How do you feel about instant gratification?

I enjoy it personally. It’s like waving a magic wand.

I’m spoiled by my programming co-workers. Sometimes I happen to stumble upon a bug, need an e-mail setting fixed on a server I don’t have access to, or have a question about the CMS we built from scratch; I can’t think of a single time when I’ve had to ask twice because I didn’t get an answer nearly immediately.

But throw clients into the mix, and you have an entirely different ballgame. Keep Reading

Take ten minutes today to comment on a blog you read.

If you’ve ever written anything, you know what a big deal it is Keep Reading

“Collaboration is Cooperation on steroids.”

—Randy Nelson, Pixar University

When people ask us what Jumpchart is, our answer is always, “It’s an online collaborative wireframing app.” But recently we got to thinking: What is collaboration, really? A common definition lands somewhere in the neighborhood of, “Collaboration means working together towards a common outcome.”, which isn’t a bad definition. But it isn’t the most correct definition either. So, the question still stands: What is collaboration? And how does it help you get your website project organized in Jumpchart? To answer those questions a little etymology will be helpful. Keep Reading

Nobody would build a house without a blueprint. No factory would build a car without a plan. A plan is the starting point for any solid project. Without a plan, you’re sure to wind up somewhere you, well, didn’t plan on.

Our heritage is in a company that builds bespoke websites for clients. Since the beginning of our business, we’ve always adhered to the idea that regardless of the vehicle we choose to use to tell it, our job was primarily that of a storyteller.

In the case of websites, we use pages, text, and images to tell that story. Keep Reading

Paprika’s getting some nice buzz on Twitter. Thanks for all the beta comments everyone! Keep ‘em coming.

I was really ready to stop reading this article about halfway through, because it said you should only put present todos on your Project List.

Blasphemy!!

If you’re anything like me, you have a todo list for:

• Right now at work.
• As soon as you get home.
• The future.
• Things you’d really like to do, but know you’ll probably never find the time for.
• Things you need to tell other people to do.

Keep Reading

You can’t work all the time, obviously. So how do you determine when you start, and when you stop?

• Are you governed by company rules?
• Are you most productive at a certain time?
• Do you work in spurts during the day?
• Do you work only at night? Keep Reading

“Steve Jobs: You know… (long pause). I’m trying to think of a good analogy. When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.”

This dialog is about the iPad vs. the PC. But this conversation could not be relevant without the internet connected application.

Silly grammar mistakes. People referring to a page within a site as a completely different website. Being blamed for something I didn’t do, or not being given any credit for something I did. Not feeling 100% confident about my own work. Oh, and oysters.

These are things that bug the ever-living crap out of me. Up until about a year ago, I just let them bug me- and shook them off. I thought that by not letting them get to me, I was being the better (bigger) person. Keep Reading

“I think that years from now, when the details have been washed away by the acid rains of time, four major commercial events will stand out in the history of personal computers: the advent of the microprocessor which drove prices of computers down to the point where individuals could buy them and led to the first flowering of the present computer revolution, the ascendancy of the software industry and the shift from “users will program them” to “users will run software packages”, the Mac interface and its followers which brought the benefits of computers to a far broader audience and fundamentally changed the way we use computers of all sizes and software of all kinds, and (to tread on dangerous ground since the event is relatively recent) the blossoming of the Internet.”

— Jef Raskin.