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WEB AFRICA TO THE RESCUE (AGAIN)

// May 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // geek stuff

So I’ve had my week’s worth of being mostly unconscious, and am almost ready to rejoin the blogoshphere (if only to get that damn picture off my homepage – there’s only so much one can take of David Hasslehoff’s crotch).

As you will see, the blog has yet another template and a shiny new host in Web Africa – the switchover was pretty disastrous (and more than this I shall not mention for fear of inventing new swearwords – suffice to say, nothing to do with them and mostly to do with my not backing up regularly enough plus a hearty dose of  miscommunication) and my whole database was inadvertently jettisoned into cyberspace. Fortunately for me, these guys were really on the ball and helped me restore it within 24 hrs, not to mention being super-friendly and very patient with the n00b I am.

A couple of hiccups later, and all is as it should be. The theme, and I know there’s still a lot of orange (I like orange, OK – my genes were spliced in the 70′s), is in it’s infancy, and I intend to do much experimentation and adding of exciting new plugins and widgets. The quotes widget, which I totally love, and which didn’t seem to work with my last template is now mostly working and will be updated frequently. There are many things about the blog and theme which need work, I do know this and I am working on it (when I have time), but any feedback or comments would be much appreciated.

That’s it for now…a really big THANKS to Web Africa for all their help in restoring my database – you get the superhero-of-the-week award. Thanks also to Jayx for hosting up till now.

MAILFIRE GOES ABOVE AND BEYOND

// March 5th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // business, geek stuff, marketing

This is a post that is way overdue, and to those about whom it is written, I apologise for my tardiness. It is another work-related post, but allow me to allay your fears, dear readers, that this trend toward the serious is not permanent and all manner of frippery, tomfoolery and lollygagging will soon return to this blog.

As I have previously stated, it takes a lot for me to either promote or burn anything online, and a while back I did a serious burn on our bulk mail service providers, Mailfire . What I didn’t say, was that takes even more to get me to change my mind about something (being a Leo, I’m just about as stubborn and single-minded as they come). It rarely happens. Like the Yeti, it is more a rumour than a certainty. Few have seen it, ask my friends (better yet, ask my ex-friends).

That said ladies and gents, here you have it live: Mailfire…I’ve changed my mind. Two days after I posted my rant on the company, I received an email from the General Manager of Web Africa, Rupert Bryant. He requested a meeting with us, apologised for all the problems we’d experienced, offered us a month’s refund and a 100% discount our upcoming fees. He pulled people off leave (and to you guys, I’m really grateful), set up a brainstorming session at our earliest convenience and assigned us our own designated support team.

We duly met 5 days later with Rupert, 2 developers and our sales consultant, Tyron. Far from the stuffed shirts I was expecting, I was utterly astounded at this dynamic young team and how openly they were willing to listen to and work with us (AND they didn’t get all pissy that I’d been so rude online, which is definitely what I would have done, and which is why I’ll never make it in PR ).

I outlined the most pressing problems we were having, namely that:

1.  Their WYSIWYG editor was generating code that was not recognised by the majority of mail clients, where the actual html rendered perfectly in Litmus ( a SUPER awesome app for anyone who designs html email, btw!) testing.

2.  There was no direct html paste and send function, which would bypass the problems caused by the WYSIWYG editor (this is a pretty standard feature on most bulk email clients, catering to companies that have an in-house designer who sets up and sends the mail as desired). So what we wanted was a simple html >> paste >> send, no editing stages to bung in extraneous code where code should not be. For those users who are not able to code, the editor would have to be modified to ONLY generate code which was compliant with email clients.

These were prioritised as the two problems to be tackled first as they would fix the rendering issues we had been experiencing.

We identified a number of further issues which hampered user friendliness and efficiency, which were considered less urgent, including:

1.   A separate image gallery allowing us to upload and delete images, and harvest the image URL to be used for design purposes.

2. A number of issues relating to subscriber lists (which I don’t really deal with so I can’t go into too much detail), including -

• the option to prevent sending duplication when a sender appeared on more than one list selected for sending, but allowing a user to be on more than one list and to move easily from one list to another.
• The ability to search the lists for specific subscribers and modify that subscriber’s user account.
• Uploading of lists via zipped CSV files.
• Downloading subscriber lists with a number of options as to the amount of information required by the user.

3.  The actual appearance of some of the back end features, which were quite small and difficult to work with.

4.  The order in which sent mails were displayed and the ability to mass-delete old and defunct mails which tended to clog up the account (pretty quickly with us, as we send so much mail)

These were the chief issues – I think a number of others have since been identified and tackled by the Mailfire team (please feel free to correct me guys).

Once the meeting was concluded, Mailfire snapped to action and immediately provided us with our own ‘point man’, Constant Laubscher, who has been an absolute pleasure to work with. He sent me almost daily updates on the progress the developers were making (which was much speedier than I had anticipated) and we proceeded to test and tweak the new features as they were released. Within a week (10 days after the blog post – WOW) we had a fully functional plain html paste feature, meaning an end to our rendering issues.

A few days later, we had the gallery function working properly (a huge bonus for in-house designers, and one the many bulk mailers don’t offer). When using Internet Explorer obviously there were issues with getting this right, and it works a bit differently in that browser than in browsers that sane people use, like Firefox.

With these 2 things in place, compilation and accurate sending of the newsletters was made infinitely quicker and easier and they went out and were now received by the end user as they were designed.

