I’ve been a fan of Grace Smith’s blog and especially her Dock Series where by she invites a web / design professional to show off their dock, it’s a great way of finding out what other designers are using, comparing their set up to your own – as well as finding new applications. A while ago she ‘opened the floor and invited people to take part’, I only just stumbled across the post – not sure why / how I missed it first time around, but all the same I screen grabbed my dock and here is a brief explanation on each of the applications that reside on my dock.

• Finder – My OCD means everything is very neatly filed away inside here.
• Dashboard – I do actually have a couple of apps in here that I use, apart from the pre-installed Calculater and Conversion tool – I use a Loren Ipsom generator by Tobias Ahlin, which is rather nice.
• Photoshop – I’ve been using PhotoShop for over 10 years now, I do all my designing in it – when possibly Illustrator and Fireworks could sometimes be better suited – but I’m so comfortable with PS I can’t let it go.
• Dreamweaver – Using this less and less now as I’m working with Wordpress more and more, I even looked into switching to Coda – but I couldn’t as there are too many DreamWeaver specific features I’d miss; especially the server behaviours which I rely on for my PHP / MySQL work.
• Adobe Illustrator – I wasn’t using Illustrator as much as I should, or at least when it was the best tool for the job – so last year I started designing T-Shirts and forced myself to do all the design work in Illustrator. It has definitely helped me learn the application, and work out how I can use it more in the future.
• CyberDuck – My FTP client of choice, I know a lot of people swear by Transmit – but this free app has never let me down; it has a great dock icon too!
• MAMP – I’ll either develop a website on the live hosting / domain, or I’ll work offline on my laptop with this Apache / MySQL and PHP setup.
• Text Editor – Editing and viewing simple documents, I also use Google Docs.
• Stickies – I used to organise all my work on these things, now I use them as a basic list of my current projects – so I can quickly see what I have going on, as well as what I have coming up the future. I also use them to make short notes while I’m on the phone.
• CurdBee – This is my invoicing app of choice, I’ve used the Fluid App to create an application from this superb web based invoicing service.
• Dictionary – My spelling can be pretty bad at times, so this gets me out of trouble on a regular basis.
• Contacts – Keeps all my addresses in order.
• iCal – I try to organise as much of my work / personal life in iCal as I can.
• Tweetie – Just switched from TweetDeck to this and I’m enjoying the cleaner interface, and the less is more approach.
• Skype – I’ve only just signed up, but I’m hoping it will become in handy with future clients who use it, especially those who are not based nearby.
• GMail – Another Fluid App, this time my Google Mail account. It even gives me an indication of how many unread emails I have in my inbox
• FireFox – My current browser of choice, and has been since my recent Mac Book Pro upgrade. FireFox struggled on my old 12″ G4 Powerbook.
• Safari – Now only used for testing.
• Opera – Surprised me how quick this browser is – but still only used for testing.
• Chrome – Another speedy alternative browser, and again only really used for testing.
• Camino – The least used of my browsers, and one for just us Mac users. I do occasionally use it when I feel the need for a stripped down, simple browser.
• Paparazzi – This takes screen grabs of individual web pages, handy for taking screen shots for portfolio pieces and uploading to CSS galleries.
• iTunes – Music all day long with this…
• LastFM – and this, I use LastFM’s radio stations based on similar artists and keywords (my username is djmartinlucas if you’d like to view my profile)…
• Spotify – … and finally this. I’ve only just started using Spotify, but I’m already building a collection of albums and playlists. And to my surprise – I don’t mind the adverts.
• Preview – I use it as my PDF reader, I find it a lot quicker to use than Adobe Acrobat.
• iPhoto Buddy – This is cool, it allows me to have 2 separate iPhoto albums (or more if you wanted), I have one for all my stock photos and a second for my personal photography.
• iPhoto – Store all my photos, both stock and personal ones. Really liking the recent upgrade with faces and better Flickr integration.
• Linotype Font Explorer – I use this to browse and organise all my fonts.
• App Cleaner – If I didn’t have this then I’d end up with a whole load of applications (and all their associated files) installed on my Mac, ones that I had tried out and then forgotten about. This makes it really easy to uninstall any unwanted application, and to make sure all the files have been removed.

