Altitude on Small Business Tools

A video of Steve Jobs explaining what makes a brand successful
and introducing the Think Different Ad campaign.

Are you looking for a free image and photo editing software, that is comparable,

to Adobe® Photoshop®, Corel® Paint Shop Pro®, Microsoft Photo Editor, and The GIMP.

Are you using any version of Windows?

Then look no more and go download getPaint.net

It is easy to use, free and got lots of features and easy to use

user interface.

In case you wanted to record your voice online, and you wanted to share the recording

with friends, colleagues, or family.

I found this tool called vocaroo, it is a flash based audio recorder, that allows

to record your voice.

The best part about it, is that it is:

• free
• no software needed
• you can email the audio recording
• or embed the recording on your website

It is a great tool, and I think worth checking out..

Let me know, what you think….or if you are aware of any other tools,

that does the same thing…

We all fond of screen recording or screen capturing.

They are a great tools, that you can use to communicate with your prospects,

prepare tutorials, or show what you have on your computer screen in an

easy professional video format.

I am a very visual person, so I learn much faster if you show me…

In the past, I used camtasia, and many other tools, to create demos to my clients,

or show them, certain features, or products, in case I am not able to do it in person.

Today, I stumbled upon a new tool, that I think it will revolutionize how we do

screen recording..

It is a new awesome service called screenr. You can check it out, on screenr.com

What I liked about it, it is complete integration with twitter, and best of all, it is free

and no software installation is required..

Here are a list of features that I read on their website:

Instant screencast for twitter.

Now you can create screencasts for your followers, as easily as

you tweet. You will have a ready to tweet screencast in seconds.

• It is a web based recorder, so no software installation required
• Works on PC or MAC
• Plays everywhere on the web, even plays on your iPhone
• Best of all it is completely FREE

I have tried and it works fairly well.

The only limitation that I saw is that you are limited to 5min.

But overall I think it is a great tool, and I highly recommend it.

A suggested feature for me, will be, is that I wish the user had an option,

whether to make the screencasts public or private.. Right now,

all screencasts are public, which could be an issue sometimes..

Let me know, what you think…??

Did you ever wonder what’s the performance of your website?

Did you ever wanted to compare your website to others???

Whichloadsfaster is a fun way to spread the word that web performance matters.

It’s about friendly competition and about testing in everybody’s browser,

not just ones that have nice performance tools already.

Whichloadsfaster is open source, written in HTML and JavaScript and runs entirely on the client-side.

You can host the files on your own site and tweak them to suit your own nefarious plans.

You can download Whichloadfast on github.

Or you can do your perliminary testing on http://www.whichloadsfaster.com/

Give it a try…and let me know, what you think????

It is a one hour presentation, and it is very important, to anyone in the business

of creating software.

Key points:

• Which button to press?
• Software is all about the experience?
• It is a system
• Everything is a service
• Also everything is a product
• Don’t be logical
• Memory is more important than actuality, its all about how they feel about
• Complexity is ok, Complicated is bad
• Design for people
• AGAIN Its all about the experience

Just go and take the extra step…to please your customer

When least expected…

Please refer and subscribe to the original post…

As we all know, one the challenges, we have in web development,

and design is how different browsers renders the page.

In some situations IE doesn’t render the pages correctly,

or FireFox, Chrome show the pages in totally different looks.

Stylesheets, Javascript especially are rendered differently on

different browsers.

Below are some tools that you could use to simulate different browsers:

1) Adobe BrowserLAB

Straight to the point, I really like it, and I tried it myself.

2) Browser Shots

Straight to the point, I really like it, and I tried it myself.

3) Litmus

Requires sign up.

4) Spoon Browser Sandbox

It is a firefox pluging

I looked at so many tools, but the above seems to do the job,

and the best part they cost nothing

Create Movies Out Of Pictures: PhotoFilmStrip [Windows & Linux]

PhotoFilmStrip is an open-source application (works on both Linux and Windows) which you can use to creates movies out of your pictures in just 3 steps. First select your photos, customize the motion path and render the video. There are several output possibilities for VCD, SVCD, DVD up to FULL-HD.

