Categories
Book Review

C# 5.0 in a Nutshell – Book Review

C# 5.0 in a Nutshell: The Definitive Reference – by Joseph Albahari and Ben Albahari – cover most of the language specifics of C# 5.0, with plenty of chapters covering the new async, threading, etc.

A lot of people seem to see this as more of a reference than a tutorial, but I didn't know almost anything about C# and still found it competent as such (I do have plenty of experience in other languages, though). The use of LINQPad for quickly being able to quickly try out samples (and change them as you want) is pretty great.

It is also quite impressive how many of the newest C# features were available in Chrome back in 2005 (a pascal for .net by Remobjects, now called Oxygene).

I highly recommend the book, but keep in mind that it only covers the language, not the other framework you will probably need (such as Winforms, WPF or ASP.NET).

Categories
Product Review

The Critical Website Components – Book Review

The Critical Website Components Series, by Sean D'Souza, consists of 3 short e-books:

The About Us Page—Why You Need To Throw Away Your Brown Paper

This is an interesting view into the About Us page. Sean is clearly a big fan of personality in this page, as well as having a photo or photos here, so that customers feel more confident and are more likely to trust you.  There is a lot of interesting advice here.

The Home Page—How To Put Sparkle And Pop Into Your Home

A view into how to create your home page. A couple of general layout options as well as graphic advice (the usual – create focus on what you think is important using space, contrast and direction).

Some more interesting advice on how to present your solutions on a way that will grab the attention of your potential customer. Plenty of examples.

My package also included a video with a short case study, that I didn't feel to be very useful (I have used heatmaps on my page before, and read articles on the subject, so it had nothing new for me).

Getting To Sign Up—How To Create A Clear and Simple Route For Subscribers

I thought this would be near useless (Sign ups are a whole lot less useful when you have a bunch of unconnected niche software like me, than sites like Sean's with new products that can be sold).

However, it has plenty of interesting details on not only squeeze pages, but also on creating reports – and packaging – and also on make engaging audio or video presentations.

How  To Maximise The Power Of Bonuses

This was a bonus (ironically!) to the package, that covers why and how to make product bonuses, while making they seem as valuable as possible. Very interesting views and tips! I also like the view of avoiding discounting your products and using bonuses instead – there are several places where I will not buy unless there is a discount as I know they have them frequently.

Conclusion

The home page and About us books had some interesting information, but for me the Sign Up and Bonuses ebooks were the most useful. As most of Sean's e-books, all were very fun to read and quite short and to the point.
Overall, at US$49 the package value was acceptable considering the bonus e-book, but I wouldn't recommend it otherwise.

Categories
Software Release

STG FolderPrint Plus 4.10 Released

I have just released version 4.10 of STG FolderPrint Plus.

Changes:
[unordered_list style=”green-dot”]

  • Dropped old watermark system (see blog post for details).
  • Fix for AV with some remote access tools.

[/unordered_list]
You can get it at http://www.stgsys.com/fpp.asp, or just run the program, and use Menu Help, item Check for new version.

 

 

Categories
Product Review

How to Create a Brilliant 3D Demo Video for Your Business – Course Review

How to Create a Brilliant 3D Demo Video for Your Business, by David Hawkins, covers all you need to know to make your own 3D animated video about your product or service.

Course Sections

  • Script writing
  • Storyboarding
  • Illustration
  • Animation
  • Voiceover
  • Sound Effects
  • Editing
  • Marketing/PR

Conclusion

The course is taught using several Adobe products (such as Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, etc), all of which have a 30-day trial available.

Included with the course are several files with many interactive PDF templates as well as several illustrations and projects.

If you are in a hurry, you will probably be happy to know that I could speed up the videos in Udemy (1.25, 1.5, 1.7 or 2.0). 1.5X is very watchable for me.

The 3D animation part is really something that can give an edge for your video.

Overall, the course is worth it if you can get a discount.

There is a very nice sale on Bits Du Jour for US$49 instead of US$347.

[big_button color=”blue” url=”http://stgsys.net/3ddemocourse” desc=””]Get the course for US$49[/big_button]

Check the video that is used as an example in the course below:

 

Categories
Product Review

App Making: Designing & Marketing Successful Apps – Guide Review

App Making: Designing & Marketing Successful Apps is a guide by Jeremy Olson. Jeremy is the founder of Tapity, which has a few well know apps that were featured by Apple as well as covered by the press.

I got the complete package (US$150 with the launch and App Design guide buyer discount). There are also other cheaper packages available.

The guide is hosted in guides.co. They don't allow for offline viewing, but it was quite comfortable to view on a tablet. The videos are placed on pages, which I believe is a better choice than many similar sites because it is easier to just display other resources, tips, action points and relevant screens in place.

