Web-based Photo Editing

I've now seen it all...As web 2.0 apps become more and more capable with new tecnologies like AJAX and Flex, the world of computing will become a very different place. Take Fauxto, for example. It's a web-based photo editing tool that may give Photoshop Elements a run for it's money. Another promising photo editing app is Picnik. And these apps appear to be free, although still in beta. Don't you just love the internet? ;-)

Technigrafa
Print design, web design and web hosting in Raleigh, NC
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Macs Just Rule

Well, I must admit that I've always been partial to Macs. My first post-DOS "real" computer in college was an old PowerComputing Mac clone. I even worked as a Mac technician at my college. But when I first started my business, I bought a killer 17" LCD Toshiba PC laptop because I thought that a PC might be better, since the business world seems to prefer PCs. And, don't get me wrong, it's been a great machine. But recently we replaced our home computer with a Mac Mini and there's nothing that really demonstrates the superiority of a Mac to a PC until you have them sitting next to each other and you try to do the same thing on both machines.

For example, I have a Windows Mobile phone: a Motorola Q. When I first got it, I was surprised at how easy it was to sync with my PC laptop. I installed the utility that came with the phone and plugged it in and my calendar and contacts just synced with Outlook, the way it should be. Wow, that was easy. Great!

Now, here's where it got hairy. I use Google Calendar, as it's great because I can have several shared calendars and my wife can put things on our calendar from her work. That gave it an advantage over Outlook, and besides that, Outlook, although powerful as it is, is a bloated piece of software and after having the PC for 6 months, the whole system was getting sluggish. Keep in mind that this machine was top of the line 6 months earlier. So I was starting to get tired of waiting on Outlook to render my calendar. So I needed a way to sync my Google calendar with my Outlook calendar. After a web search, I found CompanionLink, which sounded like it would do what I needed. 2-way syncing. So I bought this utility and installed it. To my dissatisfaction, I had to manually run the CompanionLink program everytime I wanted to sync the calendars, and Outlook had to not be open when I ran it, otherwise I got an error. At first it worked pretty well, but then the syncs started taking HOURS to complete. What's that all about? So I pretty much had to remember to run the update utility at the end of the day...which never happened.

My laptop was acting a little screwy yesterday, so I thought, I wonder if I can sync my phone to the Mac Mini, which I'd had for about 6 months. I thought it would probably be a pain since it's a Windows Mobile phone, but I decided to do a little research. Although it wasn't quite as plug and play as I've found most things to be on the Mac, it was remarkably easy. I did have to purchase The Missing Sync utility to allow my Windows Mobile phone to sync with my Mac's Calendar, contacts, etc. But I installed it, plugged in my phone, and voila, it synced perfectly. And to my ecstatic discovery, I could even automatically sync iTunes playlists (and photos) with my phone, and now every time I sync my phone The Missing Sync Utility will look and see when the last time my playlist was updated, and according to my settings, if it's time, it will automatically refresh the music on my phone with new MP3s from my selected iTunes playlist. I can even tell it to leave a certain amount of space on my phone's memory, so it doesn't fill it completely up with MP3s. Wow.

Okay, so my phone syncs with my Mac, and it's just as easy as it was on my PC. Now for the hard part, getting iCal on the Mac to sync with Google Calendar. Enter Spanning Sync. Yes, this is another utility I had to pay for, but I had to pay for the PC utility too, so I can't count that as a drawback. Here's the good part. I installed the utility and hit sync, and voila my iCal was synced both ways with all of my Google Calendars. AND it checks for updates regularly every hour, so I don't have to remember to sync anything. And it takes WAY less time than my PC did. Now I'm a happy, synced up guy.

So, yes, I know it's been a running debate since the beginning of time, but I have to admit, things are just easier to do on my Mac. Things work the way they are supposed to out of the box. My Mac boots up faster, and doesn't get horribly sluggish when I leave it on for weeks at a time without a reboot, unlike my PC which almost grinds to a halt if I don't reboot every day. My Mac interface looks cooler than Windows XP on my laptop (and better than Vista from what I've seen of it) and Macs are less susceptible to virii and other malware. I guess it just comes down to one thing: I love my Mac.

