Looping and good taste = beautiful music
Wednesday, September 7th, 2011
This girl’s awesome, came across this on teh’ interwebs, it needs sharing:
Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Simple, free shopping with OpenCart
Saturday, February 12th, 2011
Choosing an online shopping solution is often a tricky thing. There are literally thousands of carts, stores, plugins and systems for e-commerce.
There are plenty of high-end systems ideal for large-scale e-commerce, but if you’re just starting, your budget is often limited or sometimes non-existent.
ZenCart and it's somewhat clunky admin interface
Cheap or Open Source systems have a reputation (not always unfairly) for being a little hard to use. Anyone who’s used ZenCart will be familiar with the feature overload when navigating the back end. When you’re setting up for the first time, the last thing you really need is to spend months trying to convince a system to do what you want it to.
OpenCart is a neat, efficient system. Whilst not overflowing with features, it’s a breeze to navigate, and does contain all the core features you’d look for when setting up a shop:
- Unlimited Categories
- Unlimited Products
- Unlimited Manufacturers
- Multi Currency
- Multi Language
- Product Reviews
- Product Ratings
- Open Source
- Free Documentation
- Templatable
- Automatic Image Resize
- 20+ Payment Gateways
- 8+ Shipping Methods
If you have Installatron or a similar set up on your server, you can install OpenCart with a click of a button. OpenCart itself has a beautifully clean interface, meaning that you can start using it immediately without having to customise it to look clean or modern.
The default OpenCart template
A custom OpenCart template
OpenCart plugs cleanly into PayPal and other commonly-used systems for instant payment setup.
You can have a play with OpenCart on the website’s demo area at: http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=demonstration/demonstration
OpenCart is open source and free and you should download it from http://www.opencart.com
Log me in: free remote computer access
Saturday, February 5th, 2011
Log Me In lets you access your PC or Mac for free. Sign up at: https://secure.logmein.com/UK/
Having a tool like this is an essential must-have for any computer user, simply access their website and you gain access to your computer from anywhere in the world.
F.lux – save your eyes, feel happy
Saturday, February 5th, 2011
F.lux does something very simple. It adjusts your screen throughout the day based on the time. It gives you lots of blue light in the morning and warmer colours at night. You no longer need to squint every time you look away from the screen. Best of all it runs on Windows, Macs and Linux-based systems!
You can deactivate it temporarily for colour-sensitive work, but for most other tasks, you won’t even notice it running.
There’s plenty more info on the F.lux website: http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/
Become a better web developer in 5 minutes
Sunday, August 8th, 2010
Firebug
If you’re not using Firefox for web design, you really – really – should be. Besides being standards-compliant and supporting thousands of useful plugins, it also supports Firebug. Firebug lets you dig into your coed in real time and try out edits and changes as well as giving you a whole range of debugging tools. What’s more, Firebug also supports Yslow a Firebug plugin from Yahoo! thyat’s pure gold. It gives you accurate readouts of your page download time and has built in tools for getting more code and minifying images by using All Smush It to reduce image size without degrading quality.
Filezilla
FileZilla is an open-source FTP client which supports sFTP. FileZilla is stable, easy to use and fast. Don’t pay for an FTP client when FileZilla is available.
Snippets
Every time you write a clever line of code, discover a unique new tool or find an elegant way to write something you should save it. In the future this will save you more and more time as you go on. You should try and keep your snippets up to date and replace them as you find better alternatives. At the very least, consult a site like CSS Tricks which has a massive, ever-growing collection of freely available web design snippets.
Frameworks
Consider looking at using a framework. In CSS BluePrint is a fairly well-known standard for preventing yourself from writing repetitive code. Perhaps you’d rather use something simper? There’s plenty out there. I use a modified version of WhiteBoard CSS for WordPress, a framework which I add to with snippets I collect.
What does the client need?
The most important thing in my experience is to balance a client’s needs with your desires and their intentions. What I mean by this is that if a client needs a website selling microwaves they need it to sell, you’ll naturally want it to look fantastic and so will they, but you will be doing a better job by making a website that works rather than one that lives up the imaginary ideals of what a ‘good website’ is in your head. A good-looking, well-coded website that sells nothing is a bad website.
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Categories: Advice, Firefox, Internet, Reviews, Software, Technology, Web browsers, WordPress
Alternatives to Microsoft Office
Sunday, August 8th, 2010
You won’t hear any disagreement from me if you say Microsoft Office is good. It’s great, it has a vast amount of features and once upon-a-time most people seemed to have a copy of it. Not often legal ones, but you either had it or you didn’t.
Today Microsoft office is expensive. Amazon.co.uk has the Standard edition at £283.27 at time of writing. That’s a lot of money, especially if you don’t use it every day.
Here I have some credible alternatives to Microsoft office that are hassle-free and cost-free:
Open office org
Open Office.org (the ‘.org’ is included for legal reasons) is my personal favourite. Developed with help from Sun Microsystems, but still open source and completely free, Open Office.org offers you a seamless switch over from Microsoft Office. With alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access, you’ll still be able to open regular Office documents, work on them save them and read and edit them again in Microsoft Office. Open Office hasn’t always been the quickest application, but it is becoming faster and more streamlined with each release.
IBM Lotus Symphony
Lotus is based on an earlier version of Open Office, but branched off in a slightly different direction. It’s not as intuitive as Open Office but it’s free and again works with Word documents.
Google Docs
Google is becoming a contender in many fields, but the one benefit to using Google Docs is the ability to keep your work in the cloud. Just sign up for a free account and you can write and edit documents and spreadsheets from any computer in the world.
