Needmore Notes

Can Just Anyone Be Apple?

2009-10-14T20:16:00Z

I’m always going on about how great Apple’s stuff is. Their products are top-notch. And there’s more than one reason why my other products don’t hold up to their standards.

Apple makes the iPod earbuds out of a special material that is actually resistant to getting tangled when you put it in your pocket. The power cord snaps in place magnetically, so when someone eventually trips over the cable, it doesn’t hurt your computer or the cable at all. Discs eject by themselves, or with a key on the keyboard, not some clumsy button and pop-out holder. When you put your MacBook to sleep, the power light dims, and then glows, slowly, on and off. It doesn’t blink, but rather it fades from lit to almost off, and back again. When the room grows dark, my keyboard lights up and my display gets dark so it doesn’t strain my eyes. The list goes on and on.

Tonight, as I was untangling some random power cord with a wall wart type plug, I thought about why technologies as cool as the special cable types that Apple makes haven’t trickled down to other products. Products not made by Apple.

It’s probably for more than one reason. The build quality of the device that came with this power supply isn’t anything special, actually. It’s not something Apple would have put out to begin with. And the wall wart plug is standard enough that I’m sure we have another one laying around that would work just as well. They throw it in, and build their products to work with a generic interface. Apple essentially makes their own power supplies to some degree so they don’t have to ship the typical shit that everyone else does. That’s why theirs look so striking. They’re white. Everything else is black.

I would put it down to two reasons. The obvious one is that cheap products are going to be cheaply made - you get what you pay for. Sure, this is true. But the other reason is that Apple makes a point of patenting these inventions. They have literally hundreds of patents, as many corporations do. Steve Jobs claimed that Apple had over 200 patents just for the development of the iPhone! While I’m not sure if it’s true or not, it does make it intimidating to try to build something similar, for whatever reason.

So I guess I’ll just have to deal with my tangled cords for now.

Lake Mead Vacation

2009-10-07T14:00:00Z

Howdy! We are heading out to Lake Mead today on our (sort of) annual Las Vegas visit. We’ll be out of the studio Wedensday, October 7th through Monday, October 12th. Here are a few shots from our Mead vacation last year (the second image sadly shows the waterline dwindling, currently down 43% from capacity). Although we typically are drawn to grey skies, oceans, and evergreens, there is nothing like sitting on a deep blue lake and looking out over the dessert.

Have a lovely week!

Google Chrome Frame is Good News

2009-09-24T14:38:01Z

This week, Google released the first public version of Google Chrome Frame. This is “an early-stage open source plug-in that seamlessly brings Google Chrome’s open web technologies and speedy JavaScript engine to Internet Explorer.” In ordinary-speak, it lets crappy old versions of Internet Explorer - which many folks still use for one reason or another - work nearly as well as modern browsers like Apple’s Safari and Google Chrome. This is very exciting indeed.

It means that it might be possible, in the near future, for us to design all of our sites to require this, and not have to worry about the many, many problems with old versions of IE. We will be able to spend more time doing design, and less time worrying about technical issues.

Thank you, Google.

Meet Your Host

2009-09-17T15:31:00Z

Yesterday, I was contacted by a local company that provides environmentally-friendly web hosting. They want us to consider referring our clients to them. They look like a great business, and while most of our hosting is already “green,” I’m always interested in learning more about local businesses.

But let’s take a step back, and consider what it means for Needmore to recommend a host to our clients.

(That’s your ideal host, there.)

For one thing, speed matters. The difference between a website that loads instantly (like google.com) and a page that takes just one second to load has a huge psychological impact on how visitors perceive your site and your brand. It’s not difficult to imagine that a slow site might be seen as less attractive than a fast one.

For another thing, software support makes a huge difference. Very few web hosts are actually capable of supporting modern software like the Magento e-commerce system, much less with the level of speed and performance we require. Few list whether or not they meet its requirements at all, in which case it might just be a lot of work to even figure out if it’s possible.

We spend a great deal of time evaluating different hosting companies. We’re well aware of the strengths and weaknesses of numerous such companies, and we constantly adjust our expectations accordingly. One bad referral can really sour a relationship with a client. So we take great pains to make the best recommendations we’re able to.

