#119 Car Waxing Tutorial, Jumpchart, Leopard Wk 2

Car Waxing Tutorial at Link to the car waxing tutorial, Jumpchart from jumpchart.com review by Paige Eissinger from viewsfromthecoop.com, Leopard week two discussion with Bart and Allison.


Listen to the Podcast Once (41 min 52 sec)
[tags]Leopard, wax, Macintosh[/tags]Today is Sunday, November 4th, 2007 and this is show #119.

Listener feedback

I can’t believe the great reaction to this week’s homework assignment! A whole bunch of you went right up to iTunes and did reviews, and I can’t thank you enough! Many of you are still waiting for just the right time to get that done, I also found out from Bart that if someone puts a review up on their own country’s iTunes store, I won’t be able to see it! that’s ok, still do it!

I have to read one of the comments though, and of course it was put up there by listener James. He titled his review “The Worst” and then gave it 5 stars. He said, “I can barely stand this podcast, don’t bother. Oh, who am I kidding? Allison is the queen of all that is slightly Macintosh biased. a living legend. she will go down in the annals of history as the one to bridge the gap between mere mortals and self-righteous computer geeks. LISTEN TO THIS SHOW PEOPLE!! …OK Allison, where’s that 20 bucks you owe me for lying to the unsuspecting iTunes public?” Don’t you just love him? He also told me this in a chat message: “I subject my friend Jeni to your train wreck of a show whenever we carpool (which is 2 or 3 times a week). She’s not a Mac user but she really enjoys it. I don’t think she’s subscribed yet though. I’m still working on that part.” I just wanted to give a shoutout to Jeni and to tell her to get a new carpool partner as soon as possible, I don’t think it’s safe to have someone so clearly unstable knowing where you live!

I would also like to thank the NORMAL listeners who wrote such nice reviews – fft1024guy, jessigal, Maxinflixion, David, Ben, Lynn, Len, Talik3, rgbcmyk, JoeSilk, Mark, Mike and one1step1 for writing such beautiful things – I know I asked you to write, but I am floored by what wonderful things you wrote.

Lynn not only wrote a review, she sent me an email to tell me that she did last week’s homework assignment – she also told a friend with a new macbook to the podcast! good job Lynn, you get a gold star for the week! For those of you who haven’t done your assignment just yet, please head on over to iTunes and write a review!

jAlbum permanent delete
Last week I talked about one scary “feature” in jAlbum, that if you try to remove a photo from the gallery, it permanently deletes the folder from your disk. I ran into this when I wanted to simply exclude a couple of photos in a directory from being put into the web album. Ryan wrote in with a productive solution.

“I listened to your latest podcast today and when hearing about your problem with jAlbum, I remembered something that I had just noticed in jAlbum when putting together our pictures for a recent event. If you right click on a photo in the gallery view and select exclude, it won’t include the picture in the gallery when it builds the web page. Hope that’s what your looking for, although the delete problem is strange none-the-less.”

Thanks Ryan, for showing me the solution I needed, AND backing me up that the delete permanently feature was a bit odd!

HDAbob
As you have probably figured out by now, Honda Bob is a sponsor of the NosillaCast. He’s my mechanic. I know, it’s a little weird to have a mechanic sponsor a tech podcast, but that’s what makes the NosillaCast great – you never know what I’m going to talk about! He’s a geek too, so it all works out for the best! Honda Bob has been fixing our Honda and Acura cars since 1978. If that isn’t an endorsement, I don’t know what is! he worked on my 1976 yellow Honda Civic (the first Honda car with 4 whole cylinders), Steve’s 1980 Accord Hatchback, my 1983 Accord sedan, Steve’s black 1986 Prelude Si (that was a hot car), my 1988 Accord sedan (the color was called “champagne beige” but it was really smog colored, I wanted black, but Steve made me get that color), Steve’s BLACK 2000 Accord Coupe, my 2005 Acura TL (finally got it in black the way I’d always wanted it, and finally Steve’s 2007 Acura RDX. That’s 8 cars in almost 30 years, the Prelude is still on the road (guy in our neighborhood bought it and Honda Bob still takes care of it, and our kids are driving our ’98 and 2000 Accords, all in excellent working condition with Honda Bob.

If you drive a Honda or Acura (or you’d like an excuse to buy one) and you live or work in the LA or Orange County area, then give Honda Bob a call at (562)531-2321, or shoot him an email at [email protected]. You can also visit his informative website at hdabob.com to learn more about how cars work.HDA Bob’s Mobile Service is not affiliated with Honda, Acura or Honda Worldwide.