The developers have been working on the other issues on the list in the background, and we still have a few kinks to iron out and extensive testing is ongoing as there seem to be, for example, text conversion errors on Outlook 2007 (CURSE your suckiness Microshit and your sucky email client and your sucky web browser!) Also, there have recently been some instances where it has taken several hours for a mail to be processed. We head into a follow-up meeting tomorrow in order to go over these final problems, and if the support we’ve received in the last 2 months is anything to go by, these will be resolved in no time.

I actually cannot say enough good about these guys though. They totally went above and beyond for us – how often would you find a company that is not only willing to listen to a client’s issues, but totally redesign a system for them? They admitted mistakes had been made and rectified them quickly with no ‘ands’, ‘buts’ or bullshit, and they continue to offer prompt and competent personalised support for any problems that may occur (which, if you are sending out emails that have to go out at a certain time such as press releases, is an absolute life-saver).

I’d venture to say that I think we’ve done them a favour too, by helping to improve a application which would probably have hit problems down the road if we hadn’t thrown our toys. But they met the challenge and pulled out all the stops to make sure we had a fully functional system. And this in time for an election campaign, of which a large part is digital, and of that part, at least 50% in the form of email.

SO…my mind is solidly changed, well done guys – you have restored my faith in that elusive dream of service excellence!

And here’s the kicker: Mailfire is by FAAAAR and away the most affordable bulk email solution available in South Africa – at around R3000 per month for 200 000 emails, it’s about ¼ of the price of any of the other recognised bulk mail solutions, such as Mailchimp – between R8500 and R10 000 per month ; Campaign Monitor – R14 000 for 200 000 emails, plus R50 per email, and Striata who quoted about R13000 for 50 000 emails, meaning 200 000 hits the R50 000 mark!

The Mailfire 10 out of 10:

score 1 | the guy at the top took an interest and got involved personally.

score 2 | they admitted they were wrong.

score 3 | they compensated us.

score 4 | they showed a firm commitment to rectifying the problem from day one.

score 5 | they listened to us and took our concerns and advice seriously.

score 6 | they fixed the problem quickly and kept us informed.

score 7 | they continue to provide amazing support (a huge improvement from before), and we have our own ‘point man’.

score 8 | they are continuing to improve the system and keeping us informed as they do.

score 9 | they have been professional, courteous and engaging throughout the entire process.

score 10 | their rates KICK ASS!!

THE DA WEBSITE – MY TWO CENTS

// February 25th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // business, geek stuff, marketing, politics

I very seldom write about work on this blog as it is largely dedicated to pure self-indulgence, and the two really don’t mix in my experience. That said, last week saw the culmination of nearly two years of effort in putting together the DA’s new website, launched last Thursday and that definitely merits a mention.

We began serious conceptualising on the site around 18 months ago, although I had been squirreling ideas away since 2006, ideas which got ever more exciting as developments in Web 2.0 and social media unfolded. Using these, I drew up a long and detailed proposal which went through numerous collaborative reviews after which we put it out to tender early last year. After reviewing quotes and companies, we chose World Wide Creative headed up by Mike Perk and Fred Roed to harness our vision and optimise our most important means of communication with South Africans online.

From the outset, Fred and Mike inspired confidence in making the whole creative process crystal clear and outlining the design and development procedures step by step. The first thing we did was brainstorm the needs of our prospective audiences and potential for including social media elements and we later moved on to the more detailed processes like site design and structure. The actual process was way too involved to go into here, suffice to say that we felt we were in good hands from day one and all my fears in tackling a project of this size were quickly allayed.

The site that was launched last week, while adhering to the underlying ideas laid out in the proposal, ended up being not only very different, but much improved in a number of respects due to the extensive research and marketing expertise added to our ideas by the development team.

Unfortunately, the launch date was unavoidably moved back several months from the intended date last November due to changes in our corporate identity. Several people have commented that we’re too late to launch this close to an election and that the site won’t have any impact on our campaign. I have 2 comments here. The first is that the website is way more than an election campaign tool, and is intended to serve as a portal for communication with our supporters at all times (reinforcing the fact that we are not just a party who pops up around election time, but wants to engage with the public all the time).

The second (and I am generalising here) is that Joe Public generally doesn’t take an interest in politics until a couple of weeks before an election. I can tell you this from personal experience as the one who watched the web stats in the last 2 elections (2004 and 2006). The peak in stats only started around 1 month before the election, with the highest spike in interest occurring from about a week before the election until about 2 days afterwards. As has been pointed out, we cannot compare the situation in this country and thus this web strategy to one like Obama’s in the US where web penetration is almost total, and while an earlier launch would have been nice, I don’t believe it would have made that much difference in terms of the stats and their implications.

When I talk about Joe Public, incidentally, I’m referring to the majority of web users in this country – I mean the people who are generally logged in for less than 10 hours a week and who are actually out getting on with living the rest of the time, not the small community of several thousand online social media experts (self named?), bloggers and geeks whom I all love very much, but some of whom (as Melissa said on Nic’s post) “are so far up there arses that they are out there to slam and test and poke holes in any new SM strategy”. So far up their own arses they’re seeing daylight in some cases, methinks.

The sites (and I’ve only really focused on the main site so far, www.da.org.za – the other one launched was contributetochange.org.za) actually provoked a lot of positive feedback online as well as the usual blunt dissections by the whingers and moaners which we’ve come to expect. In the end and without meaning to offend anyone, while it’s great that the site stands up to online review (and we did invite bloggers such as Justin and Chris to the launch because we wanted feedback from those in the know), the ‘experts’ are only a tiny percentage of our target audience, and the site and strategy are really not aimed at them (except perhaps the more specialised online tools such as twitter and the social media links).

