A few weeks back I received an invite to check out JumpChart.com, a tool designed for the quick gathering, editing and deployment of web content. Ironically, we’ve discussed building a tool very much like JumpChart; to assist us with our client content gathering woes. JumpChart beat us to the punch and they did a great job executing the overall application.

Imulus is just like every other agency / development house out there who is frustrated with trying to gather client content for web projects. Typically we start with a timeline which is dead-on and very achievable, yet the project gets delayed because client has under-estimate the amount of work which goes into content writing, gathering and editing. The second part of that problem is the client’s inability to visualize the content they are tossing over the fence in Word, Excel, and PDF format.

JumpChart goes a long way toward solving these problems. The interface is intuitive and extremely useful for quickly building web structures. It took me 10 minutes to layout the structures of a 30 page site. And it took me another 15 minutes to copy & paste in all the client’s content. The resulting effort produced a clickable website skeleton which was publicly accessible by the client. It quickly became apparent to the client that there was much work which needed to be completed before the site could go live. By stripping out information architecture and content from the actual design, it forces the client to evaluate their content structures, page lengths and overall voice before that content is formated and embedded in the website.

Once the client has signed-off on the JumpChart content you can export all the goods in CSS / HTML which can later be imported into your favorite content management system.

To really do this service justice I suggest visiting their website and looking at the video tours. http://www.jumpchart.com/video-tour/

There have been many websites rushing to be “social” due to the success of Facebook, MySpace and Digg. With so many social sites making noise these days it was easy to miss one of the best social websites, patientslikeme.com.

Patientslikeme.com is a community of users with various diseases and illnesses that share their successes and failures as they battle through their experiences. The most refreshing aspect of this website is that it was the brainchild of three MIT engineers, not by some huge pharma corporation. The operating costs of the effort are covered by partnerships with healthcare provides that use annoymized data from the permission-based community.

Users are able to chart their progress, compare stories and rate the effectiveness of various medications. It helps network together shared experiences and provides a community of people who can relate to each other. Although I currently have no use for this site I am glad to know that in the event that I or someone I love gets ill, there is a community of people who I can turn to.

When it comes to OS X tips and tricks I feel pretty ahead of the game compared to most users. That said, every now and then there is a trick that comes along and speeds up my workflow. And for just that reason I think it’s important to share things I do to improve my usage of OS X. Some of these might be extremely common knowledge and some of them might be a bit off the wall but hopefully they’re beneficial. At very least they will give you some ammo for the Windows fanboys of the world.

1. Quick Access Dictionary - If you’re like me and spend a ridiculous amount of time reading articles online it becomes common place to stumble upon words of which you don’t know the meaning. Luckily OS X has a perfect tool for just this instance. While reading simply place your mouse over the word in question and hit cmd-ctrl-D. All of a sudden you will see a small panel with the definition appear next to the word. Bingo bango — no more referring to dictionary.com for all your vocabulary questions.
2. Window Screenshot Mode - Sometimes it’s beneficial to take quick screenshots of the current window, and while cmd-shift-4 is great, it can be somewhat annoying to use. So next time hit cmd-shift-4 then spacebar and you will be given a camera icon that will take a direct picture of your highlighted window.
3. Quick Zoom - Ever needed to quickly zoom in on a photo or video but didn’t want to open up photoshop? OS X has a built in zoom function that can easily be accessed by holding the ctrl key and scrolling with the mouse click-wheel. This is great when you need to view a video in full screen but don’t want to switch applications.
4. Sprung Folders - OS X has a great feature known as spring loaded folders. The gist is that if you drag a document with your mouse over a folder the folder will automatically open and reveal its contents. Hence allowing the user to hold a document and navigate to where it needs to be placed. The problem is that waiting for the folder to spring is slow and annoying. To fix this hit spacebar and the folder will automatically open. Wahla! Now you can quickly move documents without hassle.
5. Doing the most with cmd-tab - Okay, okay, this may seem extremely simple, but I know way too many people that rely on exposé and window clicking to control their applications. Especially when using cmd-tab is such a better solution!
   
   Here’s the deal, instead of exposéing or clicking to an application and then quitting or hiding it just use cmd-tab and simply hit Q (quit) or H (hide) when the application is highlighted in the list. Bang! the app is gone from your list and you never have to actually enter it. This is especially great for apps like Illustrator that don’t have a hide keyboard shortcut by default.
6. Utilize cursor jumping keys - Again, a simple but powerful tip. Instead of using the mouse to navigate the cursor within text simply hold the option+arrow keys to jump in between words (right and left) or paragraphs (up and down). Use cmd+arrows to jump to the beginning or end of a line (left and right) or top and bottom of a text document (up and down). If you want to highlight the text simply hold shift during the above actions or use delete if you want to clear it.

Hopefully these tips help you out in your day to day activities. And I strongly encourage you to post comments of tips that you consider essential. Cheers!

For about the past year I have been using a program by the name of Spotlaser that helps add some functionality to spotlight searches in OS X. Basically it allows the user to have a bit more control over exactly what they enter when looking for a document. For instance: creation date, text within the document, exact filetype, file size, etc. Spotlight is capable of finding all of these things (and more) but at times the default spotlight interface can make it hard to do. Mainly because you are forced to open up a finder window, run a search, and then add a filter rule for each search option. With Spotlaser you can do complex searching in a nice interface without the hassle.

Perhaps in Leopard spotlight will get a better interface but until that happens thankfully we have Spotlaser.

I’m a sucker for heatmaps. I guess I watched the Predator too many times as a child. Map of the Markets gives visitors a heatmap view of the hottest / coolest market sectors, along with the largest movers of the sector pie.

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