Web 2.0 — the interactive side of the internet — has amazing capacity for streamlining, simplifying, and even enriching your work life. The right tools and plugins can keep you on track, build accountability into your day, reduce the time you spend on repetitive tasks, and give you the benefits of organization whether it comes naturally to you or not.
Notice I said “the right tools and plugins.” You can also spend untold hours trolling the web, trying to find the best tools for your needs, figuring out how to use them, and then coping with incompatibilities. Especially if you’re the CEO or CFO rather than the CTO, the learning curve can seem too steep and the apparent complexities can drive you back to pencil and paper.
At Clevertech, we’ve discovered that a lot of our clients have this experience. We build custom software to streamline business systems, but we also see a need for individual work systems. Sometimes that means a custom solution, but often it just requires a guide through the thorny thicket of Web 2.0.
We can be that guide. Give us a call, and set up a one-on-one meeting or register for one of our group sessions. You’ll see increased productivity, reduced stress, and enhanced capacity.
The iPhone only makes sense for its computer-like functionality utilizing the apps that work for you. For me, it is really all about communication. That includes email via gmail, IM via trillian, basecamp, Remember The Milk and SMS.
I’ve grown used to the keyboard and can really move at a decent clip while I type. But voice is faster. And safer when I’m in the car. So I was looking for a good service and I tried out a few. This one wins in my book. Dragon Dictation allows you to click, talk and then wait a little to see it in text. While I’m sure that was the technically hard part – its the next part that shows the ingenious flexibility. You can then Send to Email, Send to Text Msg or Send to Clipboard.
The last one allows me to paste the text into any application. Now that is flexibility and worth sharing with you .
If you have many open tabs in firefox, and especially if you leave them open for a long time (overnight anyone?) then you have experienced memory usage of hundreds of megabytes. Personally, I’ve seen it as high as 800mb and higher.
An add-on called AFOM seems to have solved this issue. I’ve installed it and then let loose with my 20+ tabs. Worked for a while and checked my memory. It was at 130mb. Wow!
I immediately wrote this post to share it with you. Check it out yourself.
As the web matures, certain common sense practices become best practices. For example, it is common sense to realize that people have conversations around topics. Online business conversations around topics may center around a specific event or a specific transaction. Being able to compose and view messages, files and to do lists related to this topic all in one place is very powerful. In fact, we’d say it’s best practice as well as common sense, and we have been applying this best practice very successfully for our clients.
One of our clients experienced a lot of frustration with a web form of this kind, though. This client’s critical business conversation was about investments. On the website we developed, each and every investment in the portfolio has a dashboard that allows messages, files and to-dos to be associated with the investment. We can resize graphic files and display them on the screen as well. It combines efficiency and attractiveness, keeping all the data on the topic readily visible.
Many of these graphics came from Excel, since like most financial shops this client’s is full of Excel wizards. Here was the cumbersome process to get an Excel graph into this nifty web system:
copy the image
paste into a program like MS Paint or Adobe Photoshop
save the image
upload the image
Lots of steps. Since they performed this task so often, it became frustrating. What would be the ideal ? Copy and paste! Copy the chart in Excel and paste it into the web upload form. In the highly technical post below, we share how we conquered the security issues around sharing your local clipboard with your web browser so that a painful process became a breeze. You can also cut to the chase and go straight to the demo.
Technical Implemetation of Clipboard Copy – Web Form Paste
Years ago you could use Javascript’s object.getData() method with a data type of “Image.” You could set the object to ClipBoard, copy and paste, and browsers allowed it.
However, modern web security standards no longer allow Javascript to interact with any operating system’s clipboard. You can still override the behavior of your browser and allow clipboard access to websites, but this can leave your machine open to hacks, viruses, etc… It counts as risky behavior on the part of your machine.
What’s more, most users are not that savvy with editing browser profile policy files or advanced options. And many offices forbid overrides anyway. So that’s not really a user-friendly solution.
Where does that leave us with this request? Client-side programming still has to be the solution, but normal scripting is not a possibility. Basically, what we need to do is mimic the usual copy, paste, save and upload routine behind the scenes for the user. In my research I found two solutions:
1. Write an ActiveX control that will grab the clipboard image, create a file on the clients machine and then upload it.
2. Write a Java applet that will grab the clipboard image data, create jpeg encoded image data and send that data to a server side script for processing.