The internet provides such a comfy mask and such a versatile soap-box that it is very easy for the online-savvy to be critical (of almost everything actually) – what they tend to forget is that their narrow world view is just that, narrow – a mere sliver of the rich and powerful tapestry that makes up the collective experience of South Africans. Some people are so busy knowing everything that they stop thinking about anything outside the paradigms they are comfortable with and forget that the majority of South Africans are just regular ouens, who may know what Facebook is, but don’t give a toss about SEO, social media strategy and blogging. The experts who forget this would do well to pull their heads out and subject themselves to some serious self examination.

It’s actually something I see quite a lot working in politics, and something that we are constantly reminded of by our brilliant strategists “Do NOT assume because your friends, parents, tennis partners, the lady in the shop (insert stereotype here) think XYZ, that the rest of the country thinks XYZ too” – it’s a special form of psychological extrapolation that’s easy to fall prey to. The number of times I’ve heard some cougal pipe up and say “well my MAID says that…..”, the implication being “all black people think that…” – It just isn’t that simple, people just aren’t that simple, and to assume they are is the grossest of insults.

The first thing Fred said to us when we met to discuss the site and something which really stuck, was “be authentic” – great advice on both personal and professional levels. Advice that we followed. So the long and short of it is this. These sites area tools – tools made to be gripped with both hands and used by the people who want to know about us, the people who want to talk to us, the people who want their voices, ideas and opinions heard and responded to, the people who want to engage and get involved on any level they desire. These are not people who are going to look at our online presence and try to pick it apart. They are the people who are going to look at it and say “hey – these guys are making it easy for me…perhaps I will get involved…perhaps I will write a letter to the press, or donate R10 via sms” That’s what we’re after, and judging by the response to our volunteer programme so far, that’s what we’re getting.

As for the place of our onlince strategy in the campaign as a whole, Nic questioned the amount of money put into the online campaign and its potential returns. While we obviously can’t divulge that, the cost is but a fraction of that being spent on the election campaign as a whole (as the potential reach is but a fraction of that of the more traditional methods of campaigning). As for the returns, we will only see them as they happen, as we are as curious as everyone else to see what kind of impact our strategies will have.

Just a final word: This post was not written to diss ‘online experts’ and I do apologise if I’ve offended anyone, it was merely meant to provide a view from this side of the fence

L2R: Me, Anthony Hazell (back - director of relationship management), Ryan Coetzee (CEO), Helen Zille (Party Leader), Fred Roed (World Wide Creative)

Read more here:

SA political party launches impressive, Obama-esque campaign site

The DA, social media and the masses

I was invited to the Democratic Alliance social media launch campaign

DA, gurus and the online circus

DA reaction has me puzzled!

The DA’s use of Social Media | Can we really call it social?

SHAMELESS SERVICE III – MAILFIRE

// January 5th, 2009 // 6 Comments » // business, geek stuff

This is going to be a full on rant, so if you are allergic to people whining then don’t read it! I am sitting at work with my hands tied by bad support and unreliable infrastructure, in both cases, thanks to Mailfire, a bulk email service provided by Web Africa. Just as it takes me a lot to pimp something on the net, it takes a hell of a lot of frustration, hair pulling and teeth gnashing to actually write an entire blog post complaining about something. In summary, all I can say about Web Africa/Mailfire is that if they wanted to set up a bulk html email* programme, some research on the matter might have saved them (and us) many tears of frustration.  Now, I don’t actually know what kind of research they did do when setting up the service and I won’t speculate, but the evidence suggests they missed some fundamentally simple things .

What I do know is that after approaching them several times about specific coding issues, I can still not send out emails set up in basic html and get them to render as they should when ground through the mailfire system, but which render perfectly when sent through another system**. In addition, their user interface is not simple, or rather, it is not intuitive.

Being an organisation that sends out a lot (and I mean a LOT) of html/electronic mail, some of which (for example weekly newsletters) HAVE to go out at at specified time on a specified day, we need a reliable service, and if something does go wrong, quick and dependable support (even over the “holiday season” peeps – not everyone stops working). The call I had to make today is typical – their server was offline / paralysed-tortoise-with-broken-leg slow, meaning that:

1.  I couldn’t open my html docs in Dreamweaver to edit them (partly DW’s fault, as it gets a nappy-rash when it can’t find image locations / download images), leaving me the option of editing in Notepad or the like (no, I’m not whining because I’m lazy, I’m whining cos I’m busy).

2. In order to send out the letter on time, I would have to relocate all 25 or 30 images to another online location and redo the entire newsletter (an exercise so time consuming that it would still go out late).

When I called “support” to complain I first got “but it works on our side..”

DOH! “That’s not the issue.. I am the customer and it DOESN’T work on my side, and NO it’s not our connectivity – the rest of the internet LOVES me and wants to show me all sorts of things”

“Please send us an email”

“Why? I’ve told you what the problem is “

“It will have to go to a higher level”

“So take it to a higher level”

“Send us an email”

“fine”

I send them the following email (not the politest ever, seeing as I have had issues of various kinds with them from DAY 1 and by now I’m well fed-up):

“I cannot access your mailfire server to send out a message (YET again). Images in our documents (hosted on your server) are thus unavailable to us. We will thus (ONCE again) not be able to send out a message on time. “

Four hours later, I receive an email back from them:

“Hi Niki. Would you mind providing me with the client code for this account.”

