Bye Bye phpCollab, Hello NetOffice

I have been a phpCollab user for several years, and last week made the switch over to NetOffice.

Why?

One of the main reasons is that phpCollab is still stuck on version 2.4, and has been for along time. Sure, they have a 2.5 in beta, but that's been in beta for a long time, too. NetOffice have a stable 2.5, a 2.6 beta, and a starting to get some direction for a 3.0 release. Bug fixes seem to be attended to in a reasonable amount of time for an open source project, so we've migrated over to the 2.6 release. It features:

• An improved interface


• Time tracking


• Built-in customised reports


• Meetings

I feel that time tracking is the most important addition. With some minor customisations, we will be able to run a billing report so we can send an itemised invoice for each project. We can see how many billable hours have been done each week (and hence measure productivity). We can check each person's workload based upon estimated hours allocated with each task. Useful stuff.

We'll get some of these mods together and post them here soon...

Embedding Flash Best Practices

Embedding Flash and maintining standards-compliant code can be a bit of a nightmare.

Here is an article on "best practices" for embedding Flash.

About Us Pages - Is There A Point?

For a long time, I automatically included an "About Us" page on every website I did. Why? It just seemed to be "the done thing".

But the more I think about it, it's pointless most of the time. (Note: I'm talking about commercial websites here.)

Sure, there will be cases where it is relevant, but most of the time, who cares? People are generally visiting your website for selfish reasons. They want something. They're not really that interested in you, only what you can do for them.

And About Us pages always seem to be the most difficult to do; the hardest to write. So I'm not going to do them anymore unless there's a convincing reason to include one!

What do you think?

The Move is Taking Shape...

Our move into a larger office is getting closer...

We've painted a couple of the walls, carpet is down, phone lines have been switched on (now we just need to wait for the actual phones to be installed!)

When we signed the lease there was about 5 or 6 weeks until we officially took over. At the time we thought, "That'll take forever!" In reality, it has really only just been long enough!

Only a week to go!

Eye Tracking Research on Dead Zones

I have to admit - I'm becoming a bit hooked by this eye-tracking thing.

Greg's latest post highlights that content in visual "dead zones" may as well not be there - and he tested this by putting complete gibberish in an identified dead zone to see if anyone noticed.

And only 1 in 25 did!

The other thing that struck me is that in his example, the visual dead zone was smack bang in the middle of the page! Comments brought out that this was due to the visually prominent elements directly above the area identified as a dead zone. People tend to focus on them, and ignore what's directly below.

Just goes to show: You learn something new every day!

CSS Rounded Corners

Alessandro Fulciniti has come up with a great example of using CSS and Javascript to produce rounded corners - without images. And the best part of his example is that he demonstrates a number of different applications, from tabbed navigation to photo frames to news boxes. So there's no need to try and figure anything out (like how to use more than one instance on each page). All the hard work has been done!

A Quest For Ancient Geekiness

The year was 1984. Or 1985. No, pretty sure it was 1984.

The computer? A Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer 2. Or CoCo for short. 16 kilobytes of RAM. 320x240 8 colour display. External tape drive. No internal hard drive.

I wrote a game on this computer - I was about 14 or 15. It was published in a computer magazine. Back then there was no "cover cd" - each program was listed inside the mag and you had to type each line in yourself if you wanted it! (I'm glad you don't have to do that any more!)

This game was called "Supply Ship". It was a clone of the Commodore 64 game "Jupiter Lander".

Do you think I have a copy of the magazine my game was published in? A game I wrote when I was 14 or 15? Of course not!

So if you happen to have an old "Rainbow CoCo" magazine, or any Tandy TRS-80 magazine from that era, please check and see if you have my issue... Please!! I'm having a mid-life crisis trying to find an old copy!