The application is lightweight and very easy to use, ideal for making a video presentation or for creating a video to post on youtube for example.

I have created many of those Photofilms, and I used Windows Movie Maker in the past,but it is nice to have a tool, that’s free, and available on many platforms, mainly geared for photo slideshows, and more…

Intro from its original source click here…

FreeMind is a premier free mind-mapping software written in Java. The recent development has hopefully turned it into high productivity tool.

I have tried it by myself, and I am really impressed. It is very easy to use, and quick to learn..I use it to put my thoughts and ideas into prespective whenever I have a new idea, or when trying to gather project requirements.

So you want to write a completely new metaphysics? Why don’t you use FreeMind? You have a tool at hand that remarkably resembles the tray slips of Robert Pirsig, described in his sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance called Lila.

Do you want to refactor your essays in a similar way you would refactor software? Or do you want to keep personal knowledge base, which is easy to manage?

Why don’t you try FreeMind? Do you want to prioritize, know where you are, where you’ve been and where you are heading, as Stephen Covey would advise you? Have you tried FreeMind to keep track of all the things that are needed for that?

You can download from here… But you will need Java to be installed in order to install this software.

I love training, especially online training.

I am a more of a visual person, so I really like video training and presentations.

For me a 15min of video, showing me something how it is done, could be equivalent, of 1 hour of reading.

Follow this link for a 15 online presentations that any web developer/designer

must see…

Some of the topics covered are Ajax, Modular CSS, JQuery, Javascript and many more…

I thought this blog post has lots of wisdom..

Please check it out here…

Here is the brief text:

Do you read business blogs where the author has failed three times without success?

No, because you want to learn from success, not hear about “lessons learned” from a guy who hasn’t yet learned those lessons himself.

However, the fact that you are learning only from success is a deeper problem than you imagine.

Some stories will expose the enormity of this fallacy.

Bullet holes: A brain teaser
During World War II the English sent daily bombing raids into Germany. Many planes never returned; those that did were often riddled with bullet holes from anti-air machine guns and German fighters.

Wanting to improve the odds of getting a crew home alive, English engineers studied the locations of the bullet holes. Where the planes were hit most, they reasoned, is where they should attach heavy armor plating. Sure enough, a pattern emerged: Bullets clustered on the wings, tail, and rear gunner’s station. Few bullets were found in the main cockpit or fuel tanks.

The logical conclusion is that they should add armor plating to the spots that get hit most often by bullets. But that’s wrong.

Planes with bullets in the cockpit or fuel tanks didn’t make it home; the bullet holes in returning planes were “found” in places that were by definition relatively benign. The real data is in the planes that were shot down, not the ones that survived.

This is a literal example of “survivor bias” — drawing conclusions only from data that is available or convenient and thus systematically biasing your results.

Doesn’t most business advice suffer from this fallacy? You read about successes but what about the businesses that “never made it home?” Like the downed planes, could failure contain more lessons than success?

Burying the other evidence
Scientific journals like to publish extraordinary results, so studies that don’t show anything of statistical significance aren’t published but rather are abandoned or silently stowed away in academic filing cabinets.

This practice is called the “file-drawer effect,” and it’s a particularly insidious form of survivor bias because it’s invisible. Peter Norvig sums it up nicely:

When a published paper proclaims “statistically, this could only happen by chance one in twenty times,” it is quite possible that similar experiments have been performed twenty times, but have not been published.

Pharmaceutical companies have exploited this effect to intentionally skew results. It’s gotten so bad that journals are calling for a public database to prevent fraud:

More than two-thirds of studies of anti-depressants given to depressed children, for instance, found the medications were no better than sugar pills, but companies published only the positive trials.

If all the studies had been registered from the start, doctors would have learned that the positive data were only a fraction of the total.
–Washington Post

If that catches your attentenion… Read the rest of it on here…

As a software consulting company, and when dealing with our clients, we like to show and communicate with our clients, how a particular web page or piece of application will do and look like.