NO: “we’ve fixed the problem”, “we give a shit” “we understand your frustration”

MORE: “we have not made the sodding effort to find out your client code and get started on the issue.”

AAAAARRRGGHHHH!

Now perhaps it was that we simply got exceptional service from our previous provider, Striata – a no nonsense CMS/backend mail setup, and ONE liaison who KNEW the system, was friendly, efficient and if developer’s/system advice was required, would get back to me by telephone in under 20 minutes. ALWAYS. In addition at holiday times like this, there were also ALWAYS standby staff – one person handling our account with some technical knowledge.

When I requested a meeting with the Mailfire developer to sort out coding, rendering issues, I was told that the end of January was the earliest meeting I could get (he’s apparently on extended leave) …with additional time for development, etc, a working system by mid to end Feb? For a political party with an election coming up in March/April? I think NOT. I explained this and could still only get mid January as an option, rather than in December as I had requested.

But for today (and coincidentally it happens to be my first day back after a short “holiday”), Mailfire scores an EPIC FAIL from me (perhaps I should send them t-shirts?)

I have resorted to sending out our most popular newsletter using the old (less) hassle-free system, as we still have credit there (thank GOD!). I am now seriously casting around in desperation -we have limited time and need reliable service…where do we get it without riding this off-road learning curve again?

To be fair, I should add that by all accounts, Web Africa provides excellent support in the other services they offer, such as web hosting.

* Anyone who works with html email will tell you that it is an irksome beast. Each email client (and there are MANY) selectively supports html and css, in other words, what works with one won’t work with another, and one has to be very careful (and bloody patient) when designing html email to ensure standard rendering across the board. Essentially, you use very, very old-school html and keep css inline and to a minimum.

**The mailfire system seems geared towards novices, who can pick from templates and compose their emails in the WYSIWYG editor (which seems based on WordPress), which is great for them. But many/most well established companies will have their own designers/e-communications department who will want to send out the emails they compose as they have designed them to render. Mailfire does not support this approach unlike our older system, which allows us to simply paste the code into its interface, choose a list and send AS IS, meaning if we have done our own checking, testing, etc, there are no hassles (not friendly for the novice, I’ll grant). Mailfire simply does not allow a code-list-send scenario – the only option is working through the WYSIWYG editor, which adds in much unwanted code (as they do) – I’ve even seen code added in there that I know is not compatible with certain email clients (hence my query into the research these guys have done).

5 THINGS I DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT GAMING (AND MY WOBBLY BITS GET PIMPED)

// December 4th, 2008 // 4 Comments » // geek stuff, marketing

A few months back at the last 27 dinner I attended, I bitched and whined (as I do) at the sexist nature of the underground geek currency (T-shirts) in this town, in that I had yet to see us geecks (geek chicks, according to Gareth, pronounced jeeks) being offered a geek chick t-shirt as a bribe.

Well, as it sometimes does, the universe saw fit to placate and titillate me in the form of an email from a company called Gamer Gear who had seen my post and wanted to offer me solace in the form of a geeck t-shirt. “FINALLY”, I cried, “geek chicks shall be clothéd as a species of our own!” I immediately hit the site (which really rocks btw) and had a jolly good chuckle at the merchandise. I was so amused I decided to meet the owner, Rudashan Chetty, to find out more.

My knowledge of that world on the edge of worlds that is computer gaming could be written on the back of a very small postage stamp. It is chiefly gleaned from my gamer friends who spend their lives getting hardcore screen-tans, conquering worlds, blowing holes in scabby aliens and rescuing princesses from tall towers, all the while drinking copious amounts of “magical energy potion” (coffee) and staying awake way past their bedtimes. I have studiously avoided gaming. Given my addictive nature and penchant for working into the wee hours, gaming would more than likely get me quickly addicted and see me hunkered down in my room for days at a time, eschewing sunlight and eventually dying of starvation or OD’ing on coffee (actually…wait…I do that already).

My meeting with Rudy left me with much food for thought and was my definite WOW-of –the-week, as I was introduced to some of the lesser known facts about the gaming world…here are 5 things I didn’t know about computer gaming:

1) Gaming is a professional sport – like any other..tennis, rugby, etc – there are guys who do this and nothing else for a living, and with professional sport come big sponsorships (any marketers listening?)

2) You can get your National Sporting colours for gaming – in South Africa, just like in any other sport. According to Rudy, South Africa was the first country to offer national colours for gaming (imagine if gaming became an Olympic sport which watched by the spectators on Imax screens!)

3) The biggest LAN convention in the world attracts 10 000 players – no jokes! I have enough of an issue being ignored by my 10 gamer friends at their LAN gatherings, but 10 000 screen junkies would really do my head in (the coffee consumption alone must equal the GDP of a small country).

4) Like vampires and cave bears, gamers hang out in ‘clans’ – it’s true. They come together in the dead of night and plot to kill other clans. In cyberspace, obviously. Gamer gear are cunningly tapping this herding instinct by offering sponsorships, and custom made clan t-shirts, hoodies, etc for the 2nd most important activity at LAN gatherings i.e. Looking Cool.