They also have one very interesting feature – you can comment on each lesson, and it can be public or just readable for the author. So there is a mini-forum available on every topic. Personally I posted a question and got a response from the author very fast.

One complaint I have is that you have to log on a lot on the site – sometimes more than once a day. And they use a dual page login system that neither Chrome nor Safari (iPad) can just login directly.

Videos are mostly from a workshop, and quality is OK, although audio is sometimes a little hard to hear. Sometimes things are described (such as interactions on apps) instead of shown, which is somewhat frustrating.

It is important to note that while a lot of what is mentioned will apply to other platforms, the details are mostly focused on iOS and Apple.

The content starts with how to create and validate your app idea, and ways to brainstorm features so that you get a crisp design with a coherent, simple purpose.

There is some generic as well as useful advice on Interaction Design, prototyping and usability testing.

The Visual Design section is mostly simple principles (using proximity, alignment, contrast)but has some interesting tips, including icon design for iOS7 and 8.

There is a brief section on actually building your app, with an analysis of pros and cons of doing a native app vs a web based one, and a general idea of how much an app will supposedly cost.

What is probably the most interesting section is Marketing, which covers how to build relations with members of the press and app community, and how to pitch your app – which is similar to what I have heard elsewhere and seems like great advice.

There are some resources included, such as XLS checklists that you can fill in , pitch template and press lists, as well as market analysis and strategic design for Languages that are somewhat useful. Note that not all editions include this.

The complete package also includes the complete interviews with app developers, member of the press and more, that are included partly in the middle of the video part of the course. To be sincere, I didn't get around to watching them yet – a transcript would be great, as some were taken outside and the wind noise can make it very hard to hear (also, I'm a speed reader and a transcript takes a fraction of the time of a video).

The App Design Handbook – iOS7 edition by Nathan Barry and Jeremy Olson is also included in the complete version. This mostly covers the same material, but the sections on choosing controls for your apps, as well as how to use the iOS7 style are quite useful.There are more details in the icon design area, too.

Overall, I think it is a good investment if you are serious about creating apps. It is a little expensive without the discounts, though.

Categories
Book Review

Mastering App Presentation – Book Review

Mastering App Presentation, by Jane Portman, covers many ways in which you can present apps and designs.

This can take many forms, such as a design pitch, an app page on your site on an app store.

Naturally, the design pitches don't apply to me, as I sell apps. In that area, the book coverage was interesting and I feel I learned a lot of interesting angles, but I feel there were many, many places where the book would have been better if it would show me an example of the technique instead of only talking about it.

There are also some interviews with design pros, which were mostly interesting.

It is also interesting to know that the ebook was available only in PDF format, which can be much more inconvenient to read in tablets than mobi or epub.

Overall, I found it useful and a good deal, but I paid US$12 on a Dealotto sale – for full price (US$39) it would be a little expensive.

There is also an edition with PSD templates at US$99.

Categories
Book Review

Learning Python – Book Review

I read Learning Python, by Mark Lutz (5th Edition) a few months ago. Unfortunately, I just got around to reviewing it now.

Learning Python is a very long book at 1600 pages. It is safe to say that it covered everything that it should, but it feels like it is way too through and that a lot of it was spent in topics that were inadequate. For example, at times it mentioned that a topic would only be useful for tool writers.

Also, on many places it would go and cover a little bit of a more advanced topic where it was relevant. That is great if you are reading a specific section for all you need to know, but it also means a lot of repetition if you are reading the whole book in sequence.

Overall, I think it is pretty good, but the coverage and repetition make it longer than necessary.

Categories
Product Review

Web Development CS253 – Course Review

What it covers

Web Development CS253 is taught at Udacity, and has a free version and a US$150 version – which has in-class projects, coaching and code reviews, as well as a verified certificate.

The course covers all basics on web development, and you will develop a very simple blog and a wiki by the end.
It uses Python and Google App Engine, which I think are excellent choices for a course and require relatively little setup.

The teacher is Steve Huffman, which is one of co-founders of reddit. It is nice to have a teacher with such experience, although he does warn you several times that Google App Engine is new to him.

The official level of the course is Intermediate, which assumes that you can already program in Python.

I have done a lot of web development, but mostly way back (1999-2002), using Delphi CGI, which is fairly outdated. I am planning on doing an overhaul on some of the systems in my site, and the course seemed like it would be useful.

How the course works

The course, as usual for Udacity, is a series of videos on YouTube (almost always with subtitles available), with quizzes in the middle. Some quizzes are simple multiple-choice, and same use an online Python IDE where you can type, try your solutions and submit them.

You also have separate homeworks, which technically can be built on any web development language you want – all tests are made by accessing the URL you specify. The course is all taught using Google App Engine and Python, though.

