IDEAS

Found this article on billshrink.com that compares the costs of 3 big smartphones on the market.  I do love my iphone, but I’m so glad I’m not on AT&T with their ridiculous iphone plans…

I think you’ll be surprise by the overall prices shown, original article here:

We have a regular EVDO modem from Verizon that we share as people go on vacation, conferences and when we take road trips with projects still on the plate   We had to buy a cradlepoint router to share our EVDO modem through wifi, but this small device offers the EVDO modem, a router (up to 5 users) and up to 4 hours of battery in 1 package, hard to beat.  If it wasn’t for the fact that our plan is grandfathered in as a true unlimited plan unlike the current 5 gig limits (yes it’s enough for most, but not for us!!!), I’d say we’d try it.  Take a look at the full article

Part 2 of our series where we look at tools used in-house to make web development easier and faster. Mike demonstrates Measure it which is a browser pixel measuring tool and Screengrab which takes print screening to a the next level. We show you how simple the tools are to use and the needs they fulfill. Send requests for screencasts to share@localwisdom.com and follow us at twitter.com/localwisdom

Show Notes: Original Blog post with Measure It and Screengrab links

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Those rather helpful guys at

Smashing Magazine

have posted 40 useful resources for interface design patterns. I have some of these bookmarked and others where new.

They also just posted 10 design patterns to be paying attention to, talking about some of the recent patterns that are emerging and re-emerging in the websites that we know and love.

Good stuff to snack on and chew.

UX Booth has a great article on Counting Clicks. The every famous “3 Click Rule”, which is something like everyone should get to where they want to go in 3 clicks, is one of those “rules” that we aren’t fans of.

Not because we don’t like the challenge of making everything on your website available within 3 clicks. There might be times where it is applicable. As a general rule it places unnessary contrains on the architecture that might not really be a benefit to the user.

For example large navigation systems are not helpful for people to make decisions with. In that scenario people might want 4 clicks with smaller navigation items.

The truth is that hard, fast, and specific rules like this don’t apply to everything. Just like saying that a glass of wine a day is good for you doesn’t apply to everyone.

Some iPhone apps usage stats from adlabs.

– Minutes per use: 9.6 (Greystripe)
– Uses per user: 19.9 (Greystripe)
– Only 20% of users return to use the app after the first day (Pinch Media)
– After a month, this number drops to 5% (Pinch Media)
– “39% of iPhone users cited weather-related apps as one of the three kinds of applications they use most frequently (Compete via MediaPost, April 2009)

I just ordered a pizza from Domino’s and here it tells me exactly what the status of my pizza is in real time.

Related to the post just prior to this, I had to figure out how to test or “ping” the newly created SRV record and I found this blog post that showed me how:

” Office Communicator relies on Service Location (SRV) records in DNS for auto-configuration. Frequently you can’t create the external DNS record yourself so you need to ask your ISP or DNS provider to do it for you.

So if the service provider is swearing black and blue that the records have been created correctly but your external client is not finding the server checking your DNS configuration is a great place to start.”

Original Post here

Original Error:
Microsoft Exchange offline address book
Not downloading Offline address book files. A server (URL) could not be located.
0X8004010F

We just recently upgraded our DC to Win 2008 and also upgraded to Exchange 2007. With that, we’ve run into a small issue of the Offline Address Book (OAB) not being able to be found and it’s giving a sync error every hour in outlook. We had to figure out a way to get the Autodiscover feature to work correctly and after about 3 hours of searching, here’s the article that set us up correctly:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940881

It worked great for us as we couldn’t use the standard DNS solution due to having only 1 IP and only being able to use 1 SSL certificate on that IP (I did try a wildcard SSL, but then the email sync broke while the Offline Address Book error went away), so setting up a SRV record worked great!

Here’s a link that shows how to setup the SRV DNS entry in godaddy

Part 1 of our series where we look at tools used in-house to make web development easier and faster. Mike demonstrates some of the most commonly used features in firebug which include on the fly css and html manipulation, turning styles on and off, layouts, page sizes and page caching. Probably the most heavily leaned upon tool in the arsenal and we’ll show you how to use it! Send requests for screencasts to share@localwisdom.com and follow us at twitter.com/localwisdom

Show Notes: Firebug website

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