5) Gaming is big business - a multi-billion dollar industry drawing massive corporate sponsorships in the US and in Europe, imho this niche seems overlooked by more conventional marketers in this country – for some more hard facts, check out www.adminspy.com

Rudy admits to being a complete gaming freak, and is one of the few people in this country who has had the opportunity of gaming live on a cinema screen in Joburg (how cool would that be?). He has been offered opportunities to turn pro and is often approached by clans to bolster their ranks.

Originally from Durban, Rudy graduated from UCT with a BSc in Comp Sci and works as a Java developer. His true calling seems to lie in an altogether more creative direction, and aside from starting and running Gamer Gear, he has written and published one book of poetry and is currently working on a second.

Now I’ll say upfront that this is a pimping blog, but I will also say that I don’t pimp shit unless I think it’s WELL worth it. I was well chuffed with my EPIC FAIL t-shirt and Rudy gave me two additional shirts to give away at the latest Geek Dinner which went to Henk and J.P. Viljoen who flew down from Joburg to come to the GeekDinner (thanks Johnathan!).

The shirts are locally made and very good quality. The pool of designs on the site is quite limited at present, and I’m really looking forward to seeing more. A monthly design competition will be starting in January with prizes going to the winning designers. Users can also order custom shirts with their own designs as well hoodies, dog tags and other goodies and can rate the designs already on the site.

When I heard about the concept I immediately thought of Springleap but once I checked out the offer, I realised they are quite different. The designs gamer gear offers are niche, targeted specifically at gamers and geeks (and of a ‘friend survey’ I got a 100% positive response – says much about my friends!), plus they offer more products than Springleap like the grrl-shirts and hoodies.

Don’t get me wrong here, I love what Springleap are doing and I’m awed at some of the fantastic designs on the site, but I stand by my stubborn refusal to wear boy t-shirts – they look like tents on me and don’t show off my wobbly bits to optimum effect!

CS4 UNLEASHED…DID I SAY WOW YET?

// October 9th, 2008 // No Comments » // business, friends, geek stuff, marketing

It’s been a restful yet exciting couple of days in Cape Town, having squeezed in the last couple of days of annual leave I shall see until the election in April next year (sheesh)…all shore leave officially cancelled as of last week..the campaign ship sets sail. Being the procrastinator I am, I’ve only got down to this now because I really wanted a last couple of days sans PC before the madness begins..

I had the great (and somewhat surreal) pleasure this weekend of meeting face to face with an internet buddy, Jason Levine, who hopped through here with his fellow Adobe evangelist Greg Rewis to launch Adobe’s CS4 (just say WOW people..all together now…)

I had a groovy time chilling at the waterfront with the guys pre-launch…honestly two of the funniest blokes I’ve met in ages, getting an insider’s view on the gut-churning scariness that is Sarah Palin (I WEEP for America if that pineapple gets into office) and the upcoming American elections which are but one month away.

Also, on a more sombre note, I watched these guys gutted to witness the stock market crash on Monday evening (the DOW was down by 730ish points by 8.30pm), brought to us live via i-phone. Like anyone who’s ever had a sore tooth and can’t leave it alone, the refresh button was being used frequently. I actually inadvertently (for 10 whole minutes) got sucked into this scary black hole that I shall call social cyber-separation for want of a better phrase (you know…when you twitter the guy sitting next to you instead of just telling him he’s got spinach in his teeth?)

I pinged (new word..lol..thanks Jase!) my boet who works for a hedge fund in London to make sure he wasn’t balancing on the edge of a tall building – he’s also lost a fair whack of cash, and says his mantra for now is “think long term…think long term, find money, buy low…” It really makes me glad that I have the financial acuity of an oyster and can only afford to buy things I can see (well actually, I can’t afford to buy those right now either)..and while lame platitudes are probably the last thing you want to hear, my heart really goes out to all of you feeling the pain right now..

Upside to this, and in addition to the wonder that is CS4, I got to behold for the first time close-up the wonder that is the i-phone. EISH…I knew I’d been artfully avoiding looking too closely at these things for a reason because now of course, I want one. Who can scorn the sheer coolness of a gadget that can listen to the radio for you and not only recognise the song you want identified, but find it online for you to buy, should you so desire to…WTF? Apparently it’s ‘all about the apps’ but I’m also reliably informed that the battery life totally sucks. I’m someone who literally only uses my phone for sms’ing and phonecalls (yes folks, there are still some of us left) and I tend to avoid gadgets at all costs, so for me to say that this has me seriously excited is really saying something…YES Jayx, you were right (..again).

On to the *actual* topic of this blog (at LAST you say!) the launch of Adobe’s CS4, which was held at Canal Walk on Tuesday. I stupidly didn’t take my camera with me, for which I have kicked myself the prescribed number of times, plus a couple more for good measure (aargh). First to take the stage were Jason, Greg and our own local evangelist, Mo Jogie (where’s your blog dude?) who delivered slick energetic and highly amusing presentations (my fave line? Mo: “moms are low res, dude”).

They were followed up by some of our local trainers who went into a little more depth on the applications and their shiny new features. As I am currently still using CS2, my brains were pretty much on the wall by the time it was over – there is simply no comparison between the two…I obviously can’t contrast CS3 and 4, but I know for a fact that the changes are a far cry from the “general “service” update on CS3” that many people predicted (your words there, Shukri lol). So here’s my wow by wow rundown, I’m gonna limit this to 10 wows or I’ll be here all night and most of tomorrow (apologies to the boffs if I get the lingo wrong). Bear in mind I mainly use Photoshop, Indesign and Dreamweaver, so I’ll stick to those and leave the media geeks to their own wows…

WOW1: The first thing that struck me was that the integration of the macromedia elements (Fireworks, Freehand, Flash, etc) is now completely seamless, which I don’t think it was post-macromedia acquisition in CS3 (I stand to be corrected of course).

