Last weekend we launched JJKilla.com for Jason Andrews, an Atlanta Producer, engineer, and mixer.  Jason wanted a simple one page site that would allow him to post a short bio about himself, enable potential clients to quickly contact him, and a way to list recent projects & featured work.

We utilized ExpressionEngine to allow him to make changes to the site & maintain his client list easily.

Go check out the site now, and look for a refresh of SpotlightSoundStudio.com soon as well.  Spotlight Sound Studio is Jason’s recording facility located just north of Atlanta, and we designed this site for him about 6 years ago, so it’s time for a refresh.

SquareOne partnered with Michael Cantrell, one of our strategic partners, to deliver a cohesive product that is easy to use and delivers all of the data tracking needed by individuals in the sales world.

We’re really excited to see Sales Bean grow and are glad to have been part of the process of bringing it to the web. Drew is a great guy, and one of the best clients I’ve ever worked with. We wish him nothing but the greatest of success at Sales Bean.

You can check out the Sales Bean site at salesbean.com – it’s free to join and use.

• Seems slightly faster – maybe 10% faster for most operations
• Minimize to dock icon instead of to no-man’s land next to trash
• Time Capsule can now back up hourly speedily. Used to have to use TimeMachineEditor and modify for every 4 hours to avoid constant backups
• Time Machine backup mounted DMG isn’t generic icon anymore
• Search now can search ‘current folder’ by default instead of the entire mac
• Expose shows minimized windows below main windows, smaller icons.
• Expose, pressing spacebar while moused over a window shows full size preview of window.
• Column view allows you to sort by type, etc
• More animations in finder when reordering, etc. Everything seems smoother.
• The much hyped stacks improvements. You can now navigate thru folders.
• 4 finger swipe on older Macbook Pros!

That’s a good thing, right?

Dan Cederholm & Ethan Marcotte are teaming up for the sequel to Bulletproof web design: Handcrafted CSS. I highly respect both of these guys, and really can’t wait to see what they put together.

From the intro:

Seemingly non-obvious details can often separate good web design from great web design. You might not appreciate the quality of a well-designed website until you start using it, looking under the hood, putting it through tests, etc.

This is fantastic advice that I don’t think any web designers follow often enough. While Graphic Designers generally design for a static medium, working on the web is such a fluid set of scenarios and interactions that sometimes the little details get overlooked after the design has been approved and the code has been written.

So head over to Amazon and pre order it now!

Thankfully, Shaun Inman has come up with a pretty neat way to solve this issue, with his new web based rss reader, Fever. What Fever does differently from the other guys is it asks you to keep your feeds in two separate groups: Kindling and Sparks. All that means is that the Sparks are the feeds you subscribe to but maybe don’t read every entry (Andrew Sullivan, CNN, Engadget, other ‘high volume’ posting sites), and the Kindling are the MUST read sites (for me, Daring Fireball and other ‘lower volume, must read’ type sties). Fever then goes through and finds out what everyone is talking about, and assigns a ‘temperature’ to each topic. That way, if 10 blogs are talking about a certain topic, that topic shows up at the top of the list with the 10 blogs linking to it. This model actually encourages you to add more feeds, not the opposite. If you keep most of your feeds in the Sparks section, there’s no guilt when you leave them unread, as they will still be relevant in keeping you up on trending topics & can still be read if you like.

I’ve been using it for a few days and I’ve already caught onto news that I might have overlooked previously while skimming articles with NetNewsWire. There is also an included webclip-based application for the iPhone, so you can read feeds on the go very quickly as well. If you set up a cron-job to automatically refresh articles every half hour or so, you’ll always quickly have the latest news on your phone without having to manually refresh when the page loads. Very Google reader-esque.

A few minor wishes / issues:

• On the iPhone, there’s a little webclip jerkiness when scrolling from screen to screen. I wonder if that’s something that can be fixed?  I’m on a 3G, so maybe it’s just something us folks on ‘older’ hardware have to deal with.
• Currently there are no ‘customized post to… (instapaper, delicious, etc)’ options yet.
• I would love some sort of ‘bookmarks import to rss’ option where it scans all of your bookmarks and adds every rss feed it finds to your sparks. That way you’d get the optimal overview of everything you read in one place. That actually might be a project I undertake in the near future.
• A way to collapse all of the sub articles in the ‘Hot’ screen.  That’d make for an even quicker overview and a cleaner interface if you so desired.

