sugarenia.com

EDIT: Mr. Rosenfeld was kind enough to offer a discount code for all Sugarenia.com readers: with the code SUGARENIA you get -10% while purchasing any of their books. Now is the time to get them, guys!

At first, I was kinda hesitant to go on and buy such a niche book - after all, what’s so exciting about coding and designing web forms?

Wrong.

Mr. Wroblewski’s book taught me that web forms are all kinds of designer fun, and this is not a euphemism. It’s just what the author says:

Forms make or break the most crucial online interactions: checkout, registration, and any task requiring information entry.

Imagine how many times you decided not to join a service just because of its scary registration form - or how many times you’ve mistakenly filled in your credit card number to a checkout form that didn’t support multiple formats of input.

Get the point?

Web Form Design is a simple, well-written book: it seems to have borrowed the blogging way of stating facts, and this is a good thing: simple, coherent writing, to-the-point explanations and the ubiquitous “Best Practices” list of points in the end of each chapter strike a chord: it’s a specialized blog turned book! That’s not too bad, is it?

Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski is a book highly recommended for interface designers, both on web and more traditional media. It can help everyone that wants to improve her skills in laying out inputs and textareas, and make you feel good too in the meanwhile.

You surprised me, mr. Wroblewski. Pleasantly, I might say. I think I’ll get Site Seeing too.

luke wroblewski, web form design, site seeing

You know, after all these years online, I’ve realized I’m the traditional type. When I find something interesting online, say a nice article on typography or an inspirational CSS snippet, I don’t del.icio.us it or whatever: I want to save it somewhere in my computer and keep it away from all the bad Server Errors and Bandwidth Exceeded messages.

That, and the fact that I amass a huge amount of information over the day, led me to use some kind of PIM (Personal Information Manager) to keep it all in order. So far, I’ve used Yojimbo, Soho Notes and Together. But Together wins.

Why?

1.  I love the ability of dragging and dropping stuff to a shelf on the edge of the screen, instantly saving them. All three apps offer this kind of functionality, but I found that Together approach suited me better. Yojimbo is the worst in this aspect, I think, I remember not being able to import images directly to my library, which well, sucks.
   

   Dragging ‘n’ dropping to save notes in Together

2. Soho Notes is so, so bloated. It is full of features I never use (Contact Manager anyone?). It sure does what I want (and a ton more), but it was so sloooooooow after a while. Plus, it uses OpenBase. I mean come on. When I installed Leopard, I had forgotten to make a backup of my notes library, and I was looking for it for about two weeks. Seriously.
   

   Soho Notes: too much bloat

3. Together is intuitive, plus I love its Portrait Preview pane. It supports nested folders, tags, smart folders, all kinds of notes and snippets, and it’s very lightweight and fast to boot.
   

   A sample window of Together, me likes

If you’re in the lookout for a nice, simple and effective PIM application which support .Mac syncing, download Together and give it a chance. It’ll make your life easier and far more orderly.

together, soho notes, PIM

If you read my blog even a little, you’ll probably have guess by now my unhealthy obsession with the 37Signals way of thinking, working and doing. To be frank, this wasn’t always the case.

When I first approached a 37S product, namely Backpack, I signed up for a free account and used it for about a half hour. Then I dropped it. Smacked it, to be precise. I was in the “trying-every-app-that-moves” era, so I didn’t like it, because it was too restricting, it was lacking features, it was too simple and yada yada. Or so I thought.

After a few months I decided to give Backpack a second chance. It had matured, it had collected raving reviews, it was holding a high rank among the GTD crowd, so I succumbed. Then I found out, in my surprise, that Backpack works, after all.

Just give it time. Sure, it seems to lack features. And Ruby on Rails can be laggy at times. But it has found a niche in my digital life that no other online tool has managed to fill.

Interesting links that pop into my screen while at work and need some “private” time: Backpack Inbox for later. Work todo lists and notes and drafts and mockups and files I want to share, @Work. Stuff that I wanna buy someday, an image gallery @Shopping. Blogs posts and drafts and ideas, @Blog.

A sample Backpack page

It’s a terrific tool for the day-to-day digital notetaking, while the new multi-user features that were recently added make it a solid small company Intranet solution, with calendars, whiteboards, shared editing.

Thing is, I don’t think I ever fell in love with this product. I never had an infatuation that faded after time (I tend to do that a lot with applications, both online and offline). My Backpack love grew after quite some time of working with it, so I don’t see us getting a divorce anytime soon.

It’s not only the finished product, it’s the 37S way of thinking: declutter, simplicity, straightforward are some of the words that pop in your mind while using its products, be it Backpack, Basecamp or Highrise.

Give Backpack a try.

P.S. The Backpack links above are affiliate, but what I wrote are my true feelings on this product.

37signals, backpack, basecamp, highrise

These days, Newspond.com is all the rage in link exchanging cycles - it’s a new, Digg-like tool that looks sexy as hell and twice as sleek.

Since it’s a relatively quiet Friday night, I decided to try it, but my workday won’t leave me behind: the critic eye is here again. I just realised I’m better in pointing out other people errors than correcting my own. But that’s enough food for another post.

So if you want to check a longish, kinda detailed design review a la Sugar, by all means keep on reading.

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Back in the days where I had a PC conquering most of my tiny desk (uhm, that is like, 2 days ago), I had to switch between the desk and my bed all the time while using my Macbook.

Mom wants to play some silly exploding balls game in PC - Sugar must transfer to the bed. Sis wants to check out the latest news from the greek blogsphere - whoosh, there goes Sugar to the bed, grabbing pillows, amassing cables and being as grumpy as always.

I had two main itches with that: first, I have to gather all my cables and go, second, the Macbook is too hot for my thighs and didn’t facilitate prolonged use. The first I solved by buying a Logitech cordless mouse and eliminating a cord, leaving only the power cord. The other, I solved by buying myself a (pricey) iLap.

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