I’ve just run a quick lab test on Seamless Studio by ColourLovers (you know who THEY are, right?).  Prepare for long evenings designing palettes in ColourLovers (subject of my next post) and then designing patterns in their Seamless Studio App.

There’s not too much to tell – clearly it’s a focussed software!  You build your palette and you use the handy Studio tools to draw your pattern.  Wavy lines, boxes, symbols – all the tools are there – just slap ‘em in, arrange them and let seamless take care of the overlap and export.  Sweet!

I thought creating patterns was great – then I started building palettes for them in Colour Lovers website – which is the subject of my next post.  Read on, McDuff!

The aim of this blog is offer to our readers insights from the field of, mainly, Website Design and Development. Our mandate is simple: we research and discover new tools and developments online, and we share them with you.  What we stick in our “labs” folder – we share with you.

Today we decided to install the Disqus plugin to replace the humble WordPress Comments system – which is perfectly fine and excellent of course – but the D2T remit is to research, test and review the tools available to website owners.

Looking at the Disqus platform from outside, it looks like a supercharged comments form neatly built and maintained.  And it is!  Installing is a cinch:  The plugin is well-developed, tidy and with a clean and handy interface.  It integrates tightly with the Disqus website of course, and they guarantee WordPress comments are not lost, they are in fact “synced” with the Disqus servers (consider your privacy issues there).

One of the better facets of this tool is that, thanks to the Disqus platform tools, we get not only a great comments platform, but effectively an efficient Community Management Platform – so in demand in these social times.

For now it’s in the labs category.  We’ll run it for a while and see how it holds up, then finish up this review.  We are sure the plugin is great in terms of professional quality,  so have no hesitation in testing it yourselves on your own weblog or webpage.  Great for customer support.

You will find all you need here on the Disqus website.

Apart from a nifty interface, LittleSnapper (link below) will grab areas, windows and entire webpages (through its built in web browser).  Then you can sort them into collections, edit, tag, rename, export – generally all the usual functions and then some.

Plus LittleSnapper can upload straight to FTP or other Cloud software services.  Used to be Ember, for which I opened an account, then they closed it (shame).

If you are looking for mac screen-grab software – get yours here: http://www.realmacsoftware.com/littlesnapper/

What’s so good about it?  You may or may not know that when you install, and uninstall, programs on your computer a whole bunch of junk is installed, and not uninstalled, alongside it.  Cleanmymac ensures all this extra junk is flushed away alongside the uninstall.

Caches – where are they?  Clean ‘em out.  Do you know what Universal Binaries are?  Clean ‘em out.  Plus Logs and unused Language Files – get rid of ‘em, you (probably) don’t need ‘em.

Plus it cleans out a bunch of other system junk like trashes (you don’t know what they are?) and probably some other acronyms and extensions; I’m not going to go into a list here – take a look at the software itself (link below).

All I say is: If you can’t be bothered to dig around inside folders to gain a few gigs then install this:  Oh, and here is the link:

Clean My Mac

Nb: It’s not free – which is why it’s good.  But it’s worth it!

The Pro of this equation is that Cloudflare promises to – and I quote:

…optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources.

The Quo of the equation is that all our web traffic is diverted through these guys, perforce.  What this might actually mean is something I am still pondering.  But in the meantime I have gratefully accepted Mediatemple’s offer of easy-integration (one click install! Love you guys) and placed it on a test site beta.  We’ll see what happens.

Mediatemple acolytes will find Cloudflare automatically available for automagic installation in their control panel. Otherwise non (mt) bods will find Cloudflare here.

NB: I saw some reports of issues with CNAMEs and other custom DNS configurations – just a heads-up.

Without going into enormous detail about it’s simplicity and seamless background backup (we are plugging this program but unfortunately no affiliate linking will win us any passive income – listening Haystack?) we will simply point you to the website and confidently state: this is simply the best backup software for Mac owners… period.

http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/

iPhone users can also get double the pleasure by installing the app and syncing the information direct to your portable “Chum” (i.e. iPhone).

TripIt | Online travel itinerary and trip planner.