WOW 2:This has allowed for almost TOTAL cross-platform integration or ‘sharing the luuurve’ (right Jase?), meaning that live-time edits of one object are possible in several different applications at once (think the “edit original” function in Indesign CS2, which allows you to tweak your images in Photoshop in real time without the opening, saving and closing of documents, but across ALL the applications…did I say wow yet?)

WOW 3: The government in this country could learn a thing or two from Adobe…it’s very obvious that they’ve actually been listening to their users and have pimped the end user experience to allow for maximum efficiency with massive time-saving implications and have replaced the teeth–grating features with things that actually work.

WOW 4: Photomerge in Photoshop, which was available in CS3 but (I’m told) is vastly improved in CS4, plus ‘content-aware scaling’, which means you can horizontally or vertically compress/expand an image without the objects in that image distorting (people getting fatter/thinner/taller/shorter etc). The “3D postcard” function allows you to rotate a 2D image and actually get realistic perspective alteration. 3D object manipulation, which I believe is much improved, is another thing I can’t wait to sink my teeth into having skipped CS3.

WOW 5: Improved gradient tools and functionality – the gradient tool is now a slider bar (with the relevant colours visible) which appears on top of the object you’re working on and makes the whole gradation job so much quicker and easier – opacity settings are also much more easily accessible.

WOW 6: The workspace itself is supercool and smooth panning, rotation and scaling functions, as well as newly introduced side-by-side viewing panes in several of the apps (notably Dreamweaver) and tabbed file displays (similar to those in web browsers) mean that the creative process is no longer hampered by jumping between images, entering rotation values (angle values are actually visible as you rotate) and all those other little irritations.

WOW 7: Adobe Illustrator, of which I’ve always been very nervy, now not only allows you to have multiple artboards (THANK YOU Freehand), but for all of us security-blanket-huggers out there, also allows you to adjust your workspace to look just like Freehand, so the lure into new waters isn’t scary at all.

WOW 8: Image alignment and spacing in Indesign – something which always irritates the crap out of me and means that I invariably can’t see my product by the end of the process because it’s enmeshed in a web of guides – is now virtually all automatic – a few clicks and it’s done for you (I see much longer lunchbreaks on the cards here folks). According to the trainer, guides will soon be a thing of the past (yessss!)

WOW 9: Which isn’t a wow for most of you is RAW image formatting in Photoshop – I haven’t had the pleasure yet as it only became available in CS3. Now that I have the camera, and spent a very instructive hour in their (very blue) hotel bar with Jase and Greg (whose horrified expressions at my use of the flash were quite priceless, and which is where the accompanying pics were taken), learning about all those *other* settings aside from full-auto, I can’t wait to try ‘getting RAW’! Putting the ‘pro’ in procrastination, I’ve been putting off the instruction manual/training video thing since I got the camera, and I guess I now no longer have any excuses to get busy.

WOW 10: I have been converted by the power that is evangelism (you have been HEEEEEEALED my child) …two apps I’ve been way too scared to even attempt to date, Flash and Fireworks, are now on my doable list of things to do. Greg succinctly described my exact experience with Flash…I woke up one day and stated (assume superhero pose): “TODAY I will learn Flash”… by 10am I was crying and pulling out my hair…by 12, I was morose and contemplating drowning myself in a bottle of vodka. From the brief demo, the app now seems well within reach, as does Fireworks, which (who knew?) is SO much more efficient at image compression for web than Photoshop. The migration of files from Fireworks to Dreamweaver deserves a *wow* of its very own, and for a n00b web-type such as myself, cuts the turnaround time for the creation of a basic web page in half.

So, enough wowing now, it’s bedtime…like I said there is just *so* much cool new stuff I haven’t even scratched the scratches on the surface. There is a ton of stuff out there on the web – here are a couple of places to start…

Layers Magazine

Photoshop user

Macworld

Adobe TV

Or straight to the source… adobe.com

Thanks again to my new American friends and all at Adobe who made the launch such a pleasure. With that, time to flex the fingers, dust off the wacom tablet, set up camp by the post box and wait…

Arrrgghhh… pardon the layout of the images in this post .. WordPress is being a bitch and it’s 2am, so bugger it!

TO ERR IS HUMAN, TO ARRR IS PIRATE…

// September 19th, 2008 // No Comments » // geek stuff, humour, random madness

Today is without doubt the coolest international holiday day EVA, and makes WAY more sense to my twisted mind than lame things like Christmas, Easter and other randomly designated religious holidays.

The holiday of which I speak, is of course, International Talk-Like-A-Pirate Day.

I use the word ‘holiday’ loosely because naturally the powers that be do not see fit to recognise its obvious and glaring significance and thus will not give us the day off. But we pirates are used to such shoddy treatment at the hands of the highbrow landlubbing lemon-sucking upper crusties, and some day we shall have our(aaaarrrrr) way! In the mean time, I shall be sure to ‘pirate’ some time to honour the day in my own way by practicing my hawking and spitting techniques, balancing on dead men’s chests, waving my stapler cutlass in a very cutlass-like fashion and generally exclaiming “HAAAARRRRRRR me hearty” a lot.

