In his own words: I created the blog portion of ISO50 so I’d have a chance to share my influences and the things that inspire me. Over the years I have collected a lot of amazing examples of design and I will be posting the choice specimens here with my commentary. I am no idealogue, and certainly not an intellectual when it comes to design. I hold no college degrees and have never studied design. I have, however, independently practiced graphic design for almost ten years and at this point I feel I have a good grasp of what types of design I enjoy and what styles inform my own work.

I used to work with John and remember him going on about Twitter way before it got popular. You can find some good stuff at his blog. In his own words: “My name is John Slater and i’m a website designer, and I also develop (kinda) I have been an active part of the internet for several years and it has something that really grabbed my attention at a young age, shortly after I began “interneting” I decided to have a bash at Web Design creating a website called Proper D’oh which was a fan site to The Simpsons. Over the years I developed my knowledge of Web Design (slowly) by creating websites ranging from fan sites to full on web services, some of the websites I have created are….”

I like Smashing Magazine but I like the network Posts better. They sample stories from lots of other design blogs so you can quickly find a blog that you fancy reading. In their words: “Since November 2009 Smashing Magazine’s front page shows not only contributions from Smashing Magazine, but (in tabs) also manually selected articles from the design magazines in our network. We want to make our front page more interesting, more dynamic and also more diverse. Our network members regularly contribute a wide range of high-quality content to the web design community. We prominently highlight their best articles on our front page. In fact, the front page is now updated several times per day, so Smashing Magazine is now worth checking more often.”

This is a blog about app’s, it’s only really useful if you own a Mac computer. In their words: “The chances are that, if you’re reading this blog, you love your Mac. Well we do too, and we know there’s nothing better than tricking it out with some killer Mac apps. With so many independent app publishers around though, it’s hard to keep track of what’s out there.
AppStorm brings you not just reviews of great (and not so great) Mac apps, but we also round them up into categorized lists, give you how-to tips and tricks to get more out of them, and combine it with a healthy dose of Mac related news.” Plus you can see Busy Bee Invoicing on there!

]]> http://bee-software.net/blog/best-design-web-tech-blogs/feed/ 0 http://bee-software.net/blog/fabric-draping-for-fashion-or-furnishings/ http://bee-software.net/blog/fabric-draping-for-fashion-or-furnishings/#comments Sun, 27 Jun 2010 00:56:04 +0000 admin http://bee-software.net/?p=519

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Our invoicing software Busy Bee Invoicing has become quite popular over the last year and we are proud to have people from all around the world using our software to send out invoices. Continents such as North America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australasia all use Busy Bee Invoicing. One of the parts of the software that make it popular to a wide audience is the ability to print out an invoice in different languages, English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Slovakian are available now but if you wish to see your language please get in touch and we will be happy to add it.

With our user base expanding and invoice software users being business people that have a range of services to offer we thought we could enable them all to connect (only if they chose to do so). With this in mind we have provided a page showing all the people that have bought our invoicing software. Each person is placed on the map with a marker. A close up shot of the map is show below.

 


 
Each marker can be clicked on and if the user has agreed for there information to be displayed an speech bubble will appear with the information. You can see this in the image below were I have clicked on our “pink” marker.

 


 
Bee Connected has just gone live so no information has been added yet but we hope that this will be something that our users can make use of going forward. If you use our invoicing software and want your information to be added to the map you can do so here. Also if you use our invoicing software and have any updates that you would like to see in the coming releases please get in touch.

Busy bee invoicing can run on all major operating systems (P.C. and Apple Mac friendly).

Here are my favorite and most used Apple Mac software applications. I do use more software than this small list but they are ether Mac developed software like iPhoto or very expensive like photoshop. So this list is my favorite cheap or free apps that I couldn’t do with out.

