Caroline Wizeman - Blogs at Near Infinity

Launching Mini Confluence Enterprise Edition at the Atlassian Summit

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 18:24:31 -0500

We're in San Francisco this week at the Atlassian Summit lunching Mini Confluence Enterprise Edition -- a way to access Confluence on your iPhone, Blackberry, Palm or Android.

At last year's summit, we released Mini Confluence Personal Edition, an iPhone app that individual users can purchase from the app store and run based on Confluence's XML-RPC.

The new version is a custom plugin installed on the server. For people using an iPhone, they still download an app from the app store, but with the Enterprise Edition, it's free. For people with other mobile devices, they get to Mini Confluence through a web client.

This year's version is two times as fast as the original (!), and has some cool new features like filtering on the dashboard based on your favorites, status updates, landscape mode, and multiple user accounts. Find out more about Mini Confluence at www.miniconfluence.com.

We've been talking to lots of the conference attendees the past couple of days. Some of them have already been using the personal edition, and have given us feedback on that. Other people have ideas for MCEE, like an iPad version, support for Confluence instances protected by VPN, and even "make Mini Jira!"

I'm surprised by how many people here are on Android. It's still mostly iPhones, but a lot less Blackberry users than last year.

A lot of people have been signing up for the beta program -- we're sending out copies of the plugin for free to anyone who's interested and letting them try it out for three months. I'm anxious to hear the feedback so we can improve it before people start paying for it.

If you try it out, let us know what you think!

And now... I think it's time for some Ghirardelli Chocolate :-)

How to switch your Adobe Creative Suite from a PC to a Mac Platform

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:33:37 -0500

I was considering switching from PC to a Mac, but I have Adobe CS4 Design Premium and didn't want to pay the $1,799 to buy it again. It was surprisingly difficult to find any information about whether or not I could do it, and if so how. Some Adobe employees at a trade show even told me that it couldn't be done.

It turns out, though, that for $6.25 shipping and handling and the promise that you'll stop using and destroy your older version, they'll let you change. They call it Cross-Platform Swap. Here's how you do it:

Go to http://www.adobe.com/go/supportportal If you have an account, log in. If you don't, you'll need to create one.
Under Get Support, Click on Orders and Returns
Choose the issue type Return / Exchange / Refund and then click the button that says Proceed to Online Form
Fill out the form, typing Cross Platform Swap in the subject line. Submit.
-- In the notes field, here's what I typed: I am switching to a Mac and would like to do a cross-platform swap. I understand that my existing copy must be destroyed as soon as the new one arrives.
The next day, you'll get an email saying your issue is resolved and providing no useful information. Instructions for what to do next are actually in the ticket itself, which you can get back to on the support portal. Here's what you do:
-- Call 1-800-833-6687 and follow the prompts to customer service (#2 then #4)
-- Have your case number and credit card ready
-- Give them your credit card info and verify all your contact information

And that's it. They charge your credit card for $6.25 shipping and handling. Your old serial number gets invalidated, you destroy the old copy, and they send you the new one.

As a side note, here's a tip for getting customer service from Adobe: Instead of going to the support portal when you have a question, go to the pages on their website where they have prices and information about purchasing products. Almost immediately, you'll get a helpful person IMing you asking if they can help. These IM helpers are nowhere to be found (ironically) in the support section of their site.

Oh, and their customer support phone numbers aren't that easy to find, so here they are:
Adobe Customer Support: 1-800-585-0774 option #4
or
Adobe Customer Support: 1-800-833-6687 option #2 then option #4.

Good luck platform-swappers!

Inkscape versus Illustrator: The SVG file size throwdown

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 20:11:42 -0500

I tried a simple test today. I created identical graphics in Inkscape and Illustrator. Both had the same canvas size, same colors, shapes and text. Here's what the simple graphic looked like:

I saved the graphic in both programs as an SVG file. Inkscape created an SVG file that was 3K; Illustrator's was a ridiculous 473K. I wanted to know what caused the dramatic difference.

A co-worker suggested I open the SVG files in notepad and take a look. The Illustrator file contains many lines of garbage code, whereas the Inkscape file is simple and streamlined. To quantify it, I pasted the full text file into Word and counted the lines. The Illustrator file totaled 12,512 lines while the Inkscape file was only 89.

Is this sad showing the best Illustrator can do? Fortunately for Adobe, it's not.

llustrator has hidden a very useful option in its "Save for Web" feature. In the thousands of times I've used this feature to quickly create cleanly compacted jpegs, gifs and pngs, I had never noticed that there was another option there for saving as SVG.

Select the SVG option in Illustrator's "Save for Web" screen, and the result is a streamlined SVG file that even beats Inkscape. In my test, the same graphic was saved as 2.3K and only 58 lines of code.

Conclusions: As long as you use the "Save for Web" option, both Illustrator and Inkscape do an excellent job of creating lean, developer-friendly SVG files, with a slight edge going to Illustrator. That being said, if creating SVGs is the main thing you're looking for in a vector art program, the difference isn't worth Illustrator's $599 price tag. Save your money and download Inkscape.

	File Size	Lines of code
Illustrator SVG	473K	12,512
Inkscape SVG	3K	89
Illustrator "Save for Web" SVG	2.3K	58

Can we all just agree on a definition of Web 2.0?

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 20:54:22 -0500

Ask any group of developers, designers, project managers, and executives to articulate what Web 2.0 is, and you're likely to get as many different answers as there are people. Don't count on getting a more consistent definition from the online authorities either. Here are some examples of how different people define it:

The surface-skimmers: These non-techies know it when they see it. If the site has rounded corners, windows with gradient backgrounds, a tag cloud, and 3-D "bubbly" icons, it's Web 2.0.

The Gmail junkies: This group sees Web 2.0 as the ability for web apps to use features traditionally reserved for thick-client applications, like pioneer Gmail. For them, Web 2.0 is all about using Ajax, Ruby and other technologies to offer a better user experience.

The kitchen sink crowd: For this group, Web 2.0 includes a little bit of everything. One rather authoritative-sounding article from O'Reilly seems to throw in nearly every recent trend they could think of as part of Web 2.0: the Web as a platform, relying on collective intelligence, data-centric applications, continuous improvement of software, trusting users as co-developers, the use of lightweight programming methods, software that works on multiple devices, and rich user experiences. For good measure, they even mention The Long Tail.

Wikipedia: The typically accurate and concise Wikipedia surprised me with what seemed like an off-target definition in their Web 2.0 entry:

Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a perceived second-generation of Web-based servicesÃ'such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomiesÃ'that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.

Google: Google Definitions was a little bit clearer:

Web 2.0 is a term often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. Ultimately Web 2.0 services are expected to replace desktop computing applications for many purposes.

The term-coiner: I went back to the source, the guy who coined the phrase "Web 2.0," Tim O'Reilly. On his December 2006 blog. Tim refined his definition of Web 2.0:

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I've elsewhere called "harnessing collective intelligence.")

No wonder people like me are scratching our heads when our bosses and clients tell us they want something to be a bit more "Web 2.0-ish." Can we all agree on a definition, or should we just stop using the term before we lose our collectively-intelligent minds?

The clarity-loving communicator in me casts this vote. I say we stop using the term Web 2.0 until we can agree on a less ambiguous definition.

In the meantime, I have some bubbly icons to create.