I hope there’s a couple of applications in there that you might find useful. I might follow this up with a ‘Showing Off My Menu Bar’ post as there’s one or two neat little applications in there too.

After sorting out a task managing application (see my post on Teux Deux) I went on a mission to find a similarly impressive invoicing app. I was previously using Google Docs to create invoices; exporting them as a PDF and then emailing the invoice as an attachment to my clients. This was OK as I had my invoices backed up / saved to the cloud – which meant they were safe and accessible from any computer or mobile device, the downside was that it took time to write out the invoice, export it and then send the email.

After reading lots of blog posts and articles on various invoicing apps (such as this one from Freelance Switch) and people on Twitter mentioning the applications they use – I went on a search.

After seeing a tweet praising Invoice Machine I decided to give it a go. It’s a gorgeously designed application and has everything I needed, it also didn’t come with all the bells and whistles that many applications came with – which I find can end up weighing them down. I signed up for a free account and set about trying the app. The free account gives you 3 invoices a month – which wasn’t enough, so after playing around for a while I decided to take the plunge and upgrade. This is where my issue with Invoice Machine began, their payment system would not accept my credit card payments, I contacted customer services to see if my issue could be solved – but after a couple of emails to and from Invoice Machine, all went quiet and I didn’t get a solution – so I had to look elsewhere.

The next app I tried was CurdBee, I had previously had a look at the app before choosing Invoice Machine – the feature list and price made it very appealing, but it wasn’t quite as slick in terms of design as Invoice Machine. I chose design over function and it didn’t work out!

Again CurdBee had everything I needed, without it being clogged down with functionality that I didn’t need. I really do believe the best apps do one job brilliantly, and it’s only when they try and do too much they fail. CurdBee has a free account that lets you use it until you feel the need to upgrade – actually the free account is pretty good as it allows for unlimited invoices to be created for an unlimited amount of clients. After trying CurdBee for a while – I again took the plunge, held my breath and decided to upgrade. Crossing all my fingers – payment was accepted and I suddenly had access to unbranded invoices, PDF downloads for my invoices and email reminders that could be sent out for late payments. These 3 features alone are worth the $5.00 per month, I also went a step further and added on recurring invoices for an extra $5.00 a month. This feature is ideal for invoicing my clients for their yearly hosting renewals, I can just set up the invoice and let CurdBee do the rest. You can also add the ability to send estimates for another $5.00 per month – but that’s an option I don’t need.

My work flow now for sending an invoice is logging on to my CurdBee account, clicking on new invoice, filling in the relevant details – which take a couple of minutes, then when it’s done – I click send. CurdBee then sends the email to my client for me, which includes a link for the client to view the invoice online – which is great as I can see when my client has viewed their invoice.

Dave Bond already had a web presence when he asked me to redesign his aging website, he had begun to explore social media and had set up Twitter and Facebook accounts to promote his personal training services, but his website was falling behind in getting across his message. Dave had lots of ideas about content for the site and how it would be kept up to date, with new content being added all the time in the form of articles he had written or sourced – it became very apparent that this should be the main focus on the website. We decided to create a blog style site that would introduce Dave as a personal trainer, and then have the main focus of the site on his articles and blog posts – so people could see how active he is within the community and specifically what he does with the various institutions he works with.

Built using Wordpress, I created a custom theme and used various page templates for each section of the site – this was so that custom sidebars could display post archives and event listings where appropriate, some pages just pulled in recent posts from a specific category, others have content that is able to be edited by Dave. The following plugins were used to either help displaying or to manage content;

Contact Form 7: Definitely one of the easiest form plugins to work with.
Events: A simple events manager, this lets you create events and allows you to display them on a template page.
Get The Image: This is quickly becoming my favourite Wordpress plugin – it displays an image from a post, and is again used on template pages.
Lazyest Gallery: I needed a really simple gallery plugin so Dave could upload images and not have to fuss around with a complex admin area; upload a folder of images to a specific directory (via FTP) and the plugin does the rest to display the images on a page of the site.

