Dieter Rams’ 10 Principles of Good Design

26 April 2010

This list is just as relevant for designers of pixels as well as physical objects:

• Good design is innovative
• Good design makes a product useful
• Good design is aesthetic
• Good design makes a product understandable
• Good design is unobtrusive
• Good design is honest
• Good design is long-lasting
• Good design is thorough down to the last detail
• Good design is environmentally friendly
• Good design is as little design as possible

Dieter Rams was the chief of design for Braun for over 30 years, and was responsible for a number of groundbreaking products from that company.  You can read a nice breakdown of his 10 principles here, accompanied by photographs of some of his products.  (Also, you might find this comparison of Braun and Apple products interesting.)

Why You Should Use Google Apps for Your Small Business

20 November 2009

In the course of operating Open End, I get to meet with and learn about all sorts of small businesses and organizations.  While we’re typically sitting down to discuss websites, I often get a glimpse at back-end operations — and frequently find myself sympathetically shaking my head when I realize how much time, effort, money and frustration have been endured just in getting email up and running for 2, 10 or 20 people.

So here’s my advice.  Forget Microsoft Exchange.  Forget paying for email (or calendar) hosting, period.  Maybe even forget about Microsoft Office.  Just sign up for a free Google Apps account and stop thinking about this stuff altogether.

Google Apps is awesome, it runs at your domain, and it just works.  A lot of you already have Gmail accounts.  If you do, you may have noticed when you log into Gmail that there are links at the top of your screen for Calendar and Documents.  The idea with Google Apps is that it gives you these exact same tools — Gmail, Calendar and Documents — except it lets you run them at your own domain name, and share items (events and documents) with your coworkers.

Why Google Apps is great for email:

1. As I mentioned above, it’s free.  I’m amazed at how many people and organizations pay for email hosting.  Not only that, but a lot of organizations go above and beyond standard email hosting and pay a much heftier fee for Microsoft Exchange.  Stop it.  You almost certainly don’t need it.
2. Also as I mentioned above, it’s Gmail — but using your own domain.  A lot of people don’t realize this.  For example, I use Google Apps for openendstudios.com — whenever you get an email from me, it says “clay@openendstudios.com” — not clay@gmail.com or @googleapps.com or anything else.  Google Apps is transparent.
3. There’s nothing to support and nothing to install.  Just create your account and go.  Google pretty much knows what they’re doing — you’re very rarely going to deal with any server downtime.
4. It works across all your devices, and it’s always in sync.  Whether you’re checking your email in your web browser, using an email app (like Outlook or Apple Mail), on your iPhone, or on your Blackberry, or any combination of those, your email will always be in sync, thanks to IMAP support.

And Google Apps isn’t just about email.  If you have any need for one or more shared calendars in your office, it solves that problem with Google Calendar.  Like any Google App, you can access it through the web browser, or also through stand-alone applications.  (In the case of Calendar, you can tie things into apps like Apple iCal or Microsoft Outlook.)  Like everything else with Google Apps, it syncs seemlessly, so you and your coworkers all see the same stuff, no matter how you’re accessing the data.

And if you find yourself spending a lot of cash on Microsoft Word and Excel licenses for all of your employees, Google Apps has a solution for that, too:  Google Docs.  Google Docs is amazingly good web-based software for working with documents, spreadsheets, and even presentations.  Instead of emailing documents back and forth all the time, you just “share” documents with your coworkers.  It’s all run through docs.(yourdomain).com.  If you need to share a document with a coworker, you just specify that right within the document — the next time that person logs in, they’ll see that document listed.  If you need to send a document off to a business associate, Google Docs lets you save any document to your desktop in a number of formats, including Microsoft Word, Excel, or PDF.  (You can even import .doc and .xls files that other people send you.)

So if you’re spending any money on email hosting, calendar hosting, or Microsoft Office, just know that you have an alternative that’s not only free, but actually provides a superior experience in many ways.  Take a look and see if it’s for you.

Dreamhost, ActionMailer, SMTP and Google Apps

04 September 2009

I was banging my head for a little bit this morning trying to figure out why a Rails app I had running on Dreamhost wasn’t delivering emails (signup confirmations, contact requests, etc.) as expected.  A little bit of Googling later, I pieced the following together.  Here’s a quick recap, in case it saves any of you some time and confusion:

(Note:  These instructions are for an app running Rails v.2.3.2.  Earlier versions of Rails require some extra fiddling to make SMTP work with TLS, which is an additional protocol that Gmail servers use.  With 2.3.2, that support is now built into ActionMailer.)

ActionMailer has default SMTP settings which are specified in /vendor/rails/actionmailer/lib/action_mailer/base.rb.  Those settings are what your app will use unless you specify something different in your environment configs.  It may be that if you’re using Dreamhost’s own mail servers to run email for your domain, these settings work fine (not sure, haven’t tested.)  But if you’re using Google Apps to run your email (which is an easy one-click option for Dreamhost to alter your DNS settings appropriately), then those default settings won’t result in your emails being delivered.

So, to get things up and running, we just need to override the default settings.  Technically, we could make the change in either /config/environment.rb or in /config/environments/production.rb.  Changing it in environment.rb will use these settings no matter which environment you’re running in (including local development), which you probably don’t want, so it’s most appropriate to make the change directly in production.rb — that way, these settings will only be used by your live app.

In production.rb, you probably don’t see anything referencing SMTP settings.  You’ll want to paste in the following code:

config.action_mailer.smtp_settings = {    
  :address              => 'smtp.gmail.com',    
  :port                 => 587,    
  :domain               => 'e.g. yourdomain.com -- the domain for which you are using Google Apps',    
  :user_name            => 'user@yourdomain.com -- the address from which you want to send',    
  :password             => 'password for above user',   :authentication       => :plain,    
  :enable_starttls_auto => true
}

Once you save your new production.rb file and upload (and restart your Rails app), you should find that emails generated from your app (from, say, a contact form) should now be getting to the intended recipient, and not getting hung up in the internet netherworld.

(This was pieced together from info I gleaned from here.)

Grab a Perch

10 August 2009

We just wrapped up a website project a few days ago that was similar to a lot of others: a small site with just a handful of pages, most of which containing content which would be quite handy for the client to be able to update themselves.

A month ago I’d have recommended Bluebird, our own CMS written in Ruby on Rails which makes page editing super straight-forward for clients. So why not Bluebird this time? First, while Bluebird can work great for just about any site, it’s a powerful system with somewhat complex underpinnings — ideal for a site that has serious content management needs, but borderline overkill for your smaller site that has simple CMS aspirations. Second, I had just been introduced to Perch.

I don’t recall how I came to arrive there, but five minutes on their website had me convinced that I needed to give Perch a try the first opportunity that made sense. It focused on simplicity above all else: simple to install, simple to incorporate into your site, and simple for your clients to use. From their intro video, you could tell that the creators had sweated the details. And to top it off, the ~$60 price tag seemed more than fair.

So, without wasting any time, with anneandpetesibley.com dialed in and ready to launch, we decided to spend an extra half-day adding Perch into the mix so they could be in control of their own pages.  (This is one of the benefits of Perch — it’s not a platform you have to build upon, but rather an extra layer which you can drop on top of existing sites.)  Perch keeps the technical stuff out of the way, letting non-technical people add content to the site which they know will be presented as intended (thanks to Perch’s templating system.) It was a win for everybody, and a huge pleasure to use.

After this trial project, Perch has become a tool that we look forward to using in the future.

anneandpetesibley.com

06 August 2009

We’re excited to announce a newly launched anneandpetesibley.com.  Pay a visit and enjoy some music — you may become a fan!