The ActiveX control required creating a file on the client’s computer. That’s a solution that could lead to more problems than it solves. Admittedly, I prefer Java anyway. So here’s how we did it…
First, we needed an applet that, when triggered, would read image data from the client’s clipboard and create a jpeg encoded image — just like most of the pictures you save on your computer.
Without having to do too much heavy lifting I was able to find open source Java code on the net that grabbed image data from the clipboard and created a jpeg encoded image. Unfortunately, they all seemed to be written for php and were sending un-encoded data streams to the server. I was writing for a ColdFusion server, and I quickly found out that ColdFusion did not like the data being sent — and promptly crashed the page. Obviously, some tweaks were needed.
In the end, I opened a connection to the server from the applet, mimicked a form-data submit with a content-type: image/jpeg and sent the image’s data base64 encoded (which ColdFusion liked). The applet then waits for a filename to be returned.
After that we needed a catch or action script on the server to process the image data and return a filename. In the code you will see “shootImage.cfm.” Basically, we get the http request data (form-data sent) and parse out the data beginning after the base64 transfer encoding tag as follows:
Create a unique file name, since we have multiple users.
Write the data in binary to the file.
Finally, set a session variable with the file name created for possible future use and output the file name for the java applet to grab.
Lastly, we need a user interface page that is going to load the applet, call it on when the user hits “paste,” and display and upload the pasted image. You can see the full contents of this page in the code linked above.
There will still be security issues denying the applet access to the clipboard if the jar (the executable file) is not signed. We have included a signed jar with the code that uses Clevertech’s signature.
In the end the clients got their request and we now have a new cool little tool in our arsenal. This code has been tested and is in use by several of our clients in one form or another. Try it out yourself, if you like. If you have any issues — or don’t have the time or desire to try the do-it-yourself route — contact us, and we will help.
The key here is the Return On Investment. At Clevertech, we put ourselves in your shoes and look to maximize efficiency so that your company gets the most out of its staff resources. This tool is a great example of pushing the technology envelope to allow company staff to do more with less.
PC World reported the winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physics: Charles Kao for his work in fiber optics and Willard Boyle and George Smith for their invention of the CCD. In his report, David Coursey says,
In honoring these three today, perhaps we can also honor all those who make our technology-based lives possible.
Better, we can recommit ourselves to supporting basic science and research–hard thinking–that is so out-of-fashion in much of society today.
At a time when we need more answers than ever before, we should be concerned about how many people are capable of asking the questions and putting what they discover to use for the good of everyone…
Let’s honor these scientists by supporting math and science education and, perhaps, in another 40 years we’ll be honoring a new generation of American scientists for their life-changing achievements.
Coursey has a point.
Most of us accept modern technology, whether it be the lights that appear when we flip a switch or the charge-coupled device which we might not be able to recognize when we see it, as though it were magic of some kind. We don’t understand it, or attempt to understand it. Even those of us who apply these marvelous discoveries may not think much about the science behind it.
It’s fine to encourage partnerships between business and education, and to look, as we at Clevertech do every day, for the ways in which we can use technology to make working life easier and more profitable. But we also have to recognize the value of pure science.
“If tachyons do exist,” a scientist in one of Sidney Harris’s great cartoons announces to a colleague, “and if they do go faster than light, then I’m determined to find something that goes faster than tachyons.”
This attitude — the determination to learn and discover whether there’s any immediate application in view or not — can’t be lost without losing also a myriad of future applications of the kind of discovery this attitude brings about.
When we’re all in the same office all the time, it’s easy enough to collaborate. In the real world, we’re on the go, or in different time zones to begin with.
Collaboration can be synchronous, with everyone sharing a screen and chatting. It can also be a matter of giving everyone access to a file so collaboration can take place over time as each member of the team adds and adjusts. Too often, though, it ends up being a matter of multiple iterations and emails, .27 of which get lost.
Take advantage of the technologies that make remote collaboration work better.
Here are some options:
Adobe Share (Acrobat) and ConnectNow are easy to use and have an interface familiar to Adobe users.
GoToMeeting is another way to share screens, with voice or chat.
This handy shelf is the Backpack from Twelve South, a gadget that attaches to the stand of your Mac and holds your hard drive in well-ventilated elegance. You can get a six-pack of these and kit out your whole office — you can actually put two on each machine, at different heights, so you might need a couple of six-packs.
