EirePreneur

A future for me in investment banking?

On July 25th last year I said "Google just has to buy Sketchup 5" -

If Google bought it and gave it away as it did with Picasa it could easily recruit a huge team of volunteer 3D modellers to fill in the gaps on Google Earth. I for one would happily create a 'freehand' model of my local town. Wouldn't you?

Now H.V.T kindly informs me that Google have aquired @Last Software, developers of Sketchup 5, and he suggests I should move forward to investment banking ;-)

Seriously though, this is terrific news. The press release doesn't hint that Google will now make the product available for free but I'd imagine they surely will. And 3D Earth Modelling will truly blossom.

FeedXS is.... nothing new

TechCrunch reviews FeedXS which it says "forces you to think about RSS in it’s purest form: a way to broadcast content." Mike Arrington also loves "that it exploits RSS in a somewhat new and interesting way."

The thing is though, Nooked have been doing this with their FeedWizard service for about a year now. FeedXS, after RapidFeeds and FeedForAll is just another validation (as if Nooked needed one) of their interesting business model.

Move over Picasa - PXN8 is here

After putting Sxoop Technologies' online photo editing service through its paces it's clear that it can do for photo editing what GMail did for email. PXN8 is an online image editor which allows you to edit photos without installing software on your PC. The PXN8 user interface is written using standard web technologies: HTML, CSS & Javascript so no browser plugin is required. PXN8 is an example of the new breed of rich web applications in that it makes heavy use of Javascript.

Visit PXN8.com and the beautiful photo that greets you is the first indicator that there's something special going on here. The welcome photos change but each one is more beautiful than the next and the temptation is to get stuck right in to see if you can produce a similar work of art from your own collection. And there's no 'but' here because the fact is that you can get stuck right in, such is the amount of thought that has gone into the usability of the interface.

The default setting for the menu system in the left hand margin is for the Tools and advertising modules to be open but you can simply collapse and expand whichever menus you like. How many Web 2.0 services allow you to close the advertising box if its annoying you? The other menu items are Help and Toys. Each Help item is in turn expandible and collapsible, inline. As any fan of outlining (like me) will tell you, this is a very intuitive system. It avoids clutter and protects the newbie from information overload, yet provides all the necessary information within a few clicks. Other software-as-service providers would be well advised to visit PXN8 to see how a help system should be implemented.

Tools icon buttons are big, colourful and intuitive. Floating your mouse pointer over a button pops up a description of what it does and how to use it. One criticism would be that they don't have an altogether consistent style. The Red Eye and Whiten buttons in particular are slightly jarring in the midst of the other cartoonish buttons. A second criticism is that the all important Save button has been relegated to final position on the the second row of buttons. I'd move that up to top left where I intuitively look for the save button, and it appears in most desktop apps. Then I'd move the Flickr upload button up beside it and leave the Undo and Redo buttons where they are. This would separate these file manipulation buttons from the photo touch up ones that follow.

Even the logical division PXN8 makes between Tools and Toys demonstrates just how laser focused Sxoop are on usability. Information overload is a problem with way too many online apps but not here. The user is shown the bare minimum necessary to get them going and everthing else is within easy reach.

See Web2.0Ireland.com for the rest of this review.

ActiveWords relieves Repetitive Boredom Injury

Management of our discussion forums entails tasks which are, for the most part, variable and interesting. However, there are a few daily tasks which are excrutiatingly repetitive and boring!

That's why I've downloaded and trialled numerous macro recording utilities over the years, never quite finding one that was up to the task and worth sticking with. Recently though I came across Buzz Bruggerman's ActiveWords and reluctantly went through yet another registration and download process not really expecting the silver bullet to relieve my RBI (Reptitive Boredom Injury). But this story does have a happy ending because ActiveWords has certaily lived up to its billing and more.

After investing about two hours in simple 'programming' I now watch with satisfaction as ActiveWords copy/pastes large amouts of information between my Gmail account in one Firefox tab and a series of HTML forms on another tab. Back and forth, on and on, until it has completed in about 1/20th the time the job which used to fill me with dread everyday.

I rarely buy software, not because I'm a scrooge (and I am!) but because I seldom have a computing itch which can't be scratched by some opensource, freeware or shareware. Not so with my severe case of RBI which is why I'm happy to upgrade to a full version of ActiveWords.