UPDATE:

Since we looked at CSS Edit, which is was a pretty nifty tool for quick CSS editing, visually – and great for sorting into groups!  It seems MacRabbit has bundled all their apps into Espresso – their own HTML/CSS file editing software.

We will take a look at Espresso in another post.  At the moment we use Coda, so a face-off between the two would be a pretty interesting post.

In the meantime follow the link to take a look yourselves.

http://macrabbit.com/espresso/

One interesting stats product we did find, which, incidentally, also has a freebie package (to keep up with Google on the value front) was GetClicky.

GetClicky has some neat functions which Google does not (like Twitter stats and a whole bunch more), but what we like is that it basically shakes up the data in a nice and friendly way and allows us simply to just get a fresh view on the (pretty much) same stats.

Go check it out.

UPDATE:

Chrome is clearly now available on the Mac – and a great, great browser it is too.  We use it as a secondary browser for running Google accounts – primary browser being Safari at the moment.  Firefox has slipped a little down the browser list for being too damned heavy!

For me, working at D2T Studio and being a creative designer, my reviews will be biased towards design and ease-of-use, with a more cursory glance over technical issues.  I am testing out the freebie accounts which can be quite limited, but they will be fine for this brief overview.  I hope you find it useful.

BlinkSale

Blinksale is actually the last product I looked at out of these three, but, thanks primarily to the design and layouts, it´s already probably my favourite (unless something goes horribly wrong technically).  The design is really sweet, it´s very easy to use and really quick and intuitive, easily the best interface out of the lot.   Technically not as complete as Zoho for example, but it´s simplicity is what I love most about it.

It has most of the basic functions you will need for invoicing, and you will be setup and running in no time at all.  Also it integrates nicely with Basecamp which is another excellent web2 product that will probably stay the distance.

If they beefed up the connectivity with other products and widgets as Freshbooks did, this billing software could be just perfect.

The product is designed and built by a small team located in Southlake, Texas and Blinksale was awarded the CNET Webware award in 2007.

Accounts range from the Freebie which entitles up to 3 invoices per month, through the lowest package at $12 to $45 a month.

www.blinksale.com

FreshBooks

Freshbooks, the Canada based service, has already roused quite a serious following, with over 700,000 subscribers.  The system is quite complete, tracking invoices, expenses, time and full reporting.  The interface is simple, if a little clunky and old-fashioned (if that can be said about web2).  Nothing as slick as the Blinksale interface or as organised as the Zoho, but still perfectly usable.

Freshbooks integrates with Payment Gateways: Paypal and Authorize, amongst others.  More importantly, it integrates with Basecamp and has a host of tasty Add-ons which basically takes it to the next level, beyond the other two mentioned here for pure connectedness (if you can say that).  How about tracking your time from your OSX Dashboard, or even iPhone?  Connect directly to Xpenser (Expenses) and Oprius (CRM).

Free accounts limit you to 3 clients, but unlimited invoices.  Paid accounts range from $14 to $149.

www.freshbooks.com

Zoho

Zoho is the Web 2 version of AdventNet, a software company from California setup in 1996.  They have various integrated products, however here I will concentrate on the Invoicing side.  I´d better cut to the chase:  Zoho is very easy to setup, very complete and works very effectively.  Obviously plenty of thought and experience has backed up this excellent online product.  Also a plus is the possibility of integrating the other modules that Zoho offers with Invoicing for a more complete solutions package.

The design is clean and straightforward, intuitive and, thanks to the step-by-step approach, very easy to use.  On the downside, adding your logo isn´t too easy as Zoho resizes it to fit their dimensions, which means opening photoshop.  There are several pre-designed templates available too, and you can even add your own.

Three Payment Gateways are available at time of writing; Paypal, Google and Authorize.net.  Sent invoices will include a direct link to payment online.

Message Templates are included, and are very comprehensive, and can be completely personalised.

Finally, reporting is comprehensive; Sales Reports, Tax Reports and Customer Reports, amongst others are available at all times.

Free accounts allow you to send up to 5 invoices per month, which isn´t much.  Paid accounts range from $8 to $35 dollars.

www.zoho.com