Dave is now able to update and manage all the content on his site, as well as publish regularly to his blog; which because the initial home page shows the latest post from each category – will give a fresh look to the site each time a visitor returns to the site.

This was also my first opportunity to work with Wordpress 3, and I’ve got to say – I’m very impressed, it seems to be a lot quicker, more stable and easier to use than previous versions – if that was possible.

View the site here; http://dbpersonaltraining.co.uk

Without doubt the best camera app for the iPhone!

I was a little unsure when I first looked at the app, it wasn’t free which always makes me second guess an app – how many times have you been caught out by an app with a good write up which doesn’t live up to the PR. But in Hipstamatic’s case all the reviews were so positive a jumped in and paid the £1.19… and continued to spend money on the in app products; different flashes, lens and film options to give you even more effects. The Histamart is a very clever bit of business!

The app itself is incredibly simple, there’s the option for changing the lens, film and flash – a shake of your iPhone will shuffle all these and give you a random set of options. On the camera side there’s a view finder – which is a little small, but you get used to it – and a button that takes the photos. Couldn’t be simpler.

The one downside – apart from the small view finder, is the resolution. The photos that are produced are only 600 x 600 pixels! I’m not sure why they’re so small, whether it’s a need to apply the filters quickly – and a smaller resolution image will help there, or if it’s because reducing the image will naturally sharpen and improve the iPhone’s sometimes iffy camera quality. Either way I hope it’s high on their list of improvements – I’d pay for an upgrade that gives me larger images, as I’d love to print some of the photos I’ve taken. Note: I’ve just found out about a setting that allows for high quality pictures, it takes longer to develop the photos, but in return you’ll get 1536 x 1536 pixels. To get this setting, go to Settings on your iPhone, scroll down to Hipstamatic and turn on High Quality, not sure why this wasn’t a setting within the app – or if it was, why it was hidden away or not on as default. Much better.

You can see a selection on my Hipstamatic Flickr set here, and find out more on the app itself on the Hipstamatic website.

I’ve used a number of different methods to manager my task lists, specific todo software titles, iCal tasks and stickies on the OS X desktop; but none of them match up to the ease of use, speed of entry / reading tasks and the superb design of Teux Deux.

It’s a simple web application that shows you a day by day list of your tasks, you can view 5 days at any one time and scroll into the future (and the past). Adding a task is simple, just type it into the box below any day of the week and press Enter, you can move a task by dragging and dropping it into another day’s column, and to edit – just move the task back to the text box below the day name. Once you’ve completed a task – just click on it and instantly it have a line through it, with an additional ‘x’ so you can delete it permanently. If you don’t complete a task by the end of the day – it’s not lost, it will be moved along to the next day. There’s also a “some day” area too, for tasks that aren’t for a specific day, just at some point in the future.

Because it’s a web app I can see my list on any PC or mobile device, and there’s an iPhone App coming soon – which I’m very impatiently waiting for as I’m sure it will be as good as the website version.

Teux Deux has been so important in my day to day work flow, it’s helped organise entire projects as well as little tasks that I’ll usually forget about.

http://teuxdeux.com

I recently started a project that’s being built in Wordpress and requires a gallery to show off photos of recent events, a simple task I thought. How wrong could I of been?!

After trawling the internet, exhausting numerous Google searches and testing a couple of possible gallery plugins – I settled on Lazyest Gallery.

Many of the galleries were much more complicated than what was needed, either in the administration, the uploading of images, or styling it to fit in with the rest of the website. Lazyest Gallery has a simple set of options for the site admin and uploads are done by FTP. No buggy upload scripts, no need to create the galleries and sub galleries first – just upload a folder full of images, with the folder name being used for the gallery name. Simple. There’s no style to the gallery once placed on a page of your site – which is just done with a simple Wordpress short code – so it’s pretty easy to apply a few CSS styles to the images and fit it in with the rest of your website.