Ultimate Editor, a preliminary review

No sooner had I trackbacked my cheeky request for a complementary version of Zapadoo's Ultimate Editor than Brian O'Neill had contacted with the secret access code. True to his word and with a speed of follow up that should give potential purchasers confidence in Zapadoo's customer service.

So, after a clean, simple install it was good to be greeted by a welcome wizard to guide me through first-time configuration. However it was a little disconcerting to read the accompanying warning that skipping the wizard would require me to perform some manual configuration in order to enable all features. What? So I pretty much have to run the wizard then?

Following along with the wizard was straight forward enough although I didn't really see much of a difference, in step 4, between the three interface style choices. Perhaps a better graphic or explanation is required. 8 steps overall seems like quite alot of work to get going but at least you're rewarded with a very elegant editor interface upon completion. Zapadoo have certainly got their act together in the GUI department. In fact I've rarely seen a more visually appealing set of toolbars. Granted it does seem a bit cluttered compared with my trusty old TextPad but such are the sacrifices to be made for functionality I guess.

I must admit that I'm disappointed there's no macro support as that is one feature of TextPad I can't sacrifice. But I'm still going to give Ultimate Editor a good workout and will report back with a more indepth review. Thanks Brian!

Free business planning software

Issue 143 of the Enterprise Ireland eBusiness Live newsletter points to the PlanWare website, describing it as a resource that...

...offers free software and advice for entrepreneurs, business owners and managers on issues relating to business planning, financial and cashflow projections and strategy development. The site also features a range of White Papers on topics such as getting business ideas, devising strategies and making projections, as well as a range of online tools and checklists for business and financial planning.

Planning conference calls across time zones

My business partner lives in Louisiana (the north of the state thankfully so she was out of the way of hurricane Katrina). After 5 years working together we instintively know what times windows are good for phoning each other. However, we sometimes need to patch in one our hosting support people from Seattle or a contact in Australia. It's then that things can get tricky.

I've used Time and Date before but thanks to Lifehacker for pointing out the newly updated meeting planner which helps to pick a convenient time to suit all. What a great utility.

Virtual Offices for Smaller Companies

QuickLink: Virtual Offices for Smaller Companies.

Smaller businesses can take advantage of free tools to ease collaboration and boost productivity

[via EMERGIC.org]

Running the company on web apps

Fergus Burns spotted a very interesting post by evhead about running your company on web apps. Like the Odeo founder we too, without hardly realising it, have moved practically all of our company back-end over to web applications (which used to be called Application Service Provders [ASPs] as far as I recall?).

Certainly 'everyone here' also uses Gmail as their email client, just forwarding our 'coporate' email to it. We've been using the AWeber Autoresponder for a few years and of course our customised rendering of InfoPop's Eve product is what our own customers use the whole time. We've also been playing around with RSS Calendar and Basecamp's Tada but may just upgrade to the full Basecamp Project Management service eventually.

Complimentary software (services) make life easier

For the last 3 months I've had access to broadband during the daytime (in a friend's house, my new 'office') but revert to using dial-up in the evenings back here in my own home. And now that I've terminated my flat-rate UTVip account I need to drastically reduce my dial-up connection time. That means finding an alternative to my RSS aggregator of choice - Bloglines.com for evening use. And what better than an RSS aggregator that synchronises with my Bloglines account - FeedDemon. They work great together.

Here's the routine. The last thing I do each day before leaving the 'office' is close my Bloglines window in Firefox and launch FeedDemon, which immediately sucks down all my unread Bloglines RSS items. I can thus spend all the time I want in the evening, offline, going through those posts and flagging the ones which demand further reading. Then, last thing at night, I hit the flag filter so as to only show all the items I've marked earlier and drag and drop those post title links to my Textpad editor.

Finally, I run two Textpad macros I've created to HTMLise those links and save as a web page. First thing I do the following morning back in the broadband blessed 'office' it open that local HTML page and right click to bring up the Linky menu, then open each URL in a separate Firefox tab. I regularly open up to 30 tabs which isn't a problem with 512Mb RAM.

Bloglines, FeedDemon, Firefox and Linky - what a great combination.