Hosting is so important, in fact, that we have started offering our own plans for some of our projects, exclusively to our clients, that we know will work best. Design is our first love, not web hosting, but we’re willing to do it because it’s just that important.

So for another hosting company to contact us out of the blue is very interesting. They seem like a great company, but they’ve got a lot to prove. The only way that we could recommend them to our clients is if we were to try them out first. So if I were them, and I were reaching out to designers trying to get their business, I would offer something for free. Like hosting.

I would simple offer to set the designer up with my best hosting plan for a reasonable amount of time (why not just a year?) to evaluate it. In this case, a hosting company could look at this as a loss of $250, since that’s what they could potentially mean for them in terms of income. But we all know it’s not that simple.

Let’s say we decide we like a hosting company, and start recommending clients to them. Let’s further assume that we refer just one client per month, for three years, and the average client stays with them for three years. If I’m doing my math right, that’s $27,000. All this potential, potentially costing them next to nothing, for giving out a free sample.

Andaluz Waterbirth

2009-09-09T13:00:00Z

We’ve just collaborated with Andaluz Waterbirth Center here in Portland to redesign their website. The website focuses on stunning photography taken at the center, is based on designs by owners Jennifer and Fernando (with a touch of Needmore fit’n’finish), and is easily updatable. We were excited about the opportunity to work with Andaluz as we’ve spent much time in their Portland center; our daughter Zoë was born at Andaluz in April of this year.

Anson Mills Newsletter

2009-09-08T18:20:00Z

We’ve just worked with the folks at Anson Mills to produce their Late Summer Newsletter. During the process, we were struck by the sheer amount of love put into each and every one of their newsletters. For this production, not only did Anson Mills launch two new products, but owner Kay perfected a number of new recipes. We’re so curious about Grits Praline Ice Cream and our mouths are watering over their Neapolitan Style Pizza. You’ve got to give these delights a try.

Project: Gone Vegan

2009-09-08T14:28:00Z

Over the passage of time, you learn a lot from running a project. While we’ve run a business for six or so years now, no single project has probably been as much of a learning experience as Gone Raw was. Maybe others, but certainly no “internal” project. Community sites are a lot of work.

When Gone Raw was first created, it was a project to learn more about the Ruby on Rails framework, specifically. It seemed like the best tool for the job, so I wrote it by myself, for the most part. It was very interesting as an experience, and I was extremely proud when it took off, but almost immediately after that we started having some problems.

It frankly didn’t run that well. I probably wrote some pretty sloppy code, but regardless of the reasons, it was hard to keep the site up. At first, we ran it on a “free” hosting plan we have which is actually quite good, but it couldn’t handle it. So we moved to Slicehost, but that finally couldn’t handle it either. And sadly, the site wasn’t that popular! Certainly not deserving of so many issues. Something had to be done.

That “something” was moving the site into Drupal. Drupal is a web framework as well, but one that’s much more complete. You could certainly build a site without writing any code in Drupal, but there is a lot of work involved - particularly if you have a bunch of legacy data you have to get from one system into another, completely different, system. That can be a problem, and I’m not very skilled at it so we subcontracted another party to do it. Unfortunately, since I was not very knowledgeable about Drupal at that time, I may have provided poor guidance, or else I did not fully understand the criteria for success. Long story short, the data didn’t come across very smoothly. We had issues.

This was just over a year ago, and the site has mostly recovered. People have forgiven me for the awkwardness of that transition, and I have certainly learned a lot from my decisions about it. For a while, I refused to do any projects at all in Drupal, having that and several other fairly poor experiences with it. I’d been burned, and decided to stick to WordPress for a while.

Going to WordPress was also a blessing. I started to develop some of our sites using frameworks like Thematic, and I was extremely happy to have so much of my work done for me. To take a small example, in many “frameworks” for WordPress, you as a web designer are provided with a ton of “body classes.” This lets you know exactly what page someone is looking at, and change the look and feel of any item on any page, with extreme precision. Once you get used to having so many helpful body classes on your pages, you become frustrated with a system (like Drupal, by default) which gives you only a few.

