if you bookmark things just to help me out, these services will block the blog, ultimately defeating the whole purpose of bookmarking.

Take a look at some ads

This is risky business, since Google doesn't allow me to ask you to click on these things so I'm not No really, only click on an ad if you are truly interested in the website behid it, all I ask is that you don't just skip over ad blocks, take a casual glance at least, and if you see something you've been searching for, or you might be interested in, only then click on it.

In this case really don't start clicking away, I will get $10 one day, but the next I will be banned from adsense, so I will not be happy. If you naturally come across something you like, feel free to click away!

Give me suggestions

Suggest features you would love to have on the blog, things you would like to read about more and so on, whatever comes to mind. I would be especially thankful if you could let me know about really great applications. It is safe to say that I know about the most popular ones, but there are always some rare jewels out there. Right now you can drop me a line at contact[atsign]hackyourday[dotsign]com, but later on I will build in a form, or some other easy mechanism to do this.

Donations

If you don't have a lot of time, but your full of cash, consider throwing some of it at Hack Your Day. I will spend it on upkeep and maintanance, although if I get a lot more than that, I don't want to lie, I will buy nice things for myself! You can donate to Hack Your Day easily using the following awesome link.

Guest posts

If you don't have a lot of cash, but you do have a lot of time, fear not, you can always contribute a guest post. I am by far the best writer, but I am very picky when it comes to judging other people's work for my blog. However, if you can write well and I accept your post, you can be sure that you are a better writer than me - instant gratification!

Jokes aside, I do have some serious time issues, and right now I can't pay someone to write for me, so if you'd like to "donate" some posts to Hack Your Day, drop me an email. In the long term (few months), I do plan on hiring someone, so if you can write well, later on I would love to hire you.

Invest in my company

This is by far the best option for me obviously My company, Tastique, is an inaugurated company in Hungary, and its profile is software development for the web. We also have a web design branch, which basically operates to get us the cash flow we need while our first software bundles are still in development. If you are interested, drop me an email any time and I will send you loads and loads of documents, business plans and so on.

We have a commercial plan, software you have to pay for in other words, but we will be releasing loads of open source things as well, since I believe very much in open source in general, and in the future of open source software only. Once I have enough money to sustain myself and the company, we will try and convert to open source only, at least I hope we can!

Buy web design services

Another form of investment is to buy services from the web design branch of the company. We only accept fairly large orders, above $5.000 - $6.500, but if you're an avid fan and fellow blogger in need of a simple template, let us know and we can probably accomodate you. Again, drop me an email and we can discuss everything "in person".

Anything else

That's all I have off the top of my head, but feel free to contribute in any way you feel, would be beneficial. I'm looking to make Hack Your Day a much more quality place than it is, so any help you can give is greatly appreciated!

A big thank you to everyone!

The main reason I will buy this Windows is that it feels comfortable. I was using it for 2 weeks when I had a week off and one of the games I bought just for this occasion refused to work on it, so I uninstalled it and replaced it with Vista. After my fun time was over, I started working again, and everything felt so clunky and overly complex compared to Windows 7, so I promptly switched back again.

The feature I can now not live without is the new taskbar. When I first saw it I didn't like it visually and I didn't like it functionality-wise. Then I used it for 5 minutes and I never wanted to go back. You can pin things to it, so if you frequently use Firefox it is always there, even when closed. Right clicking an icon gives you context-sensitive options, windows for the same app are grouped extremely well, and the list goes on and on, you really have to try it to appreciate it.

Another welcome addition is the Libraries feature. It is sort of the same as the user folders, but with extended use, and a different approach. Libraries are collections of folders, which can be from all over your hard drive and external drives. The thinking behind this is that while you have some similar items like Music, Videos, etc, you might also have the need to organize your research, or your resources. For example, I use quite a few resources when I code a page (jquery, css reset frameworks, php classes, etc). Some of these might be stored in different locations, but now I can gather them inside a "Resources" library, making my life that much more easier.

These two features save me so much time that these two alone make it worth it for me. Aside from these however, there are numerous good reasons to change to Windows 7. The system is more stable, it is more intuitive, it has a bunch of smaller, but similarly helpful features, and so on. One more thing I was impressed with was how Windows built in helper tools were actually usable. My internet connection wasn't working, so I clicked on troubleshoot. I have never-ever seen this work on a Windows system, but after 20 seconds, just like that, my internet was working. I tried installing my printer driver, which said that the OS is unsupported. Windows popped a message where it said that it seems the app was not installed successfully, do I want to try and install it again with changed options. I though why not, and 3 minutes later I was printing.

Overall, it seems to me that Windows 7 has finally brought the spit and polish to the OS that Ubuntu and OS X has been doing for ages. Instead of hundreds of great revolutionary (albeit non-working) things, they focused on usability, user experience and overall feel. The fact that this should have happened 4 years ago with Vista is a different matter, better late then never, Windows 7 is a good buy nonetheless.

Anyway, it seems Hack Your Day is back, but posting will not be twice a day for a while. I'll be writing casually and I'll see where it leads. I still have a lot of work to do, but I'll try and get some quality articles done, rather 1 great one a week, than 1 short one a day.

For now I'm using this template I found, which is actually pretty cool, but I'll be modifying it later, let me know if you have any comments. See you guys soon!

1 to 5 recipients = 2 to 4 revisions
5 to 10 recipients = 8 to 12 revisions
Company-wide or to Executive Committee = 30 to 50 revisions

Do you think such revision is needed? Maybe I take the wrong approach, but in 95% of my emails I don't really care in the sense that it's not my problem if people don't read my emails. I'm all for revising emails, but sending an email to 20 people and doing 20 revisions? Come on!

Generally speaking I would say you should revise your email once, to make sure you didn't make any factual mistakes. If you're sending to a wide audience, maybe you could revise once more to make sure everything is clear, but noone really cares about the odd spelling mistake, or anything like that. I mostly email my clients with project updates and such, they care about the project status, not the correct placement of commas. They are perfectly happy with a completely garbled email, as long as I do what I need to.

Obviously there are scenarios where careful wording and extreme revision is needed (job offers, investment opportunities, etc), but I think in the day to day email business there is no need to be so meticulous. Yes, you will make some mistakes, but you won't spend all day revising your simple email.