video games aren’t my thing
as I’ve said in the past, but Braid looks like a pretty intelligent title, with a bit of a metaphysical bent. If I were any good at video games, this is the type of title I would buy.
Braid trailer from David Hellman on Vimeo.
auto tuning the homepage
Auto Tuning from Casey Donahue on Vimeo.
we three links
Stereogum’s “Decomposed,” featuring great bands performing in a stripped-down, all acoustic environment. Including The Soft Pack (above).
Mozilla’s Prism liberates web apps from the browser in much the same way Fluid does. But Prism uses Firefox and Fluid uses Safari.
SugarSync lets you share files across computers and devices, but not all files to all devices. Because, you know, not all files are created equal.
project management three ways
Over the weekend I had a brief Twitter/email correspondence with another non-profit professional regarding project management software. The conversation reminded me that I’ve been wanting to get some thoughts down on the three online project management tools I’ve used. So here they are:
The Baseline
Basecamp (37signals)
Price: $24-$149/month
Basecamp is the online project management software that seems to set the standard — almost everyone I know has used it at one point in their career and everyone has an opinion on it. For better or worse, it’s the software against which all others are judged.
Why it’s good: Basecamp is infinitely flexible and has a space to record everything — from simple, undated to-do lists, to milestones, document and image versioning, and basic time tracking.
If you’re working with multiple clients or large groups of projects, Basecamp is a winner — it allows you to set up multiple “Companies” (which can be clients or large groups of projects) and provide users tailored access to the system based on those companies.
With the companies feature, you essentially have four layers of information:
- client (or project group)
- project
- milestone
- to-do list
It also includes file sharing and versioning, message boards, time tracking and whiteboards — which allow for group-editable documents and notes.
Basecamp uses easy-to-grasp linear organization and an Ajax interface that most web-savvy users can grasp intuitively.
Also, Basecamp is brought to you by the same folks who bring you Ruby on Rails, so it’s open source with a robust community of developers building all sorts of extras and add-ons for its users.
Why it’s bad: Basecamp can be seriously complex and overwhelming — especially if users have access to projects and milestones they aren’t responsible for. This can be especially burdensome for administrators who are essentially forced to view all projects and all milestones.
If Basecamp isn’t managed properly, users can quickly become overwhelmed and abandon the system. To have a truly successful implementation, you need to have staff project managing out of Basecamp as part of their regular roles and responsibilities.
Also, if you think you’re going to need heavy customer service with Basecamp, it isn’t for you. Customer services simply doesn’t exist. If you have an issue, you’re dependent on the user community in the forums.
Tip for users: Turn off email notifications under the main settings window. When email notifications are on, the default is to send notifications whenever a new milestone is assigned. This can be burdensome — especially when you’re entering a slate of projects at the beginning of implementation.
The Price Leader
Zoho Projects
Price: $12-$80/month.
Zoho aims to be the cloud king. the company has documents, email, spreadsheets, CRM, organizer, whatever. If it’s software and can be hosted in the cloud, they have it. With this volume comes price competitiveness and Zoho Projects has Basecamp beat in this department.
Why it’s good: I served on a small committee that recommended Zoho over Basecamp as a new project management solution across a nationwide marketing department with several regional teams who, in turn, served several states.
Zoho got the nod for two reasons:
- Their monster time tracking abilities.
- Their excellent customer service.
Zoho can track time against task lists and even gives users a start, stop clock next to each task so they can track time right from the start page using a stop-watch-like interface. If you work freelance, or need to keep close track of time for accounting purposes, this is a killer function that may tip the scales in Zoho’s favor.
Zoho also includes some functionality that will be familiar to Microsoft Project users, namely gantt charts and dependency view. Basecamp doesn’t have either of these.
Zoho has serious customer service. When we implemented Zoho Projects following the recommendation, Zoho staff gave an online tutorial to all of our users (completely gratis), fielded programming requests for future upgrades and kept in contact with our core users to field additional questions and concerns.
The real coup: A month ago I moved to a smaller department where Basecamp was the norm. I twittered that I was transitioning from Zoho back to Basecamp and received a DM from Zoho staff politely asking if they could field any questions or get me back. Good stuff all around.
Why it’s bad: My primary complaint with Zoho is that it does not offer the levels of information that Basecamp does. Rather than starting at a company or client level, Zoho starts with projects, then moves to milestones, then dated task lists.
This means that if you work with multiple clients (or large groups of projects) you have to organize them as projects, then organize your actual projects as milestones, and milestones as tasks in a task list. This can cause some serious confusion.
Also — and this is somewhat a matter of semantics — I found the user interface and overall design of Zoho to be somewhat heavy, old fashioned and Microsoft-like. I always felt like I was working in SharePoint, which made me not want to use the system.