“All Humans like to be shown”….

In the past, we used a mix of  HTML, or photoshop mockups, to accomplish that.

And let me tell ya, That was very time consuming, and took lots of effort..

Recently we started using Balsamiq. And let me tell you what an amazing tool it is…

Here is what Balsamiq helps you to do:

1) Improve your Usability – Explore Different Designs in Minutes

Very easy to use, you will figure out everything in minutes…

2) Use it with your clients

Let them help you bring their vision to life, or help them quickly to bring their vision into life.

3) Get to Agreement Early – with a tool everyone can use.

One of the issues that happens, is that the client’s expectation, and your understanding,

can be different. With Balsamiq, you can narrow down that gap, and both sides,

get to understand, communicate better, with a great mutual understanding, using

a very intuitive tool.

4) Integrated in the way you work – Web, Desktop or Web Office

Balsamiq, comes in many different flavors. There are software and online versions of the product.

5) Cut down spec-writing time – Spend your time coding, not churning

As we all know, a good picture or image, worth thousands of words.

With a good, expressive mockup, you can cut down significantly on spec-writing time,

since you have a great meaningful image, that represents your idea and the client’s needs.

Below are examples of what you can do with Balsamiq:

What is cool is that the author provides several ways of getting individual licenses for Balsamiq.  One of them is if you are a contributor on an open source project or doing work for a non-profit.  The web site specifically states:

“If you are a do-gooder of any sort (non-profit, charity, open-source contributor, you get the idea), email me with a short blurb and I’ll send you a license, FREE of charge.”

Very cool to see that kind of ‘giving back’ to the community.

I find it to be a helpful tool in the toolbox for doing very, very quick mockups for thoughts.  It exports to a PNG file so you can share with others as well.  Share your stories of wire-framing and mockups!

And don’t forget about the online version that’s coming very soon..

It is a truely great product, and we use it now, for all our mockups.

You can grab your license here>>>>>>>

‘WORK EXPANDS SO AS TO FILL THE TIME AVAILABLE FOR ITS COMPLETION’

What do you think of the above statement????

How many tasks you were given, and just because you know that

you have long enough time, to finish it, you put it off, till a day or

two before the deadline, that’s when you realized that you are really

running out of time, and that’s when you squeezed your brain, and

put all you your effort to finish it..

Parkinson law dictates that a a task will swell in (perceived) importance,

and complexity in relation to the time allocated for its completion. It is the magic

of imminent deadline.

‘General recognition of this fact is shown in the proverbial phrase ‘It is the busiest man who has time to spare.’

So if I give you 24 hours to complete a project, the time pressure forces you to focus on execution, and you have no choice but to do only the bare essentials. If I give you a week to complete the same task, it’s six days of making a mountain out of molehill. If I give you two months, God forbit, it becomes a mental monster.

How this can be applied to software development???

We programmers, tend sometimes, to way overestimate the time needed, for task completion,

while I understand, sometimes, that’s necessary especially when requirements aren’t clear

enough, and also it is good to have enough cushion time, in case things go wrong, for any reason, and for last minute emergencies.

And by the way, even when we do overestimate, and try to buy as much time as we possibly can , we end up postponding the task to the last minute, and we end up encountering the same issues over and over, and all our cushion time is gone to waste..

From my limited experience, I noticed I perform better under pressure and tight deadlines.

While we need to be reasonable, my prespective right now is the following:

“The end product of the shorter deadline is almost inevitably of equal or higher

quality due to greater focus”

Most inputs are useless and time is wasted in proportion to the amount that is available.

Another prespective of the applicaiton of this law is this, Data expands to fill the space available for storage.

There are many applications to this law, and I beleive anyone who wants to focus on efficiency, and productivity, need to apply this law in many aspects of our lives.

Please feel free to share your thoughts…

Can you please help me, and answer my poll?

I am just trying to get to know you and how web savvy are you…

Also, I am trying to know, who my reader are, so I can write accordingly.

