Moving To Beehive

We are closing down this Blogger site and moving our thoughts and ideas to our own domain - you can find our thinking at Think It. Do It.

Google's Super Simple Home Page

I love simple things. I mean simple functionality and simple visually. Google does some things really right. And other things are not at all as simple as they could be. Sometimes their engineers dominate when their design team should have more influence. (Gmail and AdWords interfaces are both good example of this.) But when Google decided to update its home page, including a version with literally nothing but its logo and a search box, it really worked out well, in my opinion. If I'm going to use Google, I'm going there to do a search. If I want access to my Google Docs or Google Maps or GMail, I'll go directly to docs.google.com or maps.google.com or mail.google.com. One the main google.com page, just give me the search box, man! BTW, if you're not seeing this, just refresh your page and this should be the view, at least for a moment.

My Google Wave Invite Request

This is the request I just posted to Google. I've already made one request, but thought I'd try again:

I really really really want an invite. I've already filled this form out. And I'm sure this is just putting me at the end of the line. But maybe, just maybe, there's a human who will get this, and feel my sincerity and, in a moment of pure altruistic glee, send me an invite just 'cuz. Please, oh please? If it helps, I will devote my entire life to Google Wave - and possibly sacrifice my second-born child to you. (My first-born is approaching teenager-hood, so she's past prime sacrificing age...)

Restraint

We're redesigning our web site here at Beehive Media. It will be ready later this fall. As part of that process, we're going to meld this blog into the main site. And I'm going through this content to figure out what pieces of it to bring over to the new site. I'm noticing that I USE ALL CAPS AND EXCLAMATION POINTS TOO MUCH!! I get excited sometimes. I'm passionate about these things, which is why I write about them, even if it's not always that frequent. But I'll take the advice I sometimes give my daughter to "use your words" and describe my excitement rather than show it in CAPS. That is my job as a professional communicator, I suppose. But do forgive me if I sometimes relapse to my old ways.

Time Tracking Bliss

Do you need to track time for client work? Have you struggled to build your own tools, leverage existing Web 1.0 tools and/or overly complex project management platforms? Have you asked yourself, why can't SOMEONE get this right?!?!?

The time has come to declare a winner, and its name is Harvest. We just converted over to Harvest and I'm loving the web input and reporting, as well as the widget and iPhone app. While the reporting could be more robust and I REALLY wish the estimation was convertible into projects, and that we could estimate jobs using the same task lists as we track projects against, and that reporting showed estimated vs. actual....etc. It is BY FAR the most elegant, simple, quick and complete enough solution out there. Use it!

Poverty is Declining?

Who knew? World poverty is in decline as a percentage. Does this surprise you?

Simple Screenshot and Image Manipulation Tool

Here at Beehive Media we love simple solutions. I recently came across a fantastic example of simplicity and needed to share it quickly. If you ever need to create a screenshot of something on your computer, how do you do it? On a Mac, you just hold down CMD-SHIFT-3 or on Windows, you hit "Print Screen" to copy to your clipboard. Then you need to open Photoshop or something, paste, then manipulate the image. Photoshop takes awhile to open, eats up a ton of memory and for a quick and dirty image, is often not worth the trouble. In comes Skitch - a super easy way to take screen shots, mark them up, crop them, highlight things, write text on them, etc. And you can also use photos or any image from your hard drive. You can easily click and drag an image you've made into an email or post it to your personal Skitch page or any other site, via FTP, SFTP or to Flickr, etc. Great tool, easy and fast to use, etc. Thank you @ev for tweeting about it so I could discover this fantastic piece of software!