Finally, like Basecamp, Zoho can be extremely complex — even more complex than Basecamp if you’re using the gantt charts and dependency view. If you’re implementing this, use a project manager.
User tip: When using the time tacking stop watches, make sure you turn them off before closing out of Zoho. Otherwise they run forever, and it appears as though you’ve been working for 24, 36, 48 hours straight. Your clients won’t believe you.
The Gorgeous Newcomer
Action Method
Price: $12/month ($99/year)
Designed by the creative professionals at Behance for creative professionals, Action Method bills itself as a methodology, not just project management software. It’s based on the GTD-ish premise of action steps, which are posted into projects on color-coded blocks like sticky notes. By completing small actions, you complete complex projects.
Why it’s good: Action Method is gorgeous as hell. Like all things that are beautifully designed it has an inherent value that makes you want to use it. The first time I sat down to Action Method I just wanted to play in it like a Zen puzzle.
This is a good quality, because at first blush Action Method is a pretty sharp departure from the linear, project, milestone, task structure shared by Basecamp and Zoho. Action steps (which serve as your tasks) default to two rows that are easily scanned and lend themselves to being completed “out of order.” Although you can switch to a more linear, date-dependent layout in project view.
Also, it’s not readily apparent that projects can be grouped into clients or project groups, but the project does allow the creation of groups and a drag and drop function makes organizing easy.
Action Method is designed specifically for users who want something more than just a piece of project management software — it’s an organizing philosophy, complete with it’s own stationary, and should be treated as such. If you’re in to this sort of thing (and there is a part of me that is) and appreciate excellent design you will love Action Method.
In addition to the mechanics of project management, the system has two functions — references and backburners — that creative professionals will really like. References is essentially a filesharing space for notes, files, or links, and backburners is where you can store all those brilliant ideas you want to do in a project, but aren’t essential right now.
If I were a freelancer, or working with two or three people that I really trusted to use the system, I would implement Action Method in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, that’s not the case in my current group.
Why it’s bad: If all you want is a place to organize your projects and you don’t want all that philosophy mumbo-jumbo, you won’t like Action Method.
In all seriousness, their are two reasons why a group I was working with recently moved away from Action Method pretty quickly:
- The per-user pricing plan.
- Lack of a shared platform.
Action Method charges per user, so costs can add up and quickly become prohibitive (even at only $12/month). Even with only five users, you’re well above a Basecamp plan that allows for unlimited users.
Also, the system, as part of its philosophy, is tied to the individual user, rather than to the group. As the developers say in their FAQs:
We’ve seen a LOT of project management systems in our research with an “all-knowing big brother” view – and we’ve learned that, in such systems, employees don’t use them – and when they do, they are not honest nor productive. …
In our research we found that people are more likely to stay action-oriented when they can blend the actions of their personal life with their professional life. Also, we found that people are very unlikely to really keep all of their action steps for work in an area that is visible to the rest of the team. Instead, they use post-it notes and private to-do lists for most of their projects and only compose certain action steps that others can see.
I can see their point, but I don’t necessarily agree with it and my experience with the system was basically the opposite. I shared action steps with others working on projects and they simply disappeared into the ether. I had no idea how other users were filing the action steps, what their Action Method page looked like, or how they were organizing their projects. In reality, there was no accountability.
Action Method depends on small tight-knit groups who all buy in to the system and are all willing to be accountable to the system. In my experience that wasn’t practical. I was never able to point to an action step and say, “Dude, this is overdue.”
User tip: Color-code your action steps based on priority or due date. When you only have an hour or two to do some real work, you can exclude action steps that are not a priority and really focus.
Give Us This Day, Our Daily Links
Virb: High-design social network (photos, video, music)
SoulPancake: Making spirituality, creativity and philosophy cool again.
Municipal Archive: An inspiration in short fiction.
Tree: Elegant and gracious outline software for Mac 10.5 from Japan.
Heather Powazek Champ: Glorious and quiet photos in a simple WordPress theme.
Great Apps, “Meh” Apps
I’ve had my iPhone for almost two months now and — as the incessant commercials will tell you — one of the great things about this particular mobile device is the ability to download applications (”apps” to those in the know) that allow users to do things other than make phone calls.
After trying out 52 of these so-called “apps” I have some thoughts on which ones I quite enjoy and others that I enjoy less than I initially thought I would when I downloaded them.
Here are those thoughts:
Great apps
Lose it! (free) — By my estimation, I’m about 20 pounds overweight, so I need to go on a diet. This app had me input my weight and asked me how much I wanted to lose. Then it told me how many calories I can eat in a day and still lose weight. It then encouraged me to exercise and noted that if I exercise more and stay under my daily calorie count, I will lose weight faster.