My goal is to serve you, and by knowing you better, that will make things easier…

We are a small virtual company. Most of our employees and contractors

work virtually, we use the web, cloud and different collabaration tools, to collabarate

with each other on different projects and tasks.

This model serve our customers “business friends” very well, and allow us

to operate in maximum efficiency, especially during the current tough situations.

Since we are self funded, this allowed us to survive slow times, and be able to offer

unlimited savings to our business friends, and still provide maximum quality possible.

The fact that we all work remotely, we still do care about our business friends, privacy,

and also we want you to rest assured that all your data is safe. We mostly use laptops,

because of their mobility, and we apply DOD like encryption, to all our laptops, that contains

customer data.

We have been using TrueCrypt in the past year or so, and we are very pleased with it.

Here are the reasons why we like it:

1. It is open source and it is free
2. No performance issues
3. It works well, and almost non intrusive
4. Peace of mind by knowing that your data is safe and secure

TrueCrypt never saves decrypted data in to your hard disk, in other words,

any data written to your hard drive is fully encrypted.

Even if you are not using your laptop for business purposes, I still recommend,

installing TrueCrypt to your personal laptop. Since we all carry many personal

information like family photos, or financial information.

TrueCrypt finally released a new version with Windows 7 support. So I am really

looking forward to both.

To download TrueCrypt.

Below are some TrueCrypt screenshots..

TrueCrypt Setup Image

Encryption Options at TrueCrypt

Please let me know, what you think…

I know this blog supposed to be mostly a techie blog,

but when I saw this video, I thought it will be a good idea,

to share it with you.

Me personally I like Will Smith, I think he is a very talented actor.

I like his movies, and now I really admire his message.

Watch this 9 min video clip, with some of best Will’s interviews,

and I guarantee you it is going to be very inspiring.

He resonates very well with me, and I am sure, you will

learn something.

Few quotes from the video:

“I LOVE LIVING. I think that’s infectious.”

“Greatness truly exists in all of us.”

I am fascinated with languages, and I would love to be able to speak

at least 5 languages, in my lifetime.

I was talking to a neurologist a while ago, and he told me something very profound.

He told me that if you want to keep your brain cells alive and as active as possible,

there are two things that you can do:

1) Learn a new language – all the time

When you are trying to learn language, and trying to come up

with the right tense and use the right vocabulary, your brain is

working on a different level, and building different connections.

2) Utilitze the other side of the body, so if you are right handed,

try to do more work with your left side, and vice versa.

I think This service will be very helpful, to give you in a way a wide global reach,

and may be expand friendships, and be able to communicate with clients,

and friends in their language .

Give it a try here Google Translate

And watch this video:

I got 15 Google Wave invitations.

I love my followers and if you want to receive an invite,

leave a comment about this blog, any suggestion or feedback is greatly appreciated.

I will make sure that I have the invitation emailed to you..

Good Luck my friends…

No one can keep up with Google, I got used to the past few months, every time when reading technology news, or checking a techie blog that there is something new Google is working on, or just released.

Now google introducing real time search it is really neat, also refer to the video below, for a quick demo.

Refer to the original post from the Google Blog right here….

And google did it again, this time, it is like have it all, so you probably don’t need twitterfeed.

All your blog posts, can be automatically posted or tweeted to your

twitter account automatically, using Google Feedburner.

Refer to screenshot below:

The new Feedburner option is called “Socialize” and can be found on the “Publicize” tab. To set it up, simply add your Twitter account (you can add more than 1) and then click the “Activate” button.

It uses the new Google short url: goog.gl and has quite a few advanced options, such as the ability to extract the post categories and post them as Twitter #hashtags, use inline hastags, only select the items from a certain category or based on a keyword and the options you have seen in services like Twitterfeed, such as adding text to the beginning or end of a twit, post only the title, tile and body or body, and so on.

I must say, the timing couldn’t be better as Twitterfeed has been experimenting huge delays for the last 3-4 days, with most of the content ending up as not being posted at all.

