Categories
Design

Color Scheme Designer

The design process can be a long and arduous road with many bumps along the way. Every bump affects each designer differently ie. typography, layout, content, color…DING! DING! I would sometimes spend more time than necessary deciding what colors to use in a web or logo design. I have found this handy web application developed by Petr Stanicek. It’s called Color Scheme Designer. I use it to quickly grab colors that are a part of a color family and continue with my process. The online application has several other features and functions to experiment with also.

http://colorschemedesigner.com/

(Source: Skynet Solutions)

By Clint Smith

Categories
Marketing

Google+

There is a new social media outlet, Google+, that will surely be very popular. Google+ is still in Beta, but has pretty much opened the door to anyone with a will to join. They are still adding new features every day, and working out the kinks with existing features. Google has quite a following, is the number one all-time search engine, and every smart phone purchased these days gets set up with a free Gmail account. Google has the resources to reach a large number of people very quickly. The real question is will people feel compelled to switch to Google+.

Google has a “stream,” of information, much like the news feed on Facebook, to share information with your friends. However on Google+ you can only post on your own stream. If a friend makes a post, you can then comment on it. Happy Birthdays, and random posts of affection or appreciation are commonplace on Facebook “walls,” but at least for now, you won’t see them on Google+.

You can tag your friends in posts you make with Google+ by starting their name with an @ sign similar to Twitter’s method.

The reason Google+ does not have messaging and other services is most likely because they want to integrate their other products, such as Gmail, with it so they have more to share in other areas as well.

You can download all your contacts on Google+. You can also download your “profile” and “photos” and other information Google collects on all its applications. Facebook has a similar feature but does not collect as much information on you since it is just the social network aspect of it.

You can download contacts into your GMail account simply by clicking “contacts”. It’s also very easy to download your other data by going to any Google Page with the “Google+ bar.” (This is the new black bar at the top of the page.) Next, you need to click your name “John Smith,” then “Account Settings,” and then “Data Liberation.”

(Source: Skynet Solutions)

By Ryan Williams

Categories
Support

Adobe Edge noConflict fix 0.1.2

Adobe Edge 2 is now available, but they still haven’t gotten around to making it work when jQuery is in noConflict mode.

Download the 0.1.2 fix

Again, you will still need to edit your project file like so:

/**
 * Adobe Edge DOM Ready Event Handler
 */
$(window).ready(function() {
  $.Edge.initialize(symbols);
});
/**
 * Adobe Edge Timeline Launch
 */
$(window).load(function() {
  $.Edge.play();
});

I simply added the noConflict() function and changed the four instances of “$” to “jQuery”.

/**
 * Adobe Edge DOM Ready Event Handler
 */
jQuery.noConflict();
jQuery(window).ready(function() {
  jQuery.Edge.initialize(symbols);
});
/**
 * Adobe Edge Timeline Launch
 */
jQuery(window).load(function() {
  jQuery.Edge.play();
});

(Source: Skynet Solutions)

By Blaine Schmeisser

Categories
Support

TaskAnt Review

Any company needing to assign various tasks to several different employees knows that using email as a primary way of task management may not be very efficient. For Skynet Solutions, Inc. our email client didn’t support conversations, and after a few replies, it was easy for a task to get lost, or be categorized incorrectly. To help remedy this situation, Skynet decided to use a newer technology called TaskAnt, which is an online task managing application. We have used TaskAnt for a few weeks now, and here are some comments on the software. After registering, we all had a few issues with logging in. The administrators set it up so we have our own virtual directory. This is nice since we can link to this directory compared to having other employees and some of our clients log in from the main Task Ant website. Anybody can create a task, assign it to a person, set a due date and priority, and add comments. We realized the best way to handle completed tasks was to assign it back to the original creator for them to check. We simply add a few comments with what we did, or what other information we may need. Being relatively new, I still found a few bugs. Often when clicking through links, the program grays out and stops working. Because you don’t get very deep on the site, simply refreshing isn’t a huge downfall. Also, it claims only admins can create tasks, however a user account can create them as well, which has proven helpful, but not exactly how they advertised it. There are a few suggestions we at Skynet Solutions, Inc. would love to implement. However, at the same time TaskAnt aims to make this a simple to-do repository, and it does a wonderful job at that. So that being said, we could try and make extensions to our browsers but it would be difficult to implement across all employees and the few select clients who are allowed to assign tasks directly. All-in-all, we are satisfied with TaskAnt and the benefits it offers. It is a much more efficient way to organize and assign jobs. It helps keep our personnel on the same page even though they may work from different locations. Lastly, it is easy to use.

(Source: Skynet Solutions)

By Blaine Schmeisser