As I eat food, I input what I consume into the application and it tells me when to stop eating.
fring (free) — The iPhone sucks for not having an instant message application that can run in the background (my wife’s six-year-old blackberry can do this), but the fring app is the next best thing — especially if you have multiple IM accounts, and especially if you want to make free VOIP calls to your brother in Paris and haze him about Newcastle’s suckiness.
AP Mobile News Network (free) — Yes, I actually can read Washington Post and New York Times stories on 320 X 480 pixels, but the AP app serves up shorter, more timely content.
Public Radio Tuner (free) — A real bummer about using public transportation is not being able to listen to my precious NPR. With this app that problem is solved. I can listen to the stream of my local station (WAMU) or almost any station from across the country. Here I am Michele Norris.
Shazam (free) — This is like the original iPhone app — or at least the one I remember seeing advertised first. It’s the one you hold up to a speaker and it tells you what the song is. While this is a great party trick, I find it’s most helpful when listening to XM Radio in the car. If there’s a song or artist I want to remember I just tag it in Shazam, then I can grab it off eMuisic later.
Sports Tap (free) — Here’s what you need to know about this: Fulham beats Swansea 2-1 to move on to the quarterfinals of the FA Cup off of goals by Clint Dempsey and Bobby Zamora. The next match is a Premiership tie against Arsenal.
Polarize (free) — This makes cool iPhone photos cooler by giving them a Polaroid look. You can even write a caption in the white space at the bottom. Check out the Polarize Flickr group for some cool examples.
Poker Trainer ($0.99) — I play in a $10 buy-in poker tournament once a month, so clearly I’m a super high-roller. What I like about Poker Trainer is that it’s not about beating weird avatars. Instead you play Texas Hold’em and “bet” on how likely you are to win the hand. Since Hold’em is about patience, this app reminds you which hands you should throw away.
Lightsaber Unleashed (free) — If you have a three-year-old who likes to be chased around the house while sword fighting, this is a must-have. Even is the three-year-old in question has no idea what the hell a lightsaber is.
Meh apps
Twitterrific (free, or $10 for the non-ad version) — This app used to be totally hot, but it’s not so much anymore. A lot of people are talking up Tweetie, and the latest version of that app does seem pretty hot — what with its Instapaper integration, landscape keyboard and stupid farting.
But the real reason Twitterrific is on the meh list is the annoying way it opens at the last tweet I read when I closed the application, instead of at the top of the list. This means I have to scroll like mad to see what people are up to now. It’s annoying. That said, I don’t know if I’m into spending $3 on an iPhone app.
iBlogger ($0.99) — Again, nothing wrong with this guy. It’s actually a pretty effective little application. The problem: who the fuck wants to blog on an iPhone?
Last.FM/Pandora (free/free) — It’s probably blasphemous for me to say this, but these are essentially the same apps for two different services. For both, the UI is gorgeous and when I have used them they’ve worked great. Unfortunately, because they can’t run in the background I use them very rarely. Also, I don’t have iPod speakers that are compatible with the iPhone, so I can only listen to stored music on these speakers. In short, the actual functionality of the iPhone doesn’t match up with the service these apps provide.
Any Game (prices may very) — When I got my iPhone I said to myself, “maybe I’ll get really into games and just amp up the geek factor.” Then I downloaded a bunch of games, played them a few times and realized I sucked at every one of them. I still have some of them on my phone, but I never play them. That said, if you ever want to play Pac Man, come on over and I’ll toss you my iPhone.
Posting, Poking and Writing on Walls…
… talk, type, tag, text and twitter about a lot of stuff — the greater the volume, the better.
A bit of what I’ve been up to this week:
Blog post on the near futility of making professional sports “green.”
Blog post on Google Earth 5.0.
Seven enviro. articles liked, tagged and commented on in StumbleUpon.
Nine tech and blogging articles shared and commented on in Google Reader.
Three politics and culture notes created in Tumblr.
Started writing a Google Knol on using online social networks to market web content. (It’s not published yet.)
30 new followers and countless tweets.
Three videos saved and three subscriptions marked in YouTube.
Nine songs loved on Last.fm
Of course you can see it all here or here. (Damn. The times are all fucked up on the LifeStream. Well, that means good night.)
Quick note: I am aware that this is not really a great volume.
Great Causes, Great Videos
I’ve been researching ideas for a public education campaign and looking at some great web videos that help charities spread the word with compelling visuals and high-level messaging.