So, although I'll need to keep a PC around to do browser checks on the websites we're developing, my next purchase this fall is going to be a MacBook Pro. The "fun" part will be converting my copy of Adobe CS to a Mac version, as I upgrade to CS3. But after this experience, I know that it will be worth it, and probably not near as tricky as I fear.

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Technigrafa
Print design, web design and web hosting in Raleigh, NC
919.374.3014
toll-free: 1.877.GRAFA.NC

Google Tools

I can't get enough of Google. They just keep on cranking out great web-based tools! I'm lovin' it! My most recent discoveries are Google Checkout, Google Analytics, Picasa Web Albums. While most of these services are not new (except to me), I've added these to my growing list of other free tools from Google:

iGoogle - a customized search start page. You can fill this thing up with all kinds of RSS feeds from your favorite sources, and then organize them onto different tabs. There are tons of Google widgets you can add too, for showing a daily Bible study, local weather, movie times, your Gmail inbox, and just about anything else you can think of.

Gmail - Simply the best free webmail around.

Google Talk - A great IM program so you can chat with all of your friends.

Google Maps - My favorite mapping website of choice. The drag around feature is great, and their new "Street view" blows me away!

The Picasa Web Albums give you a free GB of storage for your images online. You can share any album, and it's a breeze to edit captions. And of course every image is searchable. And if you are a Mac user and use iPhoto, there's even a plugin for exporting images to Picasa web albums.

Google Analytics is a tool that lets you track ALL KINDS of information about people who are visiting your website. What browser they are using, what country they are in, which search engines are bringing you the most hits, average time a user spends on your site...you name it. And it even ties in with Google Adwords if you are paying for advertising.

And finally, Google Checkout, which lets you buy things online more securely (similar to Paypal) shop faster and even sell items. When you checkout from your favorite online vendor, if they support Google Checkout, you can keep your email address private and Google will relay emails to your account and if you start getting spammed, you can turn that store's unwanted emails off.

All-in-all, Google gets my award for the company producing the coolest stuff on the web. And most of it is FREE! Does it get any better?

Accepting Payments Online

We do a lot of e-commerce websites and one thing that many people don't know that if you want to sell something online, you need to have what's called a "merchant account" with a payment company. Your payment company might be your bank or another organization like PayPal. If you go with a bank (will will set you up with a payment processor like Verisign or Authorize.net), you'll most likely get better transaction rates. For example, with Paypal, there is roughly a 3% transaction fee, where as most other merchants charge around 2.2%. BUT, most banks will have a monthly fee of around $40, where Paypal does not. So if you anticipate moving a lot of product, or large amounts, a credit card merchant other than Paypal may be ideal. Keep in mind Paypal, as well as other credit card merchants, have several different plans, so this is a generalization, for simplicity's sake.

An advantage of Paypal, other than there not being a monthly fee (unless you get one of their higher plans), is it is quite easy and quick to set up. Create a new Paypal account and then you have to link your account to your bank account, so you can make deposits from your Paypal account to your bank (which is something you have to do manually, but there is no charge for it). Then you verify your account by entering in the amount of two small deposits Paypal will make into your linked account. This is how they make sure you indeed own that bank account. If you don't link to a bank account, Paypal can mail you a check, but there is a small fee for that service.

So it's best to shop around with credit card merchants and get the best rate you can, but also make sure it is compatible with whatever shopping cart system you may have.

The Battle on Spam Rages On...

It's been a while since I posted last, because, well, we've been crazy busy! We recently upgraded our hosting package in order to add several new spam blocking applications, and I have to say that it is working amazingly so far - and we're not even done yet. We have established a real-time black list (among other things) that actively checks all emails to see if they are being sent from a server known for spamming. If you want all the juicy details, read this.

Anyway, just thought you may want to know that we're always doing our best to keep up with spam. We hate it more than you do (believe it or not ;-)