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Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

Integrating Radio With Your Digital Ad Campaign

Posted by in Business, Digital Advertising, Findings, Software on April 5th, 2012

They say print is dead, and the movie theaters are losing out to online streaming and home video, but one of the oldest forms of mass media is not only going strong, it’s having a resurgence and is becoming a great place to put your advertising dollars. Radio, both online and not, has become a great way to expand regionally and in some cases even nationally. Podcast hosting sites get some of the biggest traffic outside of Facebook, Twitter and Google and even traditional radio is still a great way to reach a new audience. The difficult part is still

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Road Plates game for iPhone is here!

Posted by charles in Inspiration, News, Software on September 27th, 2010

Road Plate for iPhone We’re happy to announce that our new iPhone game, Road Plates, is now available for download on the iTunes App store. Everyone with a car and kids will love this new spin on a classic road trip game. Best of all, it’s free right now.

There are a lot of thanks to go around for this project, but we’d especially like to thank Omnia who largely took up the role of architect and developer throughout the process. We also want to acknowledge Steve, Ryan, Tyler, Bryant and Ted for their amazing work in all things creative.

We had a lot

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Adobe releases BrowserLab for Web Designers

Posted by charles in browsers, Business, News, Software on June 3rd, 2009

meermeer_to_browserlab

What started as an idea in our humble office on the north side of Chicago is now available to web designers worldwide!

BrowserLab, formerly named Meer Meer, was made available for free trial download on June 2. Read the press release here.

Our principals, Charles Stevenson and Ted Billups, formed a collaboration with Joshua Hatwich and Dean Vukas in 2006 to develop a web-based experience testing tool that would streamline web designers’ cross-browser testing processes and save them thousands of dollars on hardware required to do the tasks.

Together our team worked on all facets of this nascent SaaS

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Review: MacRabbit’s Espresso

Posted by steve in Reviews, Software on April 14th, 2009

A couple weeks ago Macrabbit released the much anticipated Espresso 1.0 application. Its meant to rival the feature set of Panic’s Coda by being more or less a one stop shop for editing, uploading, and previewing Web files. Espresso doesn’t take on quite as much as Coda but what features they did do, they did with style.

It’s clear from the moment you open Espresso that the application is meant for web designers that code their own front ends. The sort of people that take good aesthetic design into their purchasing decisions. The welcome screen is a beautiful, albeit unnecessary,

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It’s Finally Time for IE6′s Curtain Call

Posted by steve in browsers, Software, Usability on April 6th, 2009

In the world of web development there has been a recent push from all around the world to finally drop support for IE6. It’s understandable since IE8 is now released and IE6 is about 8 years old, an antique in computer years. However, there are still a measurable amount of users still launching IE6 as their primary browser, 17.4% of all users according to w3schools. So should we abandon the traditional model of graceful degradation and cross browser compatibility and stop supporting IE6? Some very substantial web developers have said yes.

37signals.
37signals started phasing out support for ie6

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Alternative to TinyURL – I prefer SnipURL

Posted by ted in Findings, Reviews, Software, Uncategorized on March 19th, 2009

Everyone has their favorite little utilities, especially when it comes to taking long gangly links and shortening them for Twitter and other social apps. I like SnipURL.com best because it has a great cross-browser bookmarks bar button that converts links on-click (gotta love javascript). Here’s what else it does:

- it seems faster than TinyURL (although as of today I noticed 500,000+ snips, and their total is 28 million so they are getting lots of traffic suddenly too with the popularity of Twitter)
- it has tracking and management of snips
- the browser button is great

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Songbird Media Player and Browser

Posted by ted in Findings, Reviews, Software, Uncategorized on January 14th, 2009

I’ve been using Songbird (instead of iTunes) lately, and I have to say it’s quite a nice media browser/player. It is an open-source project with a focus on the api and web integration throughout – very similar to Firefox. In fact, it uses Firefox’s XML-based XUL user interface description language, so it even supports many of Firefox’s add-ons like DOM Inspector. One popular add-on is a panel that displays lyrics.

On launch it can import your iTunes library and settings, and instead of “The Genius” it has mashTape, with artist info, reviews, news (Digg, Google News, MTV Music News, etc.),

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ICE – Adobe InContext Editing

Posted by ted in Reviews, Software on October 15th, 2008

Our good software engineer friends at Adobe have launched InContext Editing (ICE), which (long last) allows any user to edit directly into pages using Dreamweaver. It’s what people have been asking for since I started making web pages in 1994. Other companies like Yahoo (and their YUI tools) allow for some in-page editing, but Adobe has done it with elegance and complete breadth. I’ll be curious to see how much of the content management software market they will have in 1 year. Sign up, view a tutorial and register a site to get started. The support site is here.

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