We’ve had a heck of a Friday! Both AdminPraise AND Projectfork get new themes today. In fact, they’re twin themes that are designed to mesh with each other.
Check out Stainless / Steel!

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We’re pretty vocal about it, but we’ll say it again: We LOVE the CMS Expo. We were sponsors of last year’s expo and entered into the expo thinking it was just another boring expo, and that we’d hopefully make a couple of useful contacts. I was sorely underestimating John Coonen and the CMS Expo. Every level of the expo was better than any other we’d attended.

Here’s what we like about the CMS Expo:

• Public Connections – we really got a good feel of the how the community sees us and our products and how we can make them better
• Professional Connections – CMS Expo facilitated face-to-face meetings with the best in the CMS industry and intro’d us to our peers, idols, and so many that we speak to on Skype but never in person
• Personal Attention – at times I thought John (founder of CMSX) had a crush on me judging by the attention they gave us, but they somehow find the time to give everyone this genuine attention and care
• Hotel/Accommodations – the Hotel Orrington was perfectly classy for us Cajun/Texans, looking forward to returning
• Learn from the Pros – you will legitimately learn something from the best in the biz
• Fun Fun Fun – all the pre-conference dinners, meet and greets, and mostly the NXNW Pub Crawl set the stage for further developing the great new contacts you’ll make at the Expo
• Did we mention connections? Make REAL connections. Not some B.S. networking meeting connections where you’re forced to trade business cards or some crap. REAL connections

Our Presentations This Year

• Web Design Essentials – If you’d like to learn  about our approach to designing themes for Joomla, admin interfaces and Projectfork’s UI, check out Web Design Essentials
• Manage Your Projects Better With Projectfork – Learn all about our free open source project manager for Joomla (we might even have some special reveals)

Launch Party

We’re working hard to have several reveals for JoomlaPraise, Projectfork, AdminPraise, and possibly even more 

If at all possible, come out to Evanston, Illinois and check out our presentations and/or grab a beer with us!

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We’re a small team and we design user interfaces and user experiences. We don’t know much, but we’re driven to deliver intuitive interfaces.

PayPal is a multi-million (or billion?) dollar company and you’d think their site would be somewhat intuitive, but it fails in almost every way.

We previously charged recurring subscription feeds via PayPal for our club, but did away with that in lieu of the new bundles. We’d now like to cancel the recurring subscriptions for our customers to save them time, but the task is becoming nearly impossible due to PayPal’s horrible customer experience.

I’m not a rocket scientist, but know my way around interfaces and the web in general. The PayPal site has stumped me for well over a week now.

Here’s a few of the many failures:

1. Sloooow load times. Paypal’s site has always been painfully slow for me.
2. Crummy user nav. I go to My Account thennn, History? Profile? Where are Subscriptions?
3. Only 3 Months of Search. We have members from years ago, when I search “All Activity” that only goes back 3 months?
4. Horrendous Pagination. I can only go to the Next or Prev page? No numbered search results?
5. Can’t change number of results. I can only view 20 at a time? What is this, 1992?
6. No Sorting. So I can’t sort by Active, Price, Created Date… nothing?

Ok, so at this point I obviously need help. I’m sure that’s going to be easy right? Wrong.

Here’s my adventure:

1. Click on Help
2. I see Subscriptions in the list yay! I click on it.
3. 2 measly results, neither helpful at all.
4. One of the results says “Change the date back to the year the subscription was created” but you can’t even select the year.
5. Hesitantly click on “Ask Sarah” a virtual assistant (cause I guess PayPal doesn’t have the budget for a real online assistant)
6. Any word or phrase I type Sarah tells me she don’t know nuthin’ and to go away.
7. Waaaay down in the corner I find “Contact us by phone or email” and click on it.
8. PayPal tries to force me to Ask the Community or guess what??? Ask stupid Sarah
9. I click Email Us
10. Instead of an Email form I get a list of questions, none of which include my issue.
11. I choose the closest solution and am asked to type my question, which I do.
12. I’m taken to a screen to enter 1 transaction ID??? Whaaaaa? I just wanted to send a simple email!
13. So now I guess I’ll try the Phone option tomorrow, I bet I’ll get a live helpful person there!