1. Adium

Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more.

adium.im

2. VLC

VLC Media Player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

VLC

3. Skype

Better than a phone? Yep, you betcha! Skype isn’t just about free Skype-to-Skype calls and low-cost calls to phones and mobiles at home and abroad. You can also do much, much more.

For starters why not send a text message directly from Skype; forward a call to your mobile; or set up an online number for friends, family and colleagues to make a local call from their old-fashioned phone to your Skype, wherever in the world you are.

Skype

4. Transmit

A next-generation FTP and SFTP client for Mac OS X. With its famously clean drag and drop interface, and powerful features set, Transmit makes maintaining files and folders through the Internet as easy as, well, the Mac!

Transmit

5. Coda

So, we code web sites by hand. And one day, it hit us: our web workflow was wonky. We’d have our text editor open, with Transmit open to save files to the server. We’d be previewing in Safari, adjusting SQL in a Terminal, using a CSS editor and reading references on the web. This could be easier, we declared. And much cooler.

Coda

6. Busy Bee Invoicing

Full disclosure, this is our own software. We have received plenty of emails from people who love it too so if you are looking for invoicing software for your Mac, look no further!
Busy Bee Invoicing is ideal for small businesses and contractors. It is inexpensive, with a one time purchase price of $25. Updates are free and the software will automatically prompt you when one is available – one click and you will be running the latest version!
We are constantly listening to our users and adding helpful additions like the “Quotes tab” which came out in update 1.12.

Busy Bee Invoicing

 
Why Safari does not have a preference for opening a new window in a tab makes no sense to me. 95% of the time web designers should open links in the same window but every now and again it makes sense to open a link in a new tab. One example is if you have a “how to” page. It’s good to have both pages open at the same time (the page you are trying to understand and the “how to” page telling you what to do).

The solution

 
1. Close “Safari”

2. Open “Terminal”



3. Paste in “defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true” and press “return” on your key pad.



4. Open Safari back up, your done!

If you don’t know about our software you can find out more about it here. In brief it’s invoicing software that runs on a Mac (it runs on a P.C. too).

In this post I’m going to run through the redesign of the software. Busy Bee Invoicing has been available for nearly a year now – we have made many tweaks and additions and we thought it was time to give the software more of a clean “Apple Mac” look. Just to let you know we are focusing on adding a number of extra fuctions like “Payments”. This will be available in the near future too.

Lets start with the logo

Busy Bee Invoicing logo used to look like this ( a )

We wanted to develop a logo that could be used for all our products, not just our invoicing software, and we wanted it to look modern and stylish, just like most of the software that runs on a Apple Mac. Our new logo design ( b )

As stated above the logo was to be used through out our product line. Below is how it appears as a logo for our online shop ( c )

Invoice Software

Ok so thats the logo now lets take a look at the software itself. Firstly I did a bit of looking around my own Mac computer to look for some ways I could make the software more “Apple Mac”. The first thing I noticed was that the font that Apple used was “Lucida Grande”. So that was the font taken care of. The next thing was staring me in the face the the top bar of the Mac Finder, Safari, iTunes…. Well they all use a grey gradient. So now I had the starting blocks on which to build a new look.

I did not want to totally redesign the software, i don’t think all the people that already use our invoicing program would have like me for that. I just wanted to clean it up. The buttons were to stay in the same place (give or take a couple of pixels) and the main input boxes were to be essentially left in the same place. I did change all the above sightly as you can see below. There is more room for the boxes and all the elements are alined.

Even with one of the main principles of the new look being “just a clean up” the program looks quite different. I’m happy that this will not confuse our users as every thing is still in the same place. So hopefully no looking around for something you already knew how to do.

Below are Some screen shots of our invoicing software.

 

Before the redesign

After the redesign

Before

After

Before, close up

After, close up

Before

After

Please feel free to comment

 
The new design is not out yet but we would love to know what you think. The software will look the same whether its running on Apple Mac OS or a PC. If you have not downloaded our invoicing software please feel free to give it a go. You can download it for a test run before you buy here