The interface is more spartan, the options fewer – to get more, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid version – but it’s utterly usable.
You can also work live with other users on documents, making real-time revisions and updates by selecting which documents to share with which users.
In today’s varied internet ecology, paying for expensive products when you can get free, legal equivalents is just unnecessary.
Best iPhone apps for work
Saturday, April 17th, 2010
The iPhone is undoubtedly a polarising device. It probably has more fans than detractors (or at least I like to think so), but it is primarily seen as an entertainment oriented phone, pretty much the polar opposite to the Blackberry.
So I thought I’d highlight some of the most useful tools it can provide for business.
Scheduling with Calendar and Google Calendar
I use Google Calendar not because it’s incredibly good-looking, but because it has great methods for subscribing to other applications and systems. The iPhone can subscribe to Google Calendar and sync dates and events back and forth. The magic part is being able to sync Google calendar to other apps, meaning that you can make a date on your iPhone and see it appear across your workflow (mine appear in Lighting in Thunderbird). You can add as many calendars as you like.
http://www.google.com/calendar/
Syncing files with Dropbox
Dropbox is a file-sharing program that uses peer-to-peer technology to synchronise the contents of folders across different systems. You can use Dropbox to sync files between your own PCs (or Macs) as well as choosing to share folders within your Dropbox folder with other people. The iPhone part comes into play when you download the Dropbox app and are able to view copies of your files on your iPhone. Handy, no? You can also view, download and restore files from the Dropbox website.
Dropbox is free for a starter account and gives you a whopping 2gb. If you invite friends to Dropbox you’ll get an additional 250Mb per person.
The Google App offers a quick portal into it’s services. It’s by means revolutionary and there are more complete apps for accessing Google services, but it has killer speech recognition (ie. It actually works) and a pretty icon.
The Google App links in to many of its services and can prevent a tiresome login each time you need to access a service.
2do
My favourite todo list app, mainly because you can link it without having to subscribe to an expensive system. Version 2 is on it’s way soon, with even more features. Add tasks, lists (collections of tasks), multiple sections for different types of task and sync free with Toodledo.
The interface is not only extremely good-looking, but allows for drag-and-drop, sorting, sharing and different views.
Tabs are used to great effect to separate sections and the application icon can display the number of tasks falling into a category you select.
The official website lists far more features than I can here: http://www.2doapp.com/en/2Do/tips.html
What email program do I use?
Thursday, April 15th, 2010
Web browsers come in different shapes and sizes, (‘What’s a browser?’) but fewer people are aware that they have a range of choices with email as well.
There are just as many email programs as there are internet browsers.
Microsoft Outlook
Most Windows users will be familiar with some form of Outlook. As part of the office suite, outlook offers reliability and a full suite of editing tools to control your emails. Outlook also has calendars and tasks functionality.
Microsoft Outlook isn’t free though. If you run Windows 7 or Windows Vista, you’ll have a copy of Windows Mail which is essentially a very cut down version of Outlook. If you have XP or previous you’ll have Outlook Express. If you do want to buy Microsoft Outlook you can buy it standalone or as part of the Office Suite, either way you’ll be looking to part with more than £70.
Thunderbird
Thunderbird is my email client of choice. From the same teams that runs Firefox, the world’s most popular internet browser, comes Mozilla Thunderbird. Just like Firefox, Thunderbird is free, and simple to set up.
Version 3 was released earlier this year and whilst not as fully featured as Microsoft Outlook, it is gaining features, including tabbed browsing through emails and a very fast indexed search that lets you specify dates and other conditions to filter through results. Thunderbird will also run on pretty much any platform, including Windows, Linux and OSX. An official Mozilla plug-in Lightning provides calendar functionality to rival Outlook’s.
GoogleMail / GMail
Google Mail is a slightly different approach to email. Rather than encouraging users to set up email programs and download mail to their desktops (though of course you can) Google tries to entice you to use it online so you can access it anywhere in the world.
Rather than using folders, Google has tags for your email to help organise things as well as a range of other features, including filters to process mail automatically when it arrives, beer goggles to stop accidental emailing immediately after a gentlemen’s snifter of sauce and many more experimental features besides.
Personas for Firefox
Monday, January 11th, 2010
If you’re up to date enough to be running the new Firefox 3.6 release candidate, then you’ll be able to take advantage of a groovy new feature, Personas for Firefox.
Personas are basically skins, but with a better system for installing and previewing them it’s become a breeze to switch what clothes your version of Firefox is wearing.
Please note: The new release candidate may not yet be entirely stable or compatible with your plugins. if that’s the case, just wait a few weeks until Firefox 3.6 is released officially. If you’re impatient like me though (I’ve had no problems with this Firefox release), get downloading, the links are below.
Get the new Firefox release candidate here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.6/whatsnew/
Get Firefox Personas and the personas plugin for faster switching here: http://www.getpersonas.com/en-US/
Grooveshark – free, legal online music
Saturday, January 9th, 2010
I sometimes get a little tired of having to have my iTunes library on each computer, when I just want to chuck on some music and get on with work, I go to Grooveshark.com and choose some music from their library.
Even better, is Grooveshark radio – simple select a song or songs you like and then hit the radio button, Grooveshark will then create a playlist based on the songs you have selected and you can either ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ songs as you go along, refining your playlist predictions.
Grooveshark will also let you create your own account, so you can save preferences and playlists, which is fantastic. You can save a selection of currently playing tracks as a playlist – a feature I use quite frequently.
There’s also the lovely fast HTML5 interface, which is shaping up to be much nicer than the old Flash-based Grooveshark.
Try Grooveshark out at: http://listen.grooveshark.com/