Part of this post is courtesy of Webp8

Here is another awesome tool from Google.

Basically it shows the hot zones of your web page.

This is based on Google Research,

and it really represents how much information,

does the users of your webpage.

And you will be  surprised..

Refer to the following screenshot, based on one of our web pages..

Browser Size.png by altitudeinfosys on Aviary

As we all know, people follow a very similar pattern, to what they

look at first, that’s why Headlines are very important, and must be

very visible.

I always wondered if there is an easy to show that, I saw,

some tools where users wear close to their eye, and

it reflects what they are looking at at any given second,

but I am sure they are very pricey..

What you are given, by this tool, is a reasonable tool,

in comparison to the efficiency to one of Google pages.

I beleive this will be a good demo, that you use to persuade,

your clients, of the effectiveness of some your design suggestions,

and to come up with the best usable design possible.

You can checkout this tool here,

and you can read more info about it here

Before you read further…

Let me  ask you the following quesstions:

Did you ever wished that domain search was faster,

and more real time?

Did you ever wish you could click on one link,

and takes you straight to GoDaddy.com, after

finding your desired domain name, and buying it  at a discounted rate?

Did you ever wish that you don’t have to deal

with page refreshes, and slowness, while searching for a domain name?

Well if you answered YES to any of the questions,

then look no more and head to this website InstantDomainSearch.com.

It is really an awesome tool, free, and once you find the domain,

you will buy your domain at a discounted price from

godaddy.

You don’t have to spend few minutes,

searching for the coupon code on Google.

I like speed, and efficient stuff.

Enjoy…

I use a free and and an open source tool, called WinMerge.

I really like it for the following reasons:

1. It is FREE!!!!

2. Visual differencing and merging of text files

3. Creates patch files (Normal-, Context- and Unified formats)

and many others, head to the features page to read more..

As you know, no one can remember everything especially in programming.

So many commands, and so many different ways of doing things.

Thankfully we have many search options, that we can use to search

the biggest encyclopedia, which is the web.

But sometimes, you wish have information organized in a condensed

format, easy to read and portable, that you can use offline, assuming you

weren’t connected to the web.

I would like to introduce to you Free cheat sheets for developers.

And the best part they are free.

Save time and stay well-informed

• Written by bestselling authors and leading experts
• Reliable information on major developer topics
• Filled with useful tips and source code examples
• PDF looks great on-screen or printed from your printer

From cloud computing, to Continuous integration, and scripting,

refcards have the cheat for you.

Examples:

Getting started with cloud Computing:

http://refcardz.dzone.com/refcardz/getting-started-cloud?oid=hom16541

Getting started with ASP.net  MVC 1.0:

http://refcardz.dzone.com/refcardz/getting-started-aspnet-mvc-10?oid=hom16541

Jquery Selectors:

http://refcardz.dzone.com/refcardz/jquery-selectors

Getting started with Hibernate search

http://refcardz.dzone.com/refcardz/getting-started-with-hibernate

Getting started with domain-driven design

http://refcardz.dzone.com/refcardz/getting-started-domain-driven

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Just Got Easy

Search engine optimization shouldn’t be that difficult.

A new free tool released by the IIS team from Microsoft,

to help developers and designers do SEO analysis on websites,

review your websites, and make changes fast.

The SEO Toolkit with its detailed analysis and search engine friendly suggestions

helps improve the relevance of your website in search results right away.

Optimize for  and more!

Increase Website Traffic and Revenue
Analyze your website and find ways to boost your number of hits.

Use SEO recommendations to improve traffic and increase your revenue stream.

Influence and Update Search Engines
Control the access and display of your content in search results. Keep search engines current with the latest information from your website.

Improve Customer Experience
Discover and solve common problems in your website content and design to enhance your end user experience. Make it easy for your customers to find what they’re looking for.

Review the tutorials and documentation and download here

I am always looking for a productive tools that makes whatever I am doing easier.

Whether, I am writing a quick script, code, or just normal note taking.

Checkout NotePad++, it is really awesome, and the best part it is free.