The importance of this day of course, also has its more serious and earnest side, for was it not written in the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster that “global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of pirates since the 1800s”.

For those of you non-pastafarians who do not yet subscribe to the only sensible religion on the planet, Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?? Never too late, dears, don’t worry…

To quote wikipedia: “According to the Pastafarian belief system, pirates are “absolute divine beings” and the original Pastafarians. Their image as “thieves and outcasts” is misinformation spread by Christian theologians in the Middle Ages and by Hare Krishnas. Pastafarianism says that they were in fact “peace-loving explorers and spreaders of good will” who distributed candy to small children, and adds that modern pirates are in no way similar to “the fun-loving buccaneers from history.”"

On this, the most sacred day of the pastafarian calendar, it is only fitting that I should include a holy verse…the following very naughty-cal ditty was composed for me by my very good friend and fellow pirate, Toby Bennett…

In his own words: ARRR It be talk like a pirate day me dear, so afore I slide me ol’ sailors trungen past yer silky bombaseen I thought I might chear ye with a manly sea shanty of me own devisin’ I’m afraid as ye may gather from the tone of the song I may be planing to steer my gallion North of the straights of Gebralta AAARRR!!!!

Its a manly life on the sea
and a pirate he always lives free
with the stab of a knife
no nag from a wife
and a pencant for buggerie… buugrieee

ho ho ho arhh har har harie
All pirates bob on the sea

OH It’s an manly life on the sea
and we only smell mildly of pee
we’ve rickets and scurvey and a rattling cough
but there’s still one thing we share with a toff
and that’s a penchant for buggery… bugara… buuggariee

ho ho ho arhh har har harie
All pirates bob on the sea

Oh, It’s a manly life on the sea
we never raise our pinkies at tea
Our beards are all matted and go on too long
just like this inane, hardly nautical song
but I’ll keep on singing till something goes wrong,
like them trying to bugger me… bugger me

ow fuck arrr fuck ouch… a little to the left, thank ey’
these pirates are buggering me!!!!

And here’s a final HARRRRR to my piratey friends out there… Nettle, Jax, Delilah, Tobywooo, Diiii, Jayx, Jase, THANG and all you other rum swilling scoundrels.

Just as a quick addendum to this post – despite the fact that I hate the new Facebook layout, I’m SO impressed with the special pirate Facebook launched just for today (scroll down right to the bottom left and change your language from English to English(pirate)- great they got on board (arrrr), which Google didn’t Best laugh I’ve had in ages.

Read more about the day’s origins as described by Dave Barry here >>

WISDOM OF THE ANCIENTS

// September 17th, 2008 // No Comments » // geek stuff, humour

Being mentally and creatively run down at the moment, I have not really felt like writing much and am shamelessly resorting to posting the little treats that arrive in my inbox from time to time. My litmus test is simple..if I do all or one of the following three things: 1) burn my hand on the cigarette I’m holding due to laughter-induced spasms 2) choke on my bar-one 3) spit a mouthful of coffee at my screen, the joke passes muster.

Here’s today’s gem…

In ancient Greece (469 – 399 BC), Socrates was widely lauded for his wisdom.

One day an acquaintance ran up to him excitedly and said, “Socrates, do you know what I just heard about one of your students?”

“Wait a moment,” Socrates replied. “Before you tell me I’d like you to pass a little test. It’s called the Triple Filter Test.”

“Triple filter?” asked the acquaintance.

“That’s right,” Socrates continued. “Before you talk to me about my student let’s take a moment to filter what you’re going to say. The first filter is Truth. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?”

“No,” the man said, “actually I just heard about it.”

“All right,” said Socrates. “So you don’t really know if it’s true or not. Now let’s try the second filter, the filter of Goodness. Is what you are about to tell me about my student something good?”

“No, on the contrary …”.

“So,” Socrates continued, “you want to tell me something bad about him, even though you’re not certain it’s true?”.

The man shrugged, a little embarrassed. Socrates continued.” You may still pass the test though, because there is a third filter – the filter of Usefulness. Is what you want to tell me about my student going to be useful to me?”

“No, not really…”

“Well,” concluded Socrates, “if what you want to tell me is neither True nor Good nor even Useful, why tell it to me at all?”

The man was defeated and ashamed. This is the reason Socrates was a great philosopher and held in such high esteem. It also explains why he never found out that Plato was shagging his wife.

NASA SE MA SE P**S

// September 10th, 2008 // No Comments » // geek stuff, humour, random madness, science

So the following has been widely posted around the South African blogosphere, principally highlighting the fact that there are obviously no South Africans working for NASA. For all non- South Africans this particular acronym spells out one of the rudest words in the Afrikaans language…

A challenge for my hacker friends out there…redirect the POES HOME link (highlighted bottom picture) to one of the following home pages:

Robert Mugabe
George Bush
Paris Hilton
or of course..any pr0n site of your choice

FREE LOVE…THE GEEK WAY

// August 29th, 2008 // 4 Comments » // geek stuff, marketing

It’s been a very busy week in geek-land, and now after 3 events in 5 days and waaay too much strong coffee, I’m gonna start to tie all the confused threads together. Please forgive me if this lacks cohesion, I’m suffering from serious information overload. As these events have been very widely blogged about, photographed, live-blogged, miniblogged and videotaped. I don’t feel the need to go into too much detail, so here are some general impressions from Wordcamp 2008 (23rd Aug, Wild Fig); the Heavy Chef Session (27th Aug, Media 24) and the 27 Dinner (27th Aug, Ferryman’s tavern) in no particular order.