(as a side note I also replied to an email from service@paypal.com, in which I got an autoresponder that I couldn’t email this address and I should try their awesome Help section)

FAIL

Update 2/20/10:

I finally jumped through the hoops to call support, and PayPal’s phone support is nothing short of amazing. I would have never guess it, but yes, PayPal’s phone support rocks.

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As I was enjoying work this Saturday morning, is realized something. I’m using Google Chrome, and all the tabs I have open are Google Apps Mail (GMail), Google Voice (reading a voicemail…yes, reading), Google Docs, Google Spreadsheet, and Google Reader.

Damn, I knew I liked Google products, but I didn’t realize how far things have gone. With the release of the Nexus One (Google Phone) and Google Chrome OS coming out soon, I could be using soley Google products. The ONLY app tying me to the “old” world is Adobe Fireworks, and with the rise of things like Aviary (browser based design apps), I’m betting we’ll be totally internet based, mostly Google within a couple of years. How long will it take Google to come out with a notebook? 1 year?

The future is now, and Google owns it.

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My browser addiction saga continues. Google Chrome extensions have been enabled on the Mac dev channel and I’ve installed quite a few. Some of these extensions are even better than Firefox addons.

All the Google stuff works great (of course since Chome is Google). The extensions for Google Apps Mail (or GMail) and Google reader are fantastic bc they give you a count of unread items, and even a quick preview. This is huge bc I don’t have to leave a tab open for them. There’s also an extension to display feeds as Firefox does in the address bar.

They’ve also got some sweet web dev extensions. Avairy’s Screen Capture rocks for quick grabs and edits. Chrome Sniffer displays and icon for the CMS the site uses which is very cool and handy. Pendule is kindof a lite version of the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox.

One last note for something that stumped me (embarrassingly) on the Mac version: To access extension options or disable/uninstall, click on the wrench icon and go to Extensions

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Santa got me a Magic Mouse for Christmas and it’s pretty neat. I’m getting use to it, but can already tell you that if you get one, immediately install MagicPrefs to get more customization options.

I also wanted to note that if you’re using USB Overdrive, you must uninstall it to get the Apple Wireless Mouse Update 1.0 to work. Took me about an hour of screwing around to figure that out. You can’t just disable it, you must uninstall.

If I think of any cool ways to use the Magic Mouse to benefit Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress I’ll post notes

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In our new Drupal Ubercart store, we wanted users to be able to sort our product grids. We’re using Ubcart and come custom Views for the grids, and there’s no option for users to be able to change the sorting, so what do you do?

We stumbled across this thread which discusses a solution where you create multiple displays in a particular view, each sorted differently (by date, desc/asc, price, etc). Then you install the Views Display Tabs module, which is a little gem. Basically, it allows you to select which view, and then which display in the view will be displayed in Ajax tabs. Very cool.

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I’ve posted recently about my Firefox frustrations and really tried to stop using it and rely on Safari & Chrome on the Mac, but it’s like giving up smoking or crack.

Basically, you just can’t beat Firebug, it’s Firefox’s saving grace. My biggest gripe was the extremely slow loading of history and new tabs. I found Vacuum Places Improved 1 recently and it’s made a huge difference in the performance. I highly recommend trying it.

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Meet your replacements, Safari & Chrome on the Mac. I’ve relied on Firefox for so long, but I’m getting on with my life.

Don’t get me wrong. Firefox has changed the world of browsers and has done incredibly important things. It’s just that it has become such a resource hog that I can hardly use my Mac at all. Safari and Chrome both just haul ass on the web in comparison. It’s insane, I forgot how fast my computer was.

The killer for me was the Safari 4 Web Inspector. With it, I’m no longer tied to Firefox because of Firebug’s importance. Web Inspector isn’t quite as good, but I’m willing to adjust in trade for keeping the hair I have .

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We are rockin’ and rollin’ with our new JoomlaPraise, Projectfork, AdminPraise, Pixel Praise, and Ecommerce store. It’s hard to believe how well everything is coming along (I hope I’m not jinxing us). It seems as though all our years of experience is paying off and we’re finally arriving at designs that are simple, beautiful, and easy to navigate.

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