Content

The first part assumes that you have no HTML or server practice. You can skip a whole lot if you already do.
Soon you will write actual simple apps, use databases, add access control, use JSON and use Memcached to allow for much larger scale sites.
There is some very interesting coverage on how things are scaled on reddit and Udacity itself.

Python

I have to say that I didn't like the idea of a language with significant whitespace. But having used Python in this course and others, I have come to really appreciate how clean it looks. It is also quite easy to use for web development, and I understand it has nice frameworks (such as django).

Google App Engine

Google App Engine is an interesting option for hosting that many large companies use. The big advantage is that scaling is much easier, specially if you don't have experience with setting up multiple servers and doing load balancing on bigger loads. It can do a lot of that automatically. And a big advantage for the course as well as trying it out is that it is free up to a certain point – which you are totally not going to reach at this course.

It has improved a lot over the years and now supports several languages, instead of just Python as when it started. There are also a whole bunch of services you can use, but you always have to be careful because everything comes at a literal cost.

You still have to take care not to be bitten by eventual consistency problems, and I have noticed wild speed differences in response time, including responses freezing for more than a minute while the server created an index for a datastore with a couple of dozen entries (!).

Homework Checking

I had some trouble with the homework checking, and the forums are full of similar complaints. Basically, sometimes the checker will just say the things didn't work, making it a major problem to figure out what you did wrong. In some cases, simply resubmitting after an error got a version accepted.

On some other cases, the system pointed out what it tested and failed, and then it was easy to correct.

Conclusions

I thought this was useful, and it was interesting to see how CGIs work on Python and Google App Engine. The course took me about 30 hours, including all videos and homework.

If you don't have web development experience or if you are interested in learning Python or how to use Google App Engine, that feels like time well spent. I am not sure if the paid version would be worth it for me – I don't really have any use for the certificate at this point, but the in-class projects and code reviews sound like they might be useful.

I am still not sure if I am going with Ruby on Rails for my site backend or Python, though. 🙂

Categories
Product Review

Squirrly Review – WordPress SEO Plugin

Updated on 23/Jun/2021: the current product is very different from what I reviewed below. It has more features, but now is a monthly subscription (the old plan still works, but in a limited capacity). Also, I have tried the keyword features and they failed to work at all, just lost connection after quite a while.

Squirrly is another SEO plugin for WordPress. Yes, I do realize how many of those exists, but there was a sale on DealFuel.com with no monthly fees and the Squirrly reviews seemed convincing. There are 3 major features on the plugin – a keyword research module, a sidebar with details on SEO for your post, and content that can be added to your post that is related to your keyword.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is pretty fast, and it is easy to find the information, which includes competition. No idea on the source of the data, though – or if it is any good. At least I don't have to start a separate program and wait for it to run. I do wish the extra information was on a proper grid, though – it actually is on a pop-up per keyword.

My plan has a limit of 300 keyword searches per month. I imagine that will be quite enough for me. Naturally you will need to choose a keyword (or several) for the next features to work. Squirrly - Keyword Research

SEO Sidebar

The sidebar didn't work at first, but after using Save Draft it worked fine. There is plenty of useful information in the sidebar, including most of the little stuff (keyword density, use keyword on H2, use Image with Alt for the keyword) that has been in similar plugins for years.

Squirrly - SEO Sidebar

Content

You have a bunch of choices here: Image, Wiki, Wiki, News, Blogs, My Articles. Images worked very fast and got me a bunch of relevant images. With a single click it is added to your article, with the Alt attribute already set for your keyword. I got some relevant stuff from the other searches, too.

Squirrly - ContentSquirrly - Articles

Audit/Monitor

There is some kind of audit of my blog that will take place in 2 to 3 days according to their site. I will update this review when it does.

The Squirrly site also says that I will get an e-mail with weekly tracking for articles, including “social signals”. Looks interesting. I already use Rank Tracker for some keywords on my sites, but I don't bother with the setup for individual articles. Again, I will update this article when I learn more.

Extra SEO Stuff

On settings, there are a bunch of stuff, including – add canonical link kin home page – add sitemap – add Facebook Meta objects – connect site with Facebook Insight, Bing Webmaster Tools, etc I have kept most of it off, as I already have another SEO plugin covering  this area.

Conclusion

Overall, I really like Squirrly, and it seems to work fine. Naturally, it is hard to tell if its suggestions are actually good for the article SEO or not., but these seem to make sense.

The tracking stuff looks wonderful, but I haven't seen it working yet.

 

Categories
Articles

CSS3 Animations

CSS 3 Logo

A List Apart has an interesting overview of CSS3 animation and user experience .

I have seen a few of these effects around, and they really add to the user experience while being pretty light.