The take home feel-good inspiration I got from Saturday’s WordCamp was that “software wants to be free”. This whole business of creative commons, freeware, open source, to my mind, is one of the most exciting things happening *on this planet* at the moment. It’s SO exactly the opposite of the yuppie-money-power-grabbing reality of the 80’s and early 90’s (well portrayed in American Psycho!).

It’s ALSO so far away from my imaginings of that brilliant but sleazy software developer hunched over his machine for 76 hours straight creating clever things to make Microsoft money and living off baked beans and cat food, until one day it hits him that he’s been DBF’d and turns his skills to creating nasty little viruses, cos let’s face it, he *can*, he’s pissed off and he needs a creative outlet.

To me the whole open*, share-the-love concept totally transcends the software / copy / code itself, and moves collective thought from ‘me, my, mine’ to ‘ours, us, we’. I have to say it – the sharing thing is totally bringing to mind new age, hippy, flower-child-mojo vibes.

Of course in the midst of all this lurve-sharing, room is made to make money, in a way that can only be described as the marketing antithesis of all things sordid (read: dodgy second-hand car-dealers, estate agents, etc). This topic was addressed very eloquently at Wordcamp by Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress and Automattic. Let me say at this point, watching Matt’s presentation was the highlight of my day (you can view it here). I didn’t have a clue who he was when he stood up to speak (I offer no excuses for being a n00b), and when I found out I could not actually believe that this guy was “MR WordPress” himself. He is such a normal, funny, down-to-earth guy whose stellar success doesn’t seem to have gone to his head in any perceptible way. His key message- selling software is dying!

There’s a good brief summary of his talk on Joe’s blog .

Rob Stokes of Quirk reinforced the idea of sharing for profit at the Heavy Chef session (hosted by World Wide Creative, our new zen-website masters…w00t!). Rob is a fantastic speaker with effusive energy – I’ve been fortunate enough to see Rob speak before at two of Quirk’s e-marketing breakfasts which tackled similar subject matter. His presentation summarised some of the key elements in Quirk’s new publication ‘An Introduction to eMarketing‘, a fantastic e-marketer’s bible of sorts, launched under creative commons (yipeeee) and available for download here.

What stood out for me, and has been doing so for a while now, is that consumers are increasingly tired of having information rammed down their throats (especially when you’re trying to sell something intangible such as we at the DA do – futures, dreams, ideas – and for a currency that can’t be seen – votes)

I reckon they are tired of information overload, pressure to buy the generally invasive nature of marketing…like Rob said, nowadays, if you want to make money from someone or even just gain their attention, you have to offer them something of value first – be it interesting info in an e-newsletter if you’re a consultancy, or a free photo stock gallery with the option to buy ‘premium’ pictures if you’re an online photo gallery…you get the idea. I personally love the sharing culture in the field of design which I work in – there are literally zillions of free design elements out there (brushes, textures, vectors, fonts) as well as kickass tutorials etc, which I very much take for granted without often stopping to reflect on the *coolness* of free stuff* and generous people. Kudo’s to you all!

The free-love mojo’s influence actually seems to have spread as far as defining a new “currency” in the small circle that is geekdom. One of the first things I noticed when I started coming to 27 dinners and the like was the jealously guarded possession and almost fanatical attachment to t-shirts…the getting of t-shirts, the wearing of t-shirts and the ways and means to get more t-shirts seemed uppermost in many minds.

Wednesday’s 27 dinner was no exception where the legal tender ranged from blog-posts to firelighters, braai tongs, Stormhoek wines, and of course, t-shirts! Not being a t-shirt wearer myself I naturally felt quite left out and began wondering, being a natural collector (a *champion* collector of Smurf stickers in my day), if I should be collecting them anyway. Then the thought struck me…guys…these are men’s t-shirts. There are geek chicks out here who want to collect stuff too. Make geek chick t-shirts – your logos will look way better on us! Just a thought.

I cannot say too much about the talks at 27, because I really couldn’t hear much (sorry Dave, the sound really did *suck*- I suppose it didn’t help that I was sitting at the back of the class with the other naughty kids), but good vibes anyway – was delighted to run into Mudthang again, as well as me old smoking buddy Stii, and Lester Hein, a brand sparkly new acquaintance who inhabits the same demon-stalked hell that is email marketing that I do..well met, mate! I was also lucky enough to meet Paul Vechiatto from ITWeb. The man is a veritable goldmine of information, with a fantastic sense of humour to boot. Another thing I love doing at these events is putting names to faces and it was great to meet Pam Sykes and Eve D and to see Jo Duxbury, Feisty Female, and Kerry-Anne Gilloway again.

Naturally the one entity that always appears at these things is the legendary Brandon Golding and his even more legendary camera which, pending the outcome of the next set of photographs, may be geographically relocated to a place where ‘the sun does not shine’ by yours truly.

A million thanks to the organisers of these events – Wordcamp: Tyler Reed and Jason Bagley, The Heavy Chefs – and Dave Duarte for the 27 Dinner.

As I said, much blogging has been done on these events:

Wordcamp: Vids – check out Zoopy
Zoopy; live blogging from Charl Norman; entries from Wordcamp organsiers Tyler Reed and Jason Bagley and microblogging anything on Twitter tagged with #wordcampsa.

Fred Roed on Heavy Chef

*note the terms ‘open’ and ‘free’ are not absolute – for more info on creative commons, click here