But as we evaluated and decided on an approach for Gone Vegan, we realized that Drupal really was the best platform for the site. Nothing else that we were familiar with came close. And since it has such a thriving community, I was able to track down several modules I’d never encountered before, that added the functionality to Drupal that I needed.

All was right in the world.

Gone Vegan was a project that took us one week. Now, that doesn’t mean that we’re done; quite the contrary. A website like this requires ongoing work, no doubt about it. But having worked on Gone Raw for three years, we know what we’re getting into. And of course, we know how to avoid the mistakes that waste time, this time around. And we’re feeling good about it. It’s nice to at least walk into a project with that good feeling. Let’s hope it sticks.

At the very least, making a vegan recipe sharing site has gotten us to eat healthier. Needless to say, having read this far we’d love you to actually visit the site, and let us know what you think. We are, of course, always looking to improve.

Birdie’s Big Girl Shoes

2009-09-04T20:54:00Z

Congratulations to Sujean on the release of her first children’s book, Birdie’s Big Girl Shoes. We cannot wait to read this to our little one.

Gone Raw Today

2009-09-03T15:29:00Z

Remember when we started Gone Raw? It seem like just yesterday that we were lamenting the lack of resources for raw, vegan recipes. Well, our little website has been steadily growing over the last couple years with over 1,500 users and over 4,000 recipes. And, folks appear to be having a good time on the site, too.

Really awesome job with this site. Thank you. I was really surprised to find such a useful, well-designed site for raw vegan recipes, of all niches. This is, honestly, the first recipe site I’ve ever *enjoyed using*. Looks like there’s a great community here as well. (source)

We’d love to have you stop by and try a recipe or two, check us out on Twitter, or subscribe to our recipe RSS.

My QuickTime X is Broken!

2009-09-01T14:49:00Z

QuickTime is awesome. It’s been an integral part of the Mac experience for a long time. It would be most regrettable if something were to happen to my favorite media player.

I’ve always been a fan of QuickTime for no other reason than I really like the interface. It’s simple, it’s essentially the ultimate video player. In its latest incarnation, in Snow Leopard, every bit of window disappears when your mouse is gone. The navigation, the title bar, everything. It’s kind of slick, and once you start using it, it makes a lot of sense. It was one of those essential Mac pieces of equipment, so much so that you kind of took it for granted.

For as long as I can remember, there has been an option—disabled by default—to set the software to automatically play any media file that it opened. In the preferences, you could even tell it how to handle conflicts in this scenario. For instance, if you opened five MP3 files at once, you could tell it to play them all at the same time, or you could tell it to play only the most recently opened file. It was simple, but flexible, and I had no other cause for complaint other than the paucity of media files that it supported.

This has all changed with QuickTime X in Snow Leopard.

“Seriously, Apple, no autoplay in QuickTime X? I double-click on a media file… do you not think I mean for it to play?!?”

QuickTime X not only has no way to change that setting… it doesn’t have preferences! That’s right, in an ultimate form of pure Apple-ness, they’ve taken out the preferences completely. My trusty command-comma produces nothing at all. But this makes no sense to me at all. I don’t honestly know why the default would be otherwise. Doesn’t everyone who double-clicks on a media file want to watch and/or listen to it? Am I missing something here?

Maybe it’s a bad time that Apple’s QuickTime section of their website still links to - and offers for $29 - the old QuickTime 7 Pro. Maybe they know something we don’t. Maybe Apple fully realizes that the new QuickTime is great, but not ready for prime time yet. Heck, maybe they plan to fix the icon. It looks weird to me.

Betrayed by Basecamp

2009-08-28T16:23:00Z

We’ve been customers of 37signals - users of their fine Basecamp project management system - for almost four years, which is almost as long as it’s been around. One thing I’ve always liked about Basecamp, and a big part of why I’ve been willing to pay fifty bucks a month for so long now, is the fact that they don’t market to my clients. I like using an unbranded URL, in my case needmore.clientsection.com. And I like the fact that nowhere on the screen is a pitch for their product. This is very important to me, because I don’t want my clients to be distracted by anything while getting a project done.