Here are a few of the better ones I’ve found:
3:00 Spot (Charity: Water)
This is a slightly edited version of a video on the organization’s main site. it feature’s Beck’s “Time Bomb” and was directed by Simon Willows. It’s very compelling stuff — great graphics, amazing footage, simple to grasp facts and figures and, of course, amazing music.
Charity: Water also has a great PSA with Jennifer Connelly here:
What I love about this one is the repeated symbol of the yellow jugs and the simple idea: What if your child had to drink this water? Good stuff.
Signs of Hope and Change (Obama for America)
I remember when this came out thinking, “Why aren’t his television commercials like this?” It’s got everything: community, grassroots America, a home-made feel (even though it’s super slickly produced) and lump-in-your-throat inspiration.
Backwards Hamburger (Free Range Studios)
This was made as an online promo for the film Fast Food Nation. I dig the comic book animation of this one and the facts are cleverly placed, easily digested and surprising. Lots of stuff here about the shitty treatment of workers — not just animal rights.
Free Range is also responsible for the classic “Grocery Store Wars:”
Indeed, there is a disturbance on the farm.
Polar Bears (Friends of the Earth)
Part of FOE’s 2008 one-minute film competition, the film us humorous and striking for its simple message. I also really like the idea of one-minute for an online video — it seems to be the right length.
Climate Message in a Bottle – Final Version (Greenpeace)
This one is pretty light on facts and the education component, but I like the homespun quality. Plus, they came up with a good gimmick that made it easy for others to participate in the project. The footage from the 2007 UN Climate Change Conference makes it particularly dramatic.
Mister Trash Can (Good Magazine)
A weird Sesame Street-esque take on trash. But not just the trash you throw out — all the trash of the world. What we all throw out.
Too Many Bookmarks
Or to be precise, too many ways to bookmark and share content.
I’ve been using online social networking sites with varying degrees of frequency now for well over two years — enough that I’ve been asked to put together a primer on the sites I use for some colleagues. Through this process I’ve come to the realization that there is very little rhyme, or reason to why I use the social sites I use — or why I use them at all.
Currently, I try a new site because it’s been recommended to me by a friend, I read about it on a tech/marketing site or it’s proven to have the potential to drive traffic to the website that pays my bills. I use these sites for a while and either they stick — I keep using them — or my account goes dormant.
The logical conclusion for this is that I stop using a site because it’s no longer useful. However, I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. Rather, I think none of the sites have been terribly useful because I’m trying to make them do too much — capture all my online life regardless of subject matter or what I plan on using that captured content for.
For instance, my Google Reader Shared Items page is a hodgepodge of links reflecting my online interests regardless of what I want to do with that link — blog about it, share it, store it for reference — or what the subject matter is — the environment, tech, marketing, soccer, music, etc. Because this content isn’t categorized, it’s not really useful — even with Google’s excellent search tool.
This is further complicated by the fact that I often use Delicious and, to a lesser extent, StumbleUpon and Twitter for similar functions. (My StumbleUpon use has dropped significantly in the last year and I use Twitter for more than just link sharing.)
To address this problem, I’ve hit upon the idea of trying to use each of these services for a unique purpose. So here’s an attempt to make sense of my social network sites and categorize links in a way that is actually useful:
Google Reader Shared Items
Current activity: Active.
Link categories: Tech, web culture, marketing, blogging.
Purpose of link: Reference, action item (ie. new plug-in for blog or writing tip to implement, possible aquariumdrinker.com topics.
StumbleUpon
Current activity: Dormant.
Link categories: General environment, green tech, alternative energy
Purpose of link: Reference, blog topics for employer, marketing/SEO for employer.
Tumblr
Current activity: Dormant.
Link categories: Culture & music, sports, creative, politics
Purpose of link: Short blog entries, share and comment across the web, first draft of aquariumdrinker.com posts.
Twitter
Current activity: Very active
Link categories: Any and all
Purpose of link: Share and comment across the web.
Delicious
Current activity: Active
Link Category: Any and all
Purpose of link: Linked to Twitter, so provides a searchable, tagged database of all Twitter links for future reference.
Your Own Private Twitterverse
Last week Mashable pointed to Shout’em, which it calls a “customized Twitter-like microblogging network.” I can see other applications for it as well. Scheduled online chat, quick-answer customer service, and a new, actually usable, way to do discussion boards all come to mind. Is it less convenient to do these functions in 149 characters? Perhaps. But the Twitter format is one that web users are getting accustomed to, so I imagine the barrier of entry would not be too high. This appears to be a quick and easy way to add community to a site — as long as you foster it and moderate it of course.
Technorati Tags: blog, Blogging, community, customer service, discussion boards, mashable, microblogging, shoutem, social marketing, social networking sites, social networks, twitter, web 2.0