The more time I spend with the web development portion of the web worker community, the more I hear people say bad things about Internet Explorer. But it’s a fact of life that you need to make your sites work in IE – and worse, you need to check them in multiple versions of IE. IETester is a free tool to make this just a bit easier. It gives you a browser without a whole lot of features – but the key feature it does have is the ability to make new tabs use the rendering of IE5.5, IE6, IE7 or IE8 beta 1. Thus with four quick clicks you can see your site in all the recent iterations of this browser.
IETester itself is a work in progress, and has bugs of its own. But as a first line of defense, it’s worth a look: use it to see whether your site looks wonky in older versions of IE, and if it does, fire up a virtual machine with the real thing to check further. It comes from the makers of DebugBar, a full-featured IE plugin for web development.
If your company or co-workers are involved in numerous web 2.0 sites, you may have images on Flickr, videos on YouTube, a blog with an RSS feed and so on. This results in giving your website users many places to look when they consume your organization’s online media – not very user friendly.
This content separation leaves a space that aggregation services are trying to fill. Sites such as FriendFeed (covered before), Tumblr, and the new Strands.com (covered by parent site GigaOm.com) are all vying for your attention. These aggregation websites create what are called activity streams or life streams, and combine all your online media into one place (and one RSS Feed) for your intended audience. You have complete control as to which sites are combined and aggregated in the services.
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Most web workers couldn’t live without their instant messages. Yahoo! is trying to push the state of the art along a bit with the beta release of version 9.0 of Yahoo! Messenger. Though this is a pretty mature software category, they’ve still found a few things to add. For one, it’s easier than ever to import contacts from elsewhere – you can pull them in from Gmail, Hotmail, Orkut, and more. We may not have data portability yet, but everyone is getting better at swiping contacts from everyone else. For another, Yahoo is tying in some of their other services: if a friend uses Yahoo! Buzz, for example, you get a notification in your list.
But many web workers are probably in the same boat I am: contacts scattered all over half a dozen IM backbones. From my point of view, updates to the individual clients are interesting but not useful; I’d go nuts if I wasn’t using a unified client like Adium, Trillian, or Miranda. If you’re in a Yahoo-only world, the new beta seems reasonably stable and adds a nice feature jolt, though it’s currently only available for Windows.
Many web workers work on numerous projects simultaneously, and some serve various masters. If these descriptions fit you, consider looking into some of the free time-tracking applications available online. These can give you much more perspective on how you are actually spending your time, and allow you to keep records of the time you’re spending on this task or that.
My favorite of the free, online time-tracking applications is 88miles. The free version of it lets you set up projects and record the time you’re putting in on them. You can also generate many kinds of reports.
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We looked at site-specific browsers last year – desktop applications that capture a single web site so that you can interact with it outside the bounds of your browser. A new entrant in this field, Bubbles, is out with some intriguing features that advance the state of the art.
The new features revolve around an API that lets you customize Bubbles for particular sites. WIth these customizations, you can do things like show notifications when a new email arrives at GMail, or upload to Flickr via drag-and-drop. Bubbles is currently Windows-only and in beta, with a developer community starting to coalesce around it.
There’s been a little buzz in the blogging world this week about Musion, who call themselves “the world leader in 3D holographic projection.” This was triggered by Guy Kawasaki linking to a video showing Cisco CEO John Chambers chatting on stage with a couple of his staffers across an ocean. I’ve seen suggestions that this technology will make air travel obsolete, or substitute at some point for the sort of web conferencing that web workers are familiar with.
The demo is fairly impressive, combining Cisco’s telepresence work with Musion’s projection system. And yet…I don’t think people are really understanding what’s going on here, or where it will go in the future. As far as I can tell, this is not the sort of thing that will replace videoconferencing, even at the high end. Read the rest of this entry »
While we do talk a lot about data storage and security here at WWD – today I want to switch gears and discuss personal, or personnel, continuity.
In my business I’m mostly a one man show, and when schedules run amok or there is illness in the family it can cause a breakdown of productivity. Being a Web Worker, I do have a lot of flexibility in where and when I can work, but sometimes there really aren’t enough hours in the day to recover that lost time.
It occurs to me that we think a lot about continuity in terms of our data and even our hardware, but we tend not to have a contingency plan if we are unable to work as many hours or as productively as we need to.
How do you manage this? Do you have someone who can fill in for you?
There’s a new entrant in the online drawing tools market: Flowchart.com. Though they make their pitch as a flowcharting tool, they’re really a general-purpose shapes-and-connectors application, along the lines of Visio or OmniGraffle. Their UI is largely JavaScript-based, but seems reasonably responsive. In addition to creating drawings from templates, objects, and clipart, they offer a fair number of ancillary features: sharing, saving to PDF or PNG, recording movies, a developer API, and a marketplace (not yet fully functional) to let people sell their templates and scripts. You can also collaborate and chat in real-time.
Flowchart.com is in invitation-only beta at the moment, but I got an invitation less than 24 hours after I requested one. There are some rough edges, but it’s already displaying good functionality and promise. They’re in the same arena as established competitor Gliffy, but the extra features make them worth keeping an eye on.
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