Unfortunately, this all changed out of the blue a few days ago. With no notice, 37signals announced that they were changing their policy, and that over time all plans would use the same branded URL, and as far as I could tell, they were going to advertise their product in my page footer. In fact, until this change, there was a reassuring message in the footer, beside the link to their product, informing me that this footer would not be shown to my clients. That message is now gone.

Here is some of the reasoning behind this change, according to 37signals.

Initially we thought it would be important to hide the Basecamp brand name because, at the time, we (37signals) were still primarily a web design company. Basecamp was just a side project back then. We worried that competing web design firms would hesitate to use our Basecamp product if they thought their clients could easily trace Basecamp back to 37signals — a company that also designed web sites.

Would these web design companies think we’d use Basecamp as a conduit to pitch their clients on our own web design services? We’d never do that, and never did, but we wanted to do everything we could to assure them we weren’t interested in selling their clients on competing web development services. Hiding the “Basecamp” brand name and basecamphq.com domain name was the best way we could think of to shield 37signals from their clients.

They also sneak in a confession of what I had suspected right away:

...the brand name “Basecamp” will appear in a few places it didn’t before. A small Basecamp logo will also be visible to all users at the bottom of the screen.

While I appreciate an explanation, I respectfully disagree. In fact, it had never occurred to me that 37signals would try to steal our clients, not at all. Rather, I appreciated that since I was willing to pay for this service, they were willing to forego advertising to my clients in any way at all. It’s not about their design services, it’s about the impression that our customers were using software that was running on our server (though it wasn’t), provided by and supported by us (which it was). If one of our clients has a problem with Basecamp, they don’t go to 37signals, they come to us.

Over the years, we’ve spent a hell of a lot of time explaining why they couldn’t respond by email to a message, for example, while 37signals insisted that this wasn’t a problem. It was, it was a huge problem (since remedied, after years of pestering by their users), but 37signals didn’t know how bad the situation was because they don’t support the product, as far as our clients are concerned.

That is why we resent this change in policy. Basecamp is the type of system that you invest lots of time and effort in, over time. It runs on someone else’s servers, so you trust them to behave in a reasonable manner, and hopefully keep the general direction and policy of the service intact. This strikes me as a fairly big change in that direction and policy. I understand that things change, but not only were customers provided no advance notice, but none of their blogs nor help forums mention the change. It is only a notice that was shown to me when I logged in one day, and now it’s gone. While writing this post, I had difficulty even finding their original information to reference. I think this betrays the fact that they realize this isn’t a very cool thing to do, and they feel a bit guilty.

If 37signals really did care what their users thought about this change, they would have posted the message on their blog, or on their forum. They would invite discussion, rather than simply provide an email address for comments. They might have suggested the change beforehand, and asked for feedback from their loyal customers. They did none of these things, and I suspect it’s because they know people are going to be unhappy about it.

This is no way to treat your customers.

Bunnykins

2009-08-27T18:58:01Z

A few years ago, we started working with Hoyle and Company as our accountants. We came to them after some rather frustrating experiences and have been ever so impressed with their work. So much so that we consistently tell other business folks about them. We’ve recommended them enough that we joke about wallpapering our office with their delightful thank-you cards (they send one each time someone we recommend gets in touch with them). Today, out of the blue, we received a gorgeously wrapped package with these cute as a button silver baby spoons from our accountants.

Thanks, Lynn and Shannon. You two are the best!

Google Reader’s Quiet Revolution

2009-08-26T16:23:02Z

I’ve been using RSS news readers for quite a long time. And I’ve probably tried at least a dozen different pieces of software for this task. And like many folks these days, I eventually settled on Google Reader.

I did not, at first, think that I would like Reader. It’s not-very-pretty, in the typical Google fashion, and until you learn some keyboard shortcuts it can be a bit clunky. Given the choice between a desktop app and a web-based app, I’ll often prefer the native Mac OS X desktop app because it’s typically faster, better designed, and integrates well with the rest of my setup. But Reader has solved virtually all of those problems for me. And while I haven’t seen any numbers, it seems to me that it went from obscurity to market dominance with almost no fanfare at all.

