Monthly Archives: October 2006

TextMate's Little Surprises

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TextMate really is my favorite text editor, ever. About the only software I use more is my web browser. I particularly like the option to stay on the “cutting edge,” which means you get an updated version every few days, usually with some new features or bug fixes.

Yesterday’s version, however, had an extra little surprise – the empty document window had, instead of its usual faint logo on a white background, a big black area with a spider web in it. Strange, I thought. Only today did I get it, when I noticed that the applications icon had changed as well:

TextMate icon

Pretty cute. Happy Halloween to you, too!

99 Cents

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This is kind of a random musing here, but… I wonder who was the first person to price something just below an even amount. That is, who first decided to charge 99 cents rather than a dollar?

That’s gotta be some kind of historic event in modern capitalism.

Feature Juggling

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As we near the launch date of our raw foods recipes website, we’ve had to juggle a number of features and do our best to keep it simple. Because as we all know, the simplest thing possible is also the most likely to get launched on time!

Our main goal was to make the best website we could in a month – October. Thus, we are giving our first public showing at the PDX Web Innovators meeting this Wednesday, November 1st, and will be launching shortly thereafter. We have a heck of a long list of features we want to add, but for now we’re focusing on the key features:

  1. Browse raw food recipes.
  2. Discuss and rate the recipes.
  3. Add and track your own recipes.

Yeah, it’s simple. In fact, we’ve deliberately held back some features we’d even planned for launch, just so that we could be sure to get the recipes right from day one.

Being designers ourselves, it’s difficult to focus on the features and not the design. This can kill a project like this, because we have to write the code too! So for this project, we made ourselves a rule that we couldn’t work on the design until the last week in October. This has helped a lot (especially for me) because it forced us to spend most of our time thinking about the nuts and bolts, and by the time we got to working on the design, we already had most of our ideas worked out. It also kept the project on track.

Projects like this are a lot of fun for us. I think of it as a second job. Our “day job” is designing beautiful websites, often Flash-based, for creative clients. Very right brain stuff, and we’re fortunate to make a living at it. And after our client project work is done for the day, doing a bit of programming along with a design of our own adds a bit of left brain to the mix… and it’s almost relaxing!

Masu East

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Our friends at Masu have just opened a new location in SE (in Laurelhurst)! We had a grand time at their opening celebration last night, sampling some of the most delicious sushi we can remember. You must visit this new spot and take time to take in the incredible interior design as well.

Masu East

Aggresive Outsourcing!

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Today is the third time in as many months that we’ve received a cold call from India, offering programming or testing services. Each time, the caller explains that they’ve been looking at our websites and projects, and they think they can offer us the best rates.

I just find it strange that those are the only sales calls I get! Welcome to the 21st Century, I guess.

Save Your Boxes!

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Just a brief note to let everyone know that we’ve moved our office, and we’re all settled in and working away. Love the new place!

Here’s a tip, however. Save your boxes! I was amazed to find that we’d saved a box for just about every piece of equipment we’ve ever bought as a business. They’re priceless for moving – if they’re good enough to ship UPS they’re good enough for movers.

Oh yeah, and hire movers, if you can! My back just isn’t what it used to be.

Moving on Up

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Looking for a little help getting the word out about your site…creative business cards perhaps? Curious to know about Needmore’s new studio? Check out October’s edition of Needmore News.

Also, effective immediately, our new studio address is:

3729 SE 67th Avenue
Portland, Oregon 97206

Why Living Recipes?

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Here at Needmore, we’ve been known to enjoy quite a bit of cheese and wine. When we traded our cheese plates for raw hummus and crackers, something drastic changed in our thinking about food. We became passionate learners and creators – to the point of actually enjoying trips to our local New Seasons and scouring recipe books for ways to enjoy raw food.

Our excitement about living foods has spilled into other passions of ours – building community and web design. And, we think our living foods site is going to be a huge success! Is the site is for everyone? No way. Will people exited about living foods enjoy the site? Yes – we are already! Scott Adams notes today:

If everyone exposed to a product likes it, the product will not succeed…The reason that a product “everyone likes” will fail is because no one “loves” it.

We’re betting on love here at Needmore!

Why Apple Should Release a Personal Finance Program

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So it’s been a few years, and I decided to upgrade to Quicken 2007 the other day. I’ve been really keeping on top of my finances, and I wanted to be sure that I had the best software I could get for this kind of thing. Unfortunately, Quicken 2007 for Mac is pretty darned lame.

Now, just as a Mac application, it’s bad enough. It seems as though it hasn’t really been updated for five or ten years. It feels like a “classic” app, meaning it was written for the old school Mac OS, and was just given a quick change of clothes and some makeup to get it working in OS X. But that’s a terrible shame, because it shows. It feels clunky and it looks ugly.

Even worse, I’ve used Quicken 2007 for Windows. It’s better. It has many more features, looks like it’s been cared for, and it seems more stable. Sure, there’s a few Mac-specific perks that are missing, like .Mac sync’ing and the new dashboard widget. But come on, that doesn’t hold up to all the features you get in the Windows version. Just look on Amazon, where its average rating is somewhere between one and two stars. Not good.

Now I know PC’s are far, far more popular than Macs. But I seriously doubt the Windows version would be that much better if Microsoft didn’t have Money competing with it. A little competition is a good thing! Because there’s no serious competition on the Mac platform, the innovation just isn’t there. Intuit has gotten lazy. I’d love to see Apple do what Microsoft did and make a decent competitor on the Mac platform. If nothing else, I bet Quicken 2008 would be a whole lot better.