The only downsides that I can see so far is the lack of captions for the images – which I’m sure some people would want, and the layouts are put together using tables – which may offend some designers.

You can download the plugin here; http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lazyest-gallery

I’ve just started a Facebook Fan Page, so if you’re on the World’s biggest social network – you can follow and receive website design based updates from me in your newsfeed. I’ll be posting information about the projects I’m working on, as well as news and blog posts that I think will be helpful to website owners and fellow designers. Just follow the link below and sign up by clicking the ‘like’ button.

facebook.com/websitedesignbymartinlucas

You can also find me on Twitter if that’s your preferred network; @martinlucas.

A website that I’ve been working on for quite some time went online earlier this week. I was initally contacted in October last year by RubyFruit, a company that produces a range of jewellery for babies and children. They initially wanted their website in a hurry – built in time for Christmas – this was possible, but ultimately the deadline was brushed aside with the view of taking time to do the website properly and to get it right first time, rather than rush it through before Christmas and then have to make changes after.

The site is completely bespoke and features a number of details that I haven’t had the opportunity to include on previous work, including related products on jewellery pages and multiple category pages – so a product can be featured in more than one place. RubyFruit also allows customers to sign up and register with the site, keeping their address details for future purchases, there is also an optional sign up to a mailing list. The registration is only optional though as we wanted to make purchasing as simple as possible. Payments and the checkout process is handled by PayPal once again, allowing RubyFruit to take payments without having to pay for an expensive credit card payment system – customers also get to use a recognised and trusted payment system that’s continuously improving and growing in reputation.

I’ve had my shiny new iPhone for a couple of weeks now and have enjoyed checking out lots applications and games. He’s just a few of my favourite and most commonly used so far.

Peppermint
Not many of the colour selector / colour palette apps are free, but Peppermint Express is – and the functionality compared to the full paid for version is very good. The app allows you to select a colour from either a colour wheel or sliders, this then generates various sets of palettes depending on if you’re looking for complimentary colours, shades or compound sets of colours, there are 9 different options in total including a custom setting. After finding a palette you like you can save it to one of 3 bookmark slots – these are unlimited in the paid version. Colour theory isn’t a specialist subject of mine, but this app has already helped me to create some really nice palettes for use in websites and logo designs.
iTunes Link

DropBox
Thus one was recommended to me by @si on Twitter – I had previously heard of the DropBox service for online backups and file sharing, but I hadn’t tried it and my app enthusiasm was the ideal reason to do so. First of all, DropBox is amazing, I’ve only signed up for the free 2gb version which is plenty of space to play with, and I’ve already found it useful backing up current project files and some of my photography. The iPhone app is free, and gives you access to all the files you’ve uploaded / backed up, and where possible it will give you a viewable version – this works for PDFs and images along with a number of other formats and documents. You can also upload photos from your iPhone – making it easy to transfer images you’ve taken to a computer, considering Apple doesn’t allow you to transfer files via Bluetooth, and I’m pretty lazy when it comes to getting cables out and syncing my phone to transfer an image or two; this is great – it’s quick too, uploads from a computer on a good Internet connection are visibly quicker than other similar services – uploads from your iPhone will depend on your network connection.
iTunes Link

Camera Plus and GorillaCam
These free apps enhance the basic camera included on the 3Gs, giving you more options including digital zoom, steadying and rapid multishots.
Camera Plus iTunes Link
GorillaCam iTunes Link

7.0 Megapixel Camera
One if the only paid for apps in this list (and it was only 59p), it was something I really wanted to try -it has many of the functions of Camera Plus but with the added upscaling of the 3.2mp iPhone camera to a 7mp; which is quite a jump in size. The photos are never going to be DSLR quality, but if you’re prepared for a little noise and not the sharpest of images then the photos are surprisingly good. The only downside is the slow saving of the images, it seems to take forever to write the file.
iTunes Link

TweetDeck
I’ve been using the Adobe Air version of TweetDeck on PC and Mac for a while now, I love the fact it links to all my social networking accounts; Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Pages, LinkedIn and MySpace. The iPhone app doesn’t quite have all those networks onboard, but it does have multiple Twitter accounts and Facebook. I haven’t used many of the features yet, although I really like the integrated web browser, which saves on quitting the app and going to Safari to see a web link.

