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Flickr credit: Geof Harries

Wireframes, mockups, you name it: if you’re a designer, you know what they are.

They are these ghastly but pretty in their simplicity and grayness images that are used to form a framework on which your design is built.

Wireframes are the first stepping stone of a good design, because since they’re so flexible they allow a myriad of changes without real cost.

So, wireframes are fun. But doing them in Photoshop is not always fun! I’m looking for an application (preferrably a Mac one, but a good Windows one will do too) which exists exclusively for this kind of work. It doesn’t need to be fancy, just pleasant to use and effective.

I checked out OmniGraffle but well, it’s mostly targeted to GUI designers and less to web designers. I’ve also downloaded the trial version of Axure for Windows, still haven’t used it though.

Photoshop is my bread ‘n’ butter, it pays the bills, but it’s not the easiest tool of the trade for wireframing.

Any other suggestions by fellow web designers?

wireframe, photoshop, web design, axure, omnigraffle

If you follow this blog for a while, you must know how much I like Microsoft OneNote for Windows. I consider it a very helpful tool for brainstorming and notetaking, and being a to-do list addict, I decided to give it a go and try to keep my work to-dos in it, using its built-in tag system.

Well, I don’t know if I did something wrong and broke the thing, but it seems that OneNote is not suitable for keeping tracks of to-dos.

Why?

I created a list of notes and added a tag of “To-do” (keyboard shortcut: Ctrl-1) to each of them. Then I added a bunch of custom tags, added some more todos, added my custom tags to them. So far so good.

I decided to give the “Tag Summary” page a go, and I saw in satisfaction that I could see all my to-dos from all my notebooks grouped by tag name, conveniently shown there. I thought wow, that’s cool.

Now you see the to-dos…

Then I marked one of the to-dos (simple to-dos, not my custom tagged notes) as done. Refreshed the tag summary, and tada! All my to-dos are gone. What the f?

…now you don’t!

Is it how it’s supposed to work? Marking a single to-do as done marks the whole group? What’s happening here, can anyone enlighten me?

microsoft onenote, onenote

I happen to love one Microsoft product - OneNote.

OneNote is a brilliant note-taking program that offers a bunch of useful features to the organized and the not-so-organized like me.

I use it mainly at work - especially when conducting design research or inspiration. I surf the web, find great websites and clip to OneNote everything that strikes my fancy - it’s perfect for creating moodboards. I love the fact that you don’t need to insert data into it in a linear way - paste things wherever you want and you’re good to go.

Design research in OneNote

The only thing that bugs me is that I haven’t yet found a way to create to-do lists that makes completed tasks automatically turn gray.

Task management and todos

I want this thing for the Mac too - it’s one powerhouse of note-taking and scrapbooking. I guess it would replace my personal information manager (currently SohoNotes) too.

Ever heard of a similar application for Mac OS? Do share!

onenote, microsoft, apple, macos

Let’s face it – software can be a really annoying thing sometimes.

Things like extraneous dialog boxes, “tips of the day”, ambiguous error messages and clippers ticking on your screen happen daily. But sometimes, sometimes, you get a stupid behaviour from a hugely popular application and you want to smash your head on the screen till it bleeds to death – two times.

While at work, I use Microsoft Outlook 2007 for managing company e-mail. I have to say, in terms of memory hogs, this thing is a winner! I cannot possibly imagine why it hangs every time with a very moderately-sized inbox, 2Gb of RAM and a 3Ghz processor, but it does.

After waiting the full 30-40 seconds for it to load, I decide to create a filter for the e-mails received by the new guy that was recently hired. Oh, and another friend that popped in my mind, a common filter for the two, named “New guys”. I enter their e-mail addresses in the appropriate field…

I create a filter for two custom e-mail addresses

Ok, all fine and dandy so far. Till this:

Outlook asks me to go back and replace the delimiters myself. Hmm…

Uhm, excuse me? Why should I, the almighty (and fairly bored) user, HAVE to go back and replace my commas with semicolons? Why? Because the programmers were too lazy to implement some kind of string replace function to do the dirty work?

Ok, help me, am I missing something with this? Is this done on purpose? I may be exaggerating, but this is one of the stupidest things software ever made me do.

This post is kind of a test, to try out the new (?) Microsoft Live Writer.

I have to admit, it looks really cool and actually useful, eventhough I’ve tried other similar application in the past and I’ve not liked it a bit.

On the positive side of this free app are the fact that you can draftly preview your post, since it auto-detects your theme, you can add maps, tables and formatted images with some clicks and plus, it’s extendable.

Not bad, Microsoft.

microsoft, windows live writer