jaacob.com

there’s nothing quite like ((( WeFunk ))) to help the time pass effortlessly as you work…

(it’s under Radio -> Urban in iTunes)

Do you know how to get Firefox to send RSS links over to NetNewsWire by clicking (or right-clicking) on them? I’m so sick of having to “Copy Link Location”, then going over to NNW and pasting it into the subscribe box. There’s got to be a faster way, but an extension search turned up nothing. Has anybody figured this out?

TracBac, a new designer/client collaboration web app from 360 Degree Interactive, has gone into private beta. They sent me an email with login information so I could check it out. (Which I did briefly… it’s no Basecamp. Not in UI, not aesthetically, not in anything really.)

The thing that stuck out to me though was in their invite email—here’s how they described themselves.

TracBac is created by 360 Degree Interactive, an India based Web 2.0 Company with few passionate professionals.

Is it just me or does that not sound like a very exciting place to work?

Today’s the last day you can vote for Why Passion Works, my manifesto proposal for ChangeThis. If you haven’t voted and are interested in the premise, I’d appreciate your vote.

While looking through my search referrals (with the glorious Mint), I came across a term that seemed too broad for my site to pull up in any decent position. Usually I get found for pretty specific things such as Winning by Jack Welch or the most recent, desktop backgrounds of love. (Uh…?)

The term was color palette 2006, which according to Google has 7.4 million results, out of which I came up number 9. It was a deep link to my post about BePrivy’s color palette—2006 was nowhere to be found except for in the URL.

The part that I love about this (besides the tiny boost in traffic from all the color trendwatchers out there) is that whoever actually searched that term and found me, would have at least found commentary about color palettes, with links to additional color palettes over at Firewheel. It may not have been exactly what they were searching for (if I had to guess) but it was at least leading in the right direction.

For all the talk about how advanced Google’s algorithms are, the SERPs are still filled with plenty of disparate results that seem to only be showing because they have some combination of the term you searched for, not neccessarily together in a string (usually not it seems), and a lot of people link to them. (Unless you searched for something really esoteric, in which case you only got 23 results back.)

I wonder if the person who searched for desktop backgrounds of love found what they were looking for—I know we all love GTD, but somehow I doubt I’m what they had in mind.

I’ve always had a problem brainstorming into a computer. Word or TextEdit seems the logical choice (you need to input text, those are text editors…) but before I can get more than a couple ideas down, I get caught up in how I should be organizing this brainstorm, what is each piece of information categorized as, etc. So I went back to pen and paper, which works well except that it’s not searchable. And when you’re used to everything being accessible via Quicksilver/Spotlight, flipping through pages of old notebooks looking for that page seems a bit antiquated.

While I still utilize pen & paper way more than any other solution (especially on the go), the top way I’ve found to brainstorm into my laptop is with FreeMind. It’s an open-source brainstorming/mind-mapping solution with the best user-experience I’ve found.

My favorite part of the application is the speed with which you can get your ideas down. When I’m brainstorming, ideas usually come in waves—so one minute I’ll be doodling in the margins and the next trying to furiously scribble down everything in my head before I forget it. With FreeMind, tab gives you a new child node and return gives you a new sibling node, so you can create new thoughts that are organized from the start without any delay. If I’m in the middle of a stream of multiple thoughts, I usually create a few nodes with a keyword or two in each that will trigger the full thought relating to that idea so that I can flush each one out without worry. Moving around between the nodes is easy with the arrow keys and the app is really responsive and “snappy”.

Using the mouse (usually after the fact for further organization) is a decent experience, but not near as satisfying as the keyboard. My biggest problem with the mouse operation is that whenever the mouse passes over a node, it automatically becomes the active node. This proves to be really annoying when you have a large mindmap and need to make a change to a node at the bottom of the map via the menu at the top of the screen. Basically, you either have to weave the mouse between nodes or go all the way around, neither of which is very intuitive.

The interface is decent—the default is the one I use, and while the buttons have some definite spacing issues, I still like it better than the other skins. FreeMind ships with 9 different “Look & Feel” skins. Being a picky person about such things, I could go on about what I don’t like aesthetically, but since I’m not contributing to the project, I’ll keep my mouth shut. The app follows nearly all basic OS X keyboard commands (CMD-H hides, CMD-, is preferences, etc) which makes me happy. You can remap keyboard commands if you so desire—the only one I changed was the Node Edit command to CMD-E. What the program lacks in finish, it makes up for in customization.

I was hesitant at first but figured I had nothing to lose trying out a free solution; reading over the features I doubted I would adapt it to my workflow. But if you can type at a decent clip, there is something really satisfying about the experience of FreeMind—the speed with which I can jump from node to node and mash out new thoughts definitely brought my brainstorming to a whole new level.

Privy to Passion, the color scheme for BePrivy that won a spot in Firewheel Design’s ColorBurn contest, had its day in the sun yesterday. I think it’s responsible for around 800 or so new uniques yesterday—new traffic is good traffic in my book. Got a couple of nice compliments on the BePrivy design, which made me feel good.