Car Waxing Tutorial
Speaking of cars, throngs of people have been requesting that I create a car waxing tutorial where I explain the products and process I follow to complete my obsession. Rumel was actually going to finally wax his car this weekend after 10 years of neglect, so I finally got around to it! Steve and I actually created a little video explaining the process! It’s posted permanently in the side bar of podfeet.com and i also put a link in the shownotes. Hope you enjoy it – if you DO follow my instructions, or improvise on your own – take a picture of your car before and after and send it in! I did before & after shots on Lindsay’s car as I did the tutorial so you can see how swell it looks. next up, I’m going to create a page called “cars I have waxed”. Should be fun to see how many I’ve done!

Link to the car waxing tutorial

Jumpchart by Paige Eissinger
Niraj tipped me off to a web service called Jumpchart from which allows web developers to story board their design ideas for their customers before investing a lot of time in development. I’m not a web designer, so I decided to enlist the help of my friend and web developer, Paige Eissinger of the Views from the Coop Podcast over at viewsfromthecoop.com. I got her set up with an account over at jumpchart.com and told her to put Jumpchart through it’s paces. Let’s hear what she had to say about it:

================INSERT PAIGE’S REVIEW============
Hello, this is Paige “Chicki Chicki” Eissinger, co-host of Views from the Coop. Thanks to my Mac Chik friend, Allison, of the Nosilla Cast, I’ve had the opportunity to try out a cool tool for website planning. It’s called Jumpchart and you can check it out for yourself at www.jumpchart.com.

First of all, let me explain what Jumpchart does, or more specifically, what it did for me. As a webdesigner, the toughest thing I have to do when I start developing a brand new website for a client is planning it. If you’ve ever been on the design/development end of a website, you know what I mean. How many pages do I need? What do they need to be about? Do I need sub-pages? Do I need forms? Where does it all go? Many years ago during my first class on basic computer operations, I learned how to DRAW (yes, I said draw) a flowchart to map out the flow of the simple programs we were learning to write. I actually had a thin plastic template with all the little symbols cut into it so I could trace them onto my nifty computer paper. I really struggled then, and still do, with deciding what to put where in the scheme of things and if I changed my mind, well, let’s just say I never draw a flowchart in ink and I went through a TON of those big pink erasers…

Jumpchart is a service that helps us hard working, never-have-enough-time-to-plan web designers create online, interactive wireframes. For those of you who don’t know what a wireframe is (and that included me before I tried Jumpchart), a wireframe is a graphic representation, or visualization tool if you prefer, of a website that helps a team of web designers seperate the different elements of the site by content, function, location, interactivity and all the other stuff that goes into the finished product. You may be more familiar with the term “site map”. They’re both kinda like the old flowchart from my computer class. You identify the elements and display them graphically so everyone can see how the whole shebang fits together. This whole process works great when you have several people who have input into the design process.

In my case, the webdesign team consists of me and my client. Since I’m usually creating a website for someone whose experience with websites is from a user standpoint, it’s hard sometimes (well, a lot of the time…maybe even most of the time) to organize the content and get approval from my client because the tools I mentioned already and that I use on a regular basis don’t lend themselves to interactivity. With Jumpchart, I can create an online mock-up of a site that’s actually interactive. I can create pages and sub-pages. I can insert graphics and forms. I don’t even have to use HTML. Jumpchart uses Textile, a very simple web text markup language that’s like a lightweight HTML. Instead of opening and closing tags that contain HTML surrounded by brackets, Textile works by placing a single character before and after your web text to “mark it up” so that it appears bold, italicized, etc.

When you start a Jumpchart project, you’re prompted to name it. Once you name your project, you’re ready to go. The Jumpchart work space looks sorta like the tabbed pages in Firefox. To add a page, just click the Add page tab at the top of the screen, give you page a name, and it appears on the left side of your screen. If you want to add a sub-page to any of your pages, just click on the page where you want to add the subpage and Click the tab that says “Add Sub-page”. You can even change your mind and delete pages by clicking on the page you want to eliminate, then clicking on the tab with the little marked through circle on it. You can even re-order your pages just by dragging the names of the pages up or down to the place where you want them to be. You can set the whole website up without entering any content at all and the coolest thing is that what you see, and what your client will see, is a website with navigational links down the left hand side and content in the middle. I can tell you from my experience with Jumpchart that I was able to create a simple 7 page website and paste in some content, even upload a few graphics in less than an hour. Geez, I’ve never been able to sit down and plan any website in that amount of time, much less add content to it.

Now, the coolest part: Once you’ve created the mock-up, you can invite your client via e-mail to review it. I did that with Allison. Since I wasn’t no the receiving end of the e-mail, Allison will have to tell you how it worked, but I’m assuming she got a link in the e-mail that she could click to view the site. I know she did it, too, because I got an e-mail that told me when she’d left a comment on one of the pages. That’s where the interactive parts comes in. Not only can your client, or other web team members, review and comment on the preliminary site, when they do, you have a record of the comments. Nothing is worse than designing a website according to the instructions in all those e-mails and phone calls, than presenting a finished product that’s “not really what I wanted” even when you KNOW you gave them what they asked for.

