As a last minute deal, I’m off to Lanzarote tomorrow with a group of friends. We’re not sure which part we are staying at just yet, but it should be a really really good trip. I’m hoping to get some good rest and relaxation, spend some time chilling on the beach, and get some great photos. I have been to Lanzarote twice before, a few years ago. I liked it for a few reasons, mainly the fact that it isn’t a really popular tourist hotspot such as Tenerife, but also cause it’s a bit different. I don’t know anywhere else which offers black sand!

There’s nothing better than relaxing on the sand, iPod in your ear, sun on your back and camera in hand - ready to head off and shoot some images It will also be nice to say goodbye to my friends in style before we go our seperate ways and head off to university after summer. It hasn’t been cheap, but it will be worth every penny I’m sure.

Expect the photos to be added to the photo blog (which will be all new!) when I get back.

When working on Our Stock Works with my business partner, we had an awful lot of work to do, in many different areas. A lot of emails were thrown back and forth, and we talk a great deal via Adium (we both use Mac’s). This system works very well for a while, but there comes a point where you have a full inbox, and a list of tasks which need prioritising, assigning to one person or the other, and ticking off when they are done.

Enter 37 Signal’s Basecamp.

Basecamp is a unique project collaboration tool. Projects don’t fail from a lack of charts, graphs, or reports, they fail from a lack of communication and collaboration. Basecamp makes it simple to communicate and collaborate on projects.

It certainly does! We’ve been using Basecamp for a long while now, and it’s helped us enormously. I’m going to summarise some of the features, and explain why they’re great:

To Do’s
Pre-Basecamp we simply shuttled emails back and forth to organise things which needed completing. Basecamp offers To Do lists, which can be assigned to any member of the team and be ticked off when complete. Whenever a new to do is added, or one is completed, I am notified through an updated RSS feed in my feedreader. It keeps me up to date with what my business partner is doing (and vice versa).

Writeboards
Some emails are really important. They need to be worded just right, and come across perfectly. This means they need to be collaberated on when writing them. Writeboards are an amazing way to do this, offering collaberative changes and brilliant version tracking highlighting what’s altered since the last edit.

Milestones
If only iCal offered an easy way to share a calendar with a specific person. Hopefully that’s coming in Leopard, but for now, Basecamp offers a solution. You can set targets and milestones of specific dates, and subscribe to this through an iCal feed. This keeps us both up to date and makes sure we hit our targets and deadlines.

One thing we haven’t yet utilised is Campfire. This is another 37 Signal’s product, offering online chat facilities between a group of people. It integrates and plays nicely with Basecamp. At present, we’re happy with our MSN messenger solution (via Adium), but this may be more useful in the future with it’s logging and file preview services.

Another great thing about Basecamp is it’s Web 2.0 AJAX functionality, built over Ruby on Rails. It really feels like a professional application with incredible user design, and an intuitive layout. Text isn’t overused, they say what they need to in order to make the system user friendly and straight forward.

If you’re looking for a system to help you organise a project, share files, documents and to do lists. If you want all this to be updated via email and RSS, managed from a central location and really intuitive to use - Basecamp will be perfect for you. Check it out.

It’s a really busy time for me at the moment. I’ve had a fantastic summer so far - visiting Austria and Germany as well as going to New Wine for a week. I’ve also been setting up Our Stock Works and working on other personal web design projects.

So what’s up next? Well I’ve just finished my A-Level education, which means I’m off to university next year. I’m going to Manchester University to study a BSc in Management. This is a three year course, which should be really interesting. I’m hoping to build on the Business and Management qualifications and experience I have so far, and really further myself in that area. I’m looking forward to meeting new people and getting some quality teaching.

I’ll be staying in university halls at a place called Dalton Ellis. They seem like a really nice place to live, with lots of facilities such as tennis and squash courts, a snooker room and, of course, the local bar. It’s in an area of Manchester called Victoria campus, around 0.7 miles from the centre. I’m really looking forward to moving there. Whilst I’m sure I’ll miss home, It’ll be a great experience and another step further forward in my life!

After selling my Mac Mini with my old Logitech keyboard and mouse, it was time for a refresh. I thought it was definitely time to buy a system which would fit perfectly with my full time mac usage. I’m getting tired of reaching for the wrong keys, and having to re-map all those Windows hotkeys. The S530 seemed perfect, and arrived today.

It’s a really beautiful piece of kit as I’ve come to expect from Logitech. It has a low profile streamlined design which is really appealing, and it’s white colouring really makes it fit with the Mac experience. It all connected up fine, and worked straight away. It even had plastic protective strips covering the shiny areas of the keyboard to make sure it wasn’t damaged or discoloured in it’s box. Attention to detail is impressive.

It’s got dedicated keys on the keyboard for applications such as Safari, Mail, Spotlight (which I re-mapped straight away to Quicksilver), iTunes and iPhoto. These are great, and it’s fantastic to have them built for Mac rather than putting up with the Internet Explorer logo brandished across your keyboard. They work flawlessly.

The mouse is the most ergonomic and pleasant I’ve ever used. It hugs the hand perfectly, and has buttons in all the right places. I’ve set them so that one is for showing the desktop via Expose, one for showing all applications via Expose, one for up/downing the volume and one for mute. Pressing the middle button either opens dashboard with a quick press or ejects the CD when held down.

A lovely keyboard and mouse set, which I’d recommend 150% to any Mac user who knows they like Logitech products and wants one which fits their Apple experience.