Here are some of the features:

And here are some screenshots of this cool software.

So far my experience is been pleasant with this software, it is really fast, and I really like
the highlighting feature.

It really increased my productivity.

JESS3, a creative agency specializing in data visualization, has put together an amazing video which shows the current state of the Internet. We have highlighted some of the data below, but please also watch the video for yourself (it rivals the Social Media Revolution).

* Faceboook Serves 6 million Pages per Minute
* 1.73 Billion Internet users worldwide
* 90 Trillion Emails Sent in 2009
* 81% of Emails were Spam
* 126 Million Blogs on the Internet
* 27.3 Million Tweets Per Day
* Faceboook serves 6 million pages per minute
* 4 Billion photos hosted by Flickr
* 182 Videos watched on average per month (per user)

Very informative video below:

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Source: Web Analytics World

Today I would like to talk about error reporting and logging.

We always like to know what’s going on with all your web applications, or our clients as soon as possible, not only know the error, but sometimes, if we are able to see the full exception stack, and may be see the screen the user saw when that error occured, so we can proactively seek solutions.

For that we use Elmah. Elmah is just an awesome pluggable Module, that easily be plugged to your asp.net website, quickly, without having to change any code.

It provides many reporting capabilities, and recently twitter was added as one of the reporting options, which I thought is very nice option to have.

Now I would like to thank Atif Aziz the project owner, for a great module and a great work..

It is totally free and open source.

Here are some other features:

I always configure the log files, to be reviewed with an admin role,

and emails to be sent when exceptions occured.

Here is a screenshot for elmah in action:

Please drop me a line if you need any help, with Elmah setup.

I have used it in many of our projects, and it is GREAT…

I have seen many tutorials but the following are the ones that I liked the most,

and I thought they were the most helpful:

Elmah on DotNetSlackers.

Elmah on Phil Haack blog.

Please post any comments or questions you might have in regards to elmah.

Google focuses in 3 major areas:

1) Search

2) Ads

3) Apps.

3 nice videos that explains all this to you in great detail,

I think in 10min time, you will know more about Google.

Search Video:

Ads Video:

Apps Video:

In case if you don’t know what are the Favicon.

It is basically the image that you see on your browser,

something like this:

It gives a professional look for your website, especially when minimized.

It is very easy to do, and today, I am going to share with you few links for

some online tools to do that.

My favorite one is the following:

1) http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/

The reason I like it, because it is very easy to use.

And it generate an animated favicon, which is very nice.

And once you are done, it generates a zip file, with the

static and dynamic version altogether.

2) http://favikon.com/

It is a nice tool, and straight to the point.

3) http://genfavicon.com

It is a nice tool, and straight to the point.

Once you are done.. All you have to do,

is upload the .ico file to the root of the website,

or to the image folder.

And add the following HTML code to your web page, in between <head> and </head> tags:

Very easy to do…

0to255 is a simple tool that helps web designers find lighter and darker colors based on any color. 0to255 cures your color manipulation woes. It’s fun, simple, and a huge time-saver.

Simply pick the color that you want to start with and 0to255 gives you a range of colors from black to white using an interval optimized for web design. Then, just click the variation you want to use and the hex code is automatically copied to your clipboard.

Check it out here : http://0to255.com/

Also another website to see all these color codes,

all in one page, check it out here…

Courtesy of: http://www.webappers.com

This is a screencast prepared by president Obama.

I thought it was an interesting approach, to convey information,

and a very effective one.

On this screencast President Obama, is announcing healthcare.gov.

a new website, that explains the new healthcare bill that was passed

few months ago, and talk to you about the current available options,

till the new bill take full effect in 2014.

According to president Obama, this website will make you understand

the bill, your rights and available options.

Here is an excerpt on what they sayon this post…

Making useful, easy-to-use information available online is a priority for this Administration.  And putting power back into the hands of Americans is a primary focus for the President.  HealthCare.gov accomplishes both.  So, take a moment and check it out.

Checkout the video:

Click here to review the original source….