Once you’ve completed the mock-up and everyone has approved it, you can export a single page or a whole site to your computer with the click of a mouse. Jumpchart exports the site in HTML format of, with everything in the folder where it belongs so that it’s fully functional as soon as you upload it to a webserver. Jumpchart even has valid editable CSS as part of your project, so the exported site may require only a few tweaks to make it a finished product.

Jumpchart is an online service, not a piece of software. There’s nothing to download and it doesn’t matter if you use Windows, Mac or Linux. HTML is HTML and that’s what you get when you export your Jumpchart project. It’s pretty easy to learn, too. Jumpchart has a great online video tour that walks you through working with pages, content, files and exporting your project. Each is only about 1 minute long. The help feature is easy to use and the help content is easy to understand. Right now, Jumpchart has 4 types of accounts: the Free basic account, the $5/month Simple account, the $25/month Super account and the $50/month Deluxe account. As you would probably guess, the more expensive the account you choose, the more projects, disk storage, pages and users are available to you. My recommendation is that you visit www.jumpchart.com and take the video tour…oh, and that you check out me and my podcast co-host, Kim Beasley, The Blog Queen at www.viewsfromthecoop.com.

Thanks Paige for a great review, I really like the way you outlined the issues with creating a new website first so we could tell what problem Jumpchart could solve. I did get an email from Jumpchart telling me that you had created something for me to review. I was able to go over and make comments on different pages, as well as edit existing pages and add new pages. As a collaboration tool for a team this might work well. I didn’t follow the pricing exactly, I had to have an account in order to log in to the invitation, which made me wonder whether your clients would also have to have a paid for account, or whether they could have a login without having an account at all. I’m glad I had Paige do this review because she’s clearly more skilled and knowledgeable about this topic! Paige’s Views from the Coop Podcast has a delightful down home feel to it, and you can even join into the podcast live while it’s being recorded and participate. Even though she’s currently a Windows user only, she’s toying with the idea of getting a Mac! thanks again Paige for the great review.

Wall Street Journal
I’ve been telling you for about the last month or so why you should subscribe to the Wall Street Journal (by clicking on the link on podfeet.com), but I’ve changed my mind. You shouldn’t subscribe to the paper OR online version. Why? because it will make you late to work. At least that’s what happened to ME last thursday. Let me explain. First of all, Thursday is the day they publish the Technology Journal, so there was Walter Mossberg’s column reviewing Gateway’s new “One” computer which is supposed to compete with the iMac, but in reality is more expensive, slower, and has a smaller screen for the same price. Oh, and it doesn’t have a built in camera, it’s noisier than the iMac, and it boots up slower. Had to relish in that article and reread several times. Then inside that section Walter had his Mossberg’s Mailbox which is mildly entertaining.

So far I could have gotten to work on time, but there was also an interesting article about the Hollywood writer’s strike (did you know they only make 0.3% of DVD sales, and they make ZERO if the things they write are published on the web, even if the distributor makes money off of ads???) Moving on, there was an article about how there’s actually an ethanol GLUT in the US right now, after all this doom and gloom about how we’ll never be able to make enough. I also learned about how Netlog has a social networking site that has 28 million members because they produce in 13 different languages! Clearly I’m way late for work already, but then there was an article about how some of the US States have gotten tired of waiting for the Federal government and are taking action to close the broadband gap and make it accessible to everyone. According to the article, the us only has 19.6 broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants! That makes the US 15th in the world!!! Shockingly Denmark is number 1 at only 31.9%. I thought that the percentages were MUCH higher.

I’m at least a half hour late for work when I notice the Personal Journal section has a whole piece on low end laptops to get for your kids, like the EeePC from AsusTek, and the XO One Laptop Per Child. man, had to read that whole article to keep up with the trends. I thought i’d make it in before noon, but there was this great article about when to fix or ditch your electronics! i had no choice but to keep reading!

the bottom line is that you should by no circumstance click on the Wall Street Journal link and buy yourself a subscription…for the holidays maybe, or for your spouse…or your child to show them what newsprint looks like.

Leopard Week 2

Bart and I decided to have a conversation this week about our experiences with Leopard in week 2 – here’s that interview:

==============INSERT LEOPARD INTERVIEW===========

I need to mention one more piece of listener feedback before we go – Quality Control Director Steve has decided to check back in after a long absence. He let me know that last week’s podcast had much more than an EVER so slight Macintosh bias. hmmm…wait till he listens to this one!

On that note, I think that’s going to wrap up this fun-filled episode of the NosillaCast, I really appreciate all the great feedback you send in, keep it up by emailing me at [email protected] and keep putting those great comments on the blog – I love all the energy going on there lately! Thanks for listening, and stay subscribed.