It’s interesting that Twitter has recently purchased Tweetie and will be offering that app for free as a renamed Twitter for iPhone app, I’ll definitely be having a play with that to see if it’s a worthwhile alternative.
iTunes Link

MobileRSS
Another essential for me was a stand alone RSS reader, I’ve been using Google’s Reader for a while now so was pleased to find that the free version of MobileRSS works with Google. Set up is easy and it’s really nice to use, reading and navigating through your feeds is easy, it’s a simple app that does one thing really well.
iTunes Link

and finally…

Wordpress
This post was written using the free Wordpress app on my iPhone, I thought it was be a nice statement of what’s possible. The app is great, it allows you to easily log into your Wordpress Dashboard using your blog’s URL, your admin username and password. You need to switch on XML writing within settings first, but from there on you have access to your posts, pages and comments – so you can administer a comment, fix a typo on a page or write out a blog post – just like this one.
iTunes Link

OK, so there’s one more…

TeuxDeux
I’ve just heard that towards the end of April my favourite to do list manager – Teux Deux – will be submitting their iPhone app to Apple for approval. TeuxDeux is a web based, day specific list manager that is really simple, and for me has been essential in my day to day work flow. I for one can’t wait for the app.

When I set up Worm Sign T-Shirts I knew I wanted to use Wordpress as the CMS. Personal projects are a great way of developing and practicing your skills, and it’s not really fair on clients to use them and their websites as guinea pigs, for you to learn new tricks. After having a look into some plugins that would allow me to use Wordpress as an e-commerce website – I knew I wanted to see if Wordpress could do more than just blog.

I initially looked at using the very popular WP Commerce plugin, but it took quite a long time to set up and the learning curve was just a little longer than I what I wanted – I needed something simpler, that I could jump into a use straight away. So I turned to eShop.

It’s real strength is in it’s simplicity – the plugin is very quick to set up and adding products to your site is very easy. The main part of the set up was taken up adding PayPal details and calculating the shipping prices for our T-Shirts, this can be done by country, by weight or by the shopping cart total. There are also options for discount codes and downloads, so eShop will work if you are selling digital music or ebooks.

Products are added either to blog posts or pages, I only wanted to have products on pages and so for each new T-Shirt I’ll create a page with it’s images and text, and then fill in the custom eShop panel to add the “add to basket” functionality, prices and options – which in our case are sizes. This is one of the only downsides of eShop, it only has one set of options when PayPal can accommodate two, it would be great to have a second set of options for different T-Shirt colours. We’ve got around this by having multiple pages for the different colours of T-Shirt from a single design.

This is all the necessary set up needed to get the plugin working, from here it’s all cosmetic tweaks to get the shopping cart and check out pages fitting in with the rest of the website. This has taken a pretty long time to get right, the majority of the styling can be done via a style sheet, but I’ve gone a little further and I’ve edited many of the php files that come with the plugin. I’ve added and removed text, I’ve also cleaned up the check out pages and taken out many of the fields that weren’t needed on our check out process. Now that I’ve edited all these php files, I’m a little stuck becuase any upgrade of the plugin would overwrite all my bespoke changes – so I’m stuck on version 3.5.4 – missing some of eShop’s recent feature additions.

We use PayPal to take payments as this is the only payment gateway that eShop works with, and that is fine – I’ve used PayPal on many of my client’s websites, so I’m familiar with how it works, and so are many website users.Many still have incorrect assumptions about PayPal, for example – visitors may think they need a PayPal account to make a purchase, or that they have to register their details with PayPal – not true. I’ve tried to address this in Worm Sign’s copy, hoping that it will appease any worries a potential customer will have when making a purchase, a simple paragraph in the footer explaining that payments are made securely and that all popular credit and debit cards are accepted. This information is duplicated on our check out pages, and is expanded further in our Frequently Asked Questions page.