Overall, I think it’s a fantastic product with a ton of promise.   I’m actually spending less time reading feeds than I have in a long time, yet I feel more informed.  Most of the time, sites I read like TPM, Huffington Post and The Atlantic might be talking about the same topic.  Seeing all of the information about the one news item gives you an overview of what’s ‘hot’ for the day, week, etc.  Being a web-based app means it’s always up-to-date (and it even automatically updates the actual software on your server!). Of course, it also means there are some limitations (no caching of articles for reading later, etc, but I’m hoping some solid instapaper integration can fix that). Shawn Blanc is a better writer than I’ll ever be, so here is his review of Fever as well.

Fever costs $30, and there is a screencast here that gives a good overview.

What I think I love the most is the single ‘action button’ that allows for future features to come in pretty easily into future updates. Pressing the one action button allows you to star something, reply to a person, view their profile, and so much more. Additionally, you can customize ‘tap shortcuts’ to quickly do things you do frequently (star an item, view a profile, etc). I hope that future releases allow direct messages to be allowed as a ‘tap shortcut’.

Nothing’s perfect though, but there are only 3 things that jump out as problems to me:

• No ‘go to user’ feature. Sometimes I want to quickly bring up a profile that I don’t follow. How would I do that in Twitterrific 2?
• No ‘view more’ feature. I’d like to be able to view more than just 100 tweets.
• Selected tweet loses focus on scroll.

I’d like to think that most of those are going to be addressed in a future update. Anyway, Twitterrific costs less than $5 in the iTunes store, or has an ad supported free version. So give it a go.

Well, that might be changing with the soon-to-be-released Safari 4 browser.

When the browser’s beta version was released a while back, I had some initial reactions that I still stand by. They were trying to do too much with the new ‘tabs on top’ interface, and they actually created a frankenstein browser that breaks so many UI rules that it’s not even funny.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but something I have been doing a lot lately is using the Firefox 3.5 betas and the ‘GrApple Crisp‘ theme. This is a ‘tabs on top’ version but it’s actually done correctly in my view.

• The titlebar stays intact
• Click-though is respected
• Clicking anywhere on the bar that is not a tab creates a new tab

Worth a look if you like the tabs on top look that Chrome and Safari 4 are offering.

When you’re a small design business, sometimes it’s difficult to do it all on your own. However, when you’re a small design business with really talented folks around you, it gets a bit less tricky. With that said, I’d like to announce the first of a few ‘partnerships’ that will help us deliver even higher quality work.

Matt Downham is a guy I met at school about 5 years ago now, and is easily one of the most talented designers I know. He’s got a background in all sorts of media, from video to print to web and everything in between. Matt will be handling some of the design projects around here, mainly depending on the size and scope of the projects. As we grow and take on larger clients, it’s important to have a handful of folks to lean on to ensure we put out the best quality product. Matt is definitely one of those people.

You can check out his website here, or stay tuned for some blog posts detailing projects we are both working on.

What has caused this epic change? Simply put, a new iPhone app called Birdhouse.

Now don’t get all ahead of yourselves here – it looks like a beautifully done app, and the website design, intro video and everything in between look to be fantastically done. I don’t want to take that away from the folks who put this together (doesn’t hurt that Sandwich Dynamics is an amazing company name, either).

The app simply exists to let you quickly enter in ‘tweet’ ideas, slowly refine them, rate them accordingly, then finally publish the great ones, while still refining the rest.

It’s just that I feel like they’re solving a problem that didn’t really exist until they showed up with the app. Again, maybe I’m an oldster now and I just don’t ‘get’ it. Maybe true genius is doing exactly what I feel they did — creating a solution to an imaginary problem. I may or may not end up giving it a shot, as maybe I really am missing out on something. I just can’t shake that feeling that it makes no sense to me. Regardless of how I feel, you should check it out for yourself — the intro video is quite good.

Anyway, stay off my lawn.