There are many features in Reader that would be difficult or impossible with a desktop application. I can share articles with Kandace or other friends, find out what she recommends that I read, and of course it doesn’t matter what computer I’m at - everything stays in sync automatically. And I really like their Featured Reading Lists, which let you see what other prominent writers and thinkers are reading, and subscribe to them yourself.

Finally, it has a great iPhone interface. You can do pretty much everything with your iPhone, and they keep it simple and well-designed, not to mention that it stays in sync. I personally also use an iPhone app called Newsstand, which integrates perfectly with Reader and adds its own twist to the interface, but that’s just me. I’m a sucker for those cute iPhone apps.

If you read a lot on the web, I recommend giving Google Reader a try, if you haven’t already.

Google Ranking Surprise

2009-08-24T15:41:02Z

Improving the search engine raking for the Needmore website has long been on my to-do list. But when you’re keeping quite busy with projects, it tends to fall by the wayside. It’s hard to set aside time for something that doesn’t actually seem necessary, and that’s probably a good thing.

Last week, Google sent us a $100 coupon for AdWords. I’ve been meaning to run a campaign, so I decided to give it a try, putting in some keywords I thought would bring interested folks to Needmore. My first choices were “modern websites” and “modern web design,” so I added those keywords first and started doing some searches to see what else might be helpful.

The only trouble is that we already show up on the first page of search results for both of those terms. This came as quite a surprise to me because I had not yet taken any time to worry about our search engine raking. I know Kandace has done a bit of work on that in the past, but neither of us has looked into it recently.

So I went ahead and set up the campaign. But it doesn’t appear that it’s going to do us any good, since we’re already showing up for free in the places we really want to.

The lesson? Make sure your content is interesting, topical, and up to date, and you won’t have to worry too much about SEO.

Media Prison

2009-08-21T15:10:00Z

After every holiday or family gathering, I become a bit reflective about the digital lives we’re leading. Very often, half of the folks at these gathering have photo or video cameras, and are going to great pains to get picture after picture. And despite promises to the contrary, I usually never see those photos again. In fact, I’ve become concerned about what happens to them at all.

Most people run Windows, and I’m not sure but I would imagine that most people use whatever software comes with Windows to handle their pictures and movies. They might also use whatever happened to come with a recent camera purchase, if they installed software off the CD. And therefore each person may have a slightly different configuration. But since most people are what I would call “novice” with their computers, when their computer inevitably fails, I would imagine that the chances are very good that they’ve lost all of their media. I consider the state of affairs on Windows to almost be a sort of “media prison,” and I don’t think most folks have much of a grasp on the situation.

It’s a little easier on a Mac, if only because there’s really only one commonly used application for managing your pictures: iPhoto. The same is true for your videos, with iMovie. The format is standard, and with iPhoto it appears as a single folder on your computer. This is so convenient it’s hard to understate, because I can move a pocket-sized hard drive from computer to computer, and keep everything with me. I can sit at any Mac in the world, and open my iPhoto library, complete with information like photo locations and which faces belong to which person. That also makes it a snap to back up.

Some people seem inclined to keep every photo they’ve ever taken on their memory card, but this can’t end much better. I just recently had a memory card fail on me, and lost a day’s worth of video. Very disappointing, but it could have been a lot worse. Although storage has gotten pretty good, I think it’s still safe to say that’s not a good way to keep your pictures.

For me, a bigger fear is just losing the media I have right now. Keeping my iPhoto library on a single hard drive is not a safe bet. You need to think about keeping a backup in at least one place, which I do. But I’m still a bit paranoid because both the hard drive and the backup are often in the same physical location, which is usually my house. So if there was a fire or even vandalism, I could well lose it all. This isn’t likely to happen to a box of old photos, which may or may not survive a fire, but are highly unlikely to be stolen.

So where does this leave me? With the same advice I give everyone: keep backups. No matter who you are, you should keep at least one full backup of your computer. I can’t recommend software for Windows because I don’t use it, but for my Mac I’ve been extremely happy with SuperDuper. There are plenty of good online solutions, though at the moment we’ve settled on DropBox because it not only backs up, but keeps several computers in sync.

Whatever method you choose, follow it well. It will save you one day, and believe me, your media is worth it.