You can set things that don’t actually need frequent access (like that hard drive) into a space that isn’t used much, and have your desk top for the things you really need to get your hands on — or leave the desk in Zen-like emptiness. Either way, you might find that you experience less stress and get more done if you add this little shelf to your desk.
Is this going to change your life? Probably not. But it’s an example of how a simple design decision can make a difference in your work. This is what we do every day at Clevertech. Our designs end up in your computer, not out where people can see them and be impressed, but they can revolutionize your office and your workflow –and improve your bottom line.
It’s true: sometimes people resist new technologies. But even those who embrace them sometimes have problems making best use of them.
In the 1700s, guns were fairly inaccurate. It was possible for soldiers to line up across from one another, fire all together, and miss most of the people on the other side.
By the time of the American Civil War, guns had become much more accurate. On some level, people knew this. They hunted with more modern guns, after all, so they knew that they could aim and shoot pretty well. And yet quite a few field commanders lined their soldiers up across from each other and fired. They must have been astonished to see how many men were lost in this way.
Fairly quickly, the soldiers caught on and began to use the tactics of guerilla warfare — not unheard of during the American Revolution, but quickly to become the norm during the Civil War.
Without the stress of approaching death, many people fail to adjust to new technologies. You may know people who routinely print out emails, or print and file copies of electronic invoices. You may know people who call to ask whether an email has been received. You may even know people who keep track of data with multiple unintegrated programs or paper ledgers or Post-It notes for that matter, recording the same data many times, in many places, for many people.
Chances are you — or your staff — are doing some things by hand that your software will do. Chances are you’re repeating some actions when there’s no need or benefit for doing so.
And chances are, it isn’t a matter of life and death, as the failure of soldiers to grasp the changes in weaponry can be. But it may well be a matter of ROI, productivity, or job satisfaction.
Look around your office and see if there are places where your office culture is lagging behind your available technology. If you have trouble finding them, Clevertech can help. If in fact your technology lags behind your culture, we can help with that, too.
We love technology. Just in principle. Technology offers the promise of a better life. True, sometimes it only delivers a better life in the sense of having a truly cool new gadget, but this is one version of a better life.
Here are our recommendations for TV shows for those who love technology as much as we do. Sometimes the tech stuff in these shows saves people’s lives. Sometimes they’re just enviably cool and possibly imaginary gadgets. No matter.
Leverage is a stylish show about a bunch of thieves who get together to deliver justice to bad guys, always with sleek devices. Our favorite is Hardison, who often proclaims that it’s “The Age of the Geek, baby. We rule the world.”
Burn Notice is an updated MacGyvor with spies, violence, and somewhat crazed women. The characters on this show, enjoying Miami in their rayon shirts, take ordinary objects and make them into lethal weapons and surprisingly effective spy gear.
How Stuff Works on the Discovery Channel is a nonfiction contender which mixes history and technology in a heady concoction. Admit it, you want to know how iron works, and even if you already know how beer is made, you’ll admire the camera work.
Mythbusters gives viewers a chance to share in the innocent pleasure of real, highly competent technophiles who get a chance to confirm or disconfirm urban myths. Their glee when they blow things up (which they do at every opportunity) is contagious.
Timewarp slows ordinary things down to the point at which they become an entirely new experience, and MIT’s Jeff Lieberman is there to interpret everything for our complete viewing pleasure.
Numbers has mathematicians explaining basic things to one another in a way that would, in real life, be offensive. Apart from that, it’s a smart crime show with unusual depth of character and relationships.
The Big Bang Theory is at the other end of the spectrum, being a situation comedy based on popular stereotypes of physicists and engineers, but we have to admit that we find it funny. Don’t watch it in mixed company– shoo the liberal arts majors out before it comes on.
Modern Marvels shows you the coolest stuff out there. From the skinny on James Bond gadgets to the newest sports gear, engineering disasters to weaponry, Modern Marvels bring you maximum detail.
Popular Science’s Future Of is an in-depth examination of the future of security, sex, superhumans, and all kinds of other stuff with Baratunde Thurston. Mini-documentaries with interviews show all the wires and buttons and everything.
One of our IT guys responded to this topic with, “My People don’t watch TV.” He admitted that he watches these programs on his computer. We think maybe he’s too literal-minded.
This handy shelf is the Backpack from Twelve South, a gadget that attaches to the stand of your Mac and holds your hard drive in well-ventilated elegance. You can get a six-pack of these and kit out your whole office — you can actually put two on each machine, at different heights, so you might need a couple of six-packs.
