The talented, somewhat self-congratulatory folks at 37 signals are launching a new, not-quite-CRM CRM system called Highrise. It is touted as a task manager for business people, rather than a business task manager. Or something like that. In any case, they are known for their clear, uncluttered interfaces, so it’s worth taking a look. A few notable features:
Tasks are grouped into “buckets”, so when you go to the Tasks page, you see “Overdue”, “Today”, “Tomorrow”, “Next Week”, etc. It’s a nice way to make the app communicate like a human being.
Tasks can be grouped into discrete categories, like “Email”, “Call”, etc.
“Blank Slate” screens for areas you are visiting for the first time. They help you though initial setups, like adding initially contacts to your account.
Highrise is being billed as perfect for small businesses…but I don’t see a way to add customer profile fields, or any advanced searching methods. But the idea of using a task manager like this instead of a bloated app like Salesforce will definitely be attractive to smaller companies.
>> Highrise Tasks walkthrough – 37 Signals
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After the redesign of planyourmeetings.com, I was left with a lingering dread about validation. The main site is built on Wordpress, so the content entry done by the editorial staff would be valid; it was the other parts – specifically the Resource Directory – that annoyed me.
While the new Resource Directory – built with phpMyDirectory – is much more advanced than the old one, the code it generates isn’t just tag soup; it’s more like hearty tag chowder. And the question left is: Is it worth re-engineering the back-end code to generate valid XHTML output? My financial sense (a well as my boss) says no, and that irritates the web developer in me. But, even in the face of well-known arguments for valid markup, will you pay the hundreds (thousands?) of dollars and weeks of time it will take to fix?
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…but what logo could possibly be as cool as the Mooneyes logo? Or as iconic as Clay Smith’s cigar-chomping ”Mr. Horsepower”?
These icons are from a time when the fringes of society were simultanteously defining art, literature, and cool - and doing it far from the confines of marketing meetings and brainstorming sessions. The logos shown here are still popular, partly because of what they represent, but mostly because they were created by passionate artists who believed in what they were doing, and who they were doing it for.
Of course, we can’t simply go back to this style of design (nostalgia), nor can we apply the rules of hot rod culture to every industry. But I can’t help but go back to these images from time to time and wonder if designs like these would ever get past a marketing department these days.
>> Mooneyes
>> Clay Smith Cams
>> More logos like these at Porky’s Truck Stop (Warning: this site is so ugly it makes the internet cry.)
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Think you have tight UI specs for your application? Well, take a gander at Oracle’s Browser Look and Feel Guidelines. Larry Ellison’s magic elves have every square pixel documented and explained for your viewing pleasure. The document is a little old (2004), so some of the technology and graphics are dated, and a few of the sections really only apply to Oracle apps. But if you root around a little, you’ll uncover gems like this, taken from the “Language in UI” section:
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Even the most anti-Microsoft web developers have to concede that IE7 is a huge improvement over previous versions. But in the murky world of HTML email, Microsoft has taken a big step back in terms of HTML support. Outlook, which previously used IE to render HTML, now uses Word to do the dirty work with their latest version, Outlook 7.
To be fair, this appears to have much to do with Microsoft being forced to de-integrate IE from their other applications. And, to the developer’s credit, there is documentation and a validation program to help us work around the typical Word/HTML craziness.
>> Microsoft Breaks HTML Email Rendering in Outlook 2007 (Sitepoint)
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