On Hiatus

As you may have noticed, things have stalled out here recently. I’ve been traveling almost constantly the last few months, and the blog has fallen by the wayside.

I plan to revamp things here in the next month, with a greater focus on cutting costs in IT and marketing without sacrificing quality. There are so many ways to get your name out there or to enhance your IT capabilities with little investment other than your time. Here’s one example:

Check out Balsamiq, my new favorite desktop application for creating rapid mockups of websites and applications. Here are a few screenshots from their website:

I started using this in my company, and can’t imagine doing business without it. Communicating design concepts to a client has never been easier - I can simply mock up a layout in 10 minutes to illustrate what I’m talking about. Simply drag and drop from a library of existing interface items like icons, buttons, windows, lists, and arrange them on screen. Add arrows and virtual post-it notes to explain parts of your design, and you’re good to go. Designs can be exported as images or sent in a format that allows other Balsamiq users to modify them. You can even download pre-designed interface mockups from their partner site, MockupsToGo.net. Check out this mockup of an Outlook message:

There are still a few minor interface issues. Layer control isn’t great just yet - if you want to move a layer but have placed another layer in front of it, you can’t get to it. You’ll end up moving the layer in front of it first. For complex, multi-layer designs, this can get aggravating. Otherwise, the tool is awesome. Check it out.

Full Disclosure: I received a licensed copy of the Balsamiq application in return for an honest review of their software. This in no way influenced my review of this awesome tool.

Tech Tools: AdobeAIR Apps

Adobe Delivers

If you haven’t heard about this yet, it’s worth checking out… Adobe has released a “cross-operating system runtime that lets developers combine HTML, Ajax, Adobe Flash®, and Flex technologies to deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on the desktop” (more info). In other words, web developers can use the same web tools like Dreamweaver and Flash to develop feature-rich desktop applications.

Full Story →

Hollywood, the Constitution, and Your Future

I just saw Will Smith’s The Pursuit of Happyness for the second time this week, and I had forgotten what a powerful movie it was. Or maybe I just wasn’t in a position to truly appreciate it when it first came out. It’s like studying Shakespeare in high school: at the age of fourteen you can’t even begin to appreciate the language or relate to the feelings in his plays (years later, that hasn’t improved much). But with time comes perspective, and I saw this movie in a completely different light.

 

Hey. Don’t ever let somebody tell you… You can’t do something. Not even me. All right? You got a dream… You gotta protect it. People can’t do somethin’ themselves, they wanna tell you you can’t do it. If you want somethin’, go get it. Period. - Chris Gardner, The Pursuit of Happyness

  Full Story →

What do You do When Your Schedule Conspires Against You?

You may have noticed that this blog as been completely dormant for nearly a week now. It has been one of those weeks where every client or potential client or potential client I have ever had decided they need something from me immediately, if not sooner. It’s the sort of problem you wish for when things are slow, but dread when it actually happens.

I’ve been living my life this week by the advice outlined in the Million Dollar Leverage post on What to Do When Your Schedule Blows Up, and putting in my share of very, very late nights. Still, there are only so many hours in a day. Chris Guillebeau offers some more great advice in a recent post at The Art of Nonconformity:

Problems:

• Your friends and family members who work at traditional jobs won’t understand.
• The crises are all yours for the managing.

Solutions:

• Simply decide to stop doing stuff.
• Improve your personal productivity skills, including planning and implementation.
• Delegate or outsource

Thanks Chris for the great advice. Really, check out his blog, which is full of great stuff.

The question remains though… how do you handle a sudden major influx of work? Outsourcing is great if you have something lined up or tasks that don’t require much training, but that’s not always the case. Hiring is risky because the fever pitch of work may not last, and then when things die down you end up overstaffed. Granted, it’s a good problem to have, but it’s a problem nevertheless.