Phone contracts can be annoying, because when the time comes to upgrade the choice can be a very difficult one. I’m in the process of negotiating a new student deal for university, and I could have any of the great phone above for free. Which one to choose? I’m a firm believer that writing your thoughts down can make a decision much easier to come to, so here goes:

Sony Ericsson K800i
I’m a huge Sony Ericsson fan. My last four phones have all been Sony Ericssons, and I’ve found every one to be fantastic (apart from the odd faulty joystick). However, they seem to be losing their innovative edge. The progression and difference between each phone previously was huge, but I’m not sure how much of a step the K800 is. Sure, it has a nice 3mpx camera, but I’ve got a Sony 5mpx shooter I use when I’m taking photos. Equally, a Xenon flash doesn’t really impress me. It’s quite big and bulky, but I’m drawn to it purely because it’s a Sony Ericsson like I’m drawn to Apple. It’s also 3g, which might be coming more important in the near future as the price of video calls drops.

Samsung E900
This is a beautiful phone. On beauty alone, I’d be sold. It has touch sensitive buttons (I absolutely loved that about the older iPods), and a nice slider mechanism. No complaints there really. I’ve never used a Samsung before, so it would be a learning curve getting used to menus and the difference in predictive text etc, but I don’t think it would be a problem at all. I like learning new things! It’s got a 2mpx camera, but I’ve heard about issues with lag leading to blurry snaps. It’s also not 3g which is a slight but not too important downer.

Samsung P300
Well there’s a lot to say about this one. I absolutely love the design - the retro calculator looks is both professional and stunning. I think it’s a great concept, and always loved little pocket calculators (the same can’t be said for maths…). It’s got a comparitively poor camera however, and no 3g. It does come with a classy leather case with a built in extra battery - which would be cool - but this does add to the overall width. It’s tiny - almost small enough to fit in your pocket. What I really don’t like? There’s no external memory card slot - so I’d be stuck with the (albeit not bad) 80mb internal memory. Then again, I’ve never used an external memory card in my Sony Ericsson K750i….

It’s a tricky choice, and I’ve got a feeling I’ll end up going for the Samsung E900. I need to head into town at some point and try to pit the various networks against each other for the best deal - that’s always fun. I’ll probably do a review of the one I end up choosing at some point. If anyone’s got any comments, feel free to share.

Apple’s products are often very focused on the consumer market, striving to provide features to allow you to manage your personal photos, music, documents and data. The iLife suite is a feature packed bag of goodies which handles anything you throw at it with style and ease. But what about a Mac as a business tool?

I’ve recently set up a new company – a stock photography website (Our Stock Works) - and myself along with another director have used solely Apple’s products in collaborating and going through the process of launching the business. It has been a hassle free and streamlined process from the word go, and I’m going to cover some of the features and applications we’ve used in our workflow.

Website Design and Programming

We prefer to do things as ‘old school’ as possible, and don’t use too many of the fancy tools available. For coding and programming the website, we used a combination of Dreamweaver and TextWrangler. For graphic design we used Adobe Photoshop, and for FTP we used Transmit. It’s a fairly standard set of tools which are widely accepted. There were a couple of slightly less widely known ones which made things easier too:

• Visor – This made SSH with the server really user friendly
• DigitalColour Meter – It’s built into OSX, but not used as much as it could be
• CocoaMySQL – Perfect for managing the database
• Safari Webkit - with web inspector

Shared Calendars

By default, iCal doesn’t allow you to share calendars from one computer to another. This functionality would have been absolutely ideal, and will most likely be coming in Apple’s next operating system – Leopard. The way we used shared calendars was with the help of 37Signal’s Basecamp software. We set events and milestones in Basecamp, which were automatically downloaded and shared between everyone’s computer.

It was great to know that people weren’t missing out on important events, and had no excuse not to meet those deadlines!

Website Testing

One of the most important things when setting up an online presence is to know that it works cross operating system, cross browser. This has often been a problem on a Mac to test, as we’re still unfortunately in a minority. Ensuring your site works on Safari doesn’t mean it’ll look right in the questionably incompliant Internet Explorer. Until the advent of Intel based Mac’s, I was required to swap my keyboard, mouse and monitor over to a Windows based machine and then boot up separately to test the layout in IE. Hardly ideal! Boot Camp was released during the term of this project, and that simplified things to an extent being able to run Windows on my MacBook.

Far surpassing all these is Parallels Desktop however. Being able to hit ‘alt’ and seamlessly switch between Mac and Windows is simply a dream come true. It makes testing a no hassle procedure, and we’re proud to say that Our Stock Works looks great cross browser.

Easy Aperture

One of the most important aspects of Our Stock Works is being able to find the image you’re looking for. We do this using titles, descriptions and tags. The obvious way to enter these into our system is through a standard web upload form, ‘tagging’ the image as you upload the file. That’s how most other people do it.

Whilst we offer that, we also read IPTC data from the image when it’s uploaded. This allowed us to do some interesting things with Aperture. Imagine you’re on the road shooting images, but can’t dial up to the internet to upload and tag them. You can simply enter the keywords and details into Aperture, then when you come to upload the images all the tagging is done seamlessly. Aperture is a great tool I’d like to focus on more in the future.

Conclusion

From our experience, we’ve learned that Apple’s tools aren’t all for the consumer. There are so many ways to enhance your organization with Mac products that there’s no longer any reason not to! Some pro applications (Aperture etc) do fit the professional bill, but often it’s the standard consumer applications which can take on a whole new use when integrated with other systems (iCal and Basecamp for instance).

I hope you feel inspired to try some of this with your own project!