Previously, ThinkVitamin was part of The Deck. While The Deck was great we wanted to have more control over which ads we published on the site. Also, we wanted to give you more than one slot to advertise in. Hence, our decision to create our new ad slots.

Each ad is 125 x 125 and the ads rotate around the four slots. As a launch special we are offering the first month at a discounted rate of $395 per month, per ad (usually $495). And we only have two slots left for February!

Just email editor@thinkvitamin.com to secure your place on ThinkVitamin.

Go to our Advertise page to find out more about our page views and target audience.

On another note, we’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this. Do you think it’s a good idea? Do you think the price point is right? As readers, how many ads are you prepared to tolerate in exchange for free content? If you’re a potential advertiser, is a 125 x 125 ad enough? What else would you be looking for?

We’d love to hear your ideas.

Thanks to Fabbriciuse for the main image

As well as sharing tips from her design experience, Denise discusses the important role that copy plays in building a credible, likeable web app too.

This session is from Future of Web Design London 2007, hosted by Carsonified. You can listen to all the event MP3s and download Denise’s presentation at the FOWD past events page.

Moo has of course recently launched its fantastic stickers – hinted at here. Richard and Stef also discuss the origins of Moo, working with investors and why they chose London as their base.

Find out more information about the next Future of Web Apps.

Oops! You may experience some synching issues – we apologise for this

Vitamin: How do we refer to you guys?

Richard Moross: We’re a printing business – an old school printing business. We’re very print 1.0.

V: Unlike a lot of companies who talk at web events, you actually produce a physical product. How did that come about, and why are you still a tech firm?

RM: I think we have to be. We may be making a 300 year old product with a 500 year old business model, but we have to make it for an audience that’s interested in it today. And to be able to do that in a large way, we need to be online. So I have a design background so it’s my interest in making it look good, but then we need experts like Stef to translate how you turn that into a store, turn that into an experience online so that anyone can buy it from any country in the world. So we have to be a tech company, to be global, to be interesting, to be accessible to people.

Stef Magdalinski: I think the main thing is using the community, using our own community and other people’s communities. The fact that the final bit is print is incidental, we’re more building a way that people can express their creativity.

V: Does that mean we’ll see other products and new areas coming from MOO?

SM: Very, very much so.

RM: I think so. We’re only ever going to do anything if there’s a demand for it, and right at the very, very beginning when we launched minicards, Flickr users were saying from day one ‘Are you going to do a business card shape? Are you going to do posters? Are you going to stickers?’. I think we said ‘Yes! Yes! All of those, definitely’. I think it’s a question of what are we going to do first. We want to put as much love into the next product as we put into minicards. It’s a question of how quickly can we do that, how we prioritize which things we’re going to do – but you’re certainly going to be seeing a lot more products in the near, near future.

V: A lot of your customers probably don’t realize where you’re based, they don’t realise you’re a UK company, you’re some guys on the internet. Was that a specific decision?

SF: It was quite a conscious decision. Most companies like us are based in Silicon Valley and we wanted to be based in London, but we wanted to ship globally. We’re on the internet, and it doesn’t really matter where we’re physically based. We happen to be in London. It’s actually turned out that there’s been some good operational reasons for us to be based in London, with the Royal Mail and so forth, but we could be anywhere.

RM: We’re in Clerkenwell, which is the literal and spiritual home of print. It’s home to the oldest printing business on the planet, it’s fantastic. We wanted to be somewhere with some significance; Silicon Valley’s not known for its printing.

SF: I still have a plan for Rio at some point!

V: What came first? Did you start off looking at Flickr and how you could use it for your business?

RM: The business started off completely differently. It started with the idea that business cards are a huge phenomenon; they’re 300 years old in idea, they’re the single most successful networking tool of all time -bar none. They’re still around today. You don’t need batteries, you don’t need wi-fi to make them work, you don’t need Bluetooth and they’re still around. They’re here because they work and they’re simple, but there’s never really been a consumer proposition for them. I looked at this and thought this is completely ridiculous; people today have more ways of communicating with each other. I’ve got 10 different instant messenger accounts, email accounts, websites and things I communicate with. And yet most kids don’t have business cards, most young people don’t, even people who are employed lots of people don’t. So we wanted a personal version of the business card and it seemed like there was demand there.

The Flickr part came about 18 months in, I think we launched our business around the same time as Flickr was getting going – we started around 2004.

V: You’re still a young business, but what are the biggest challenges you’ve faced?

SM: In terms of technical challenges, supporting all the languages and character sets that people wanted to print on the cards.

RM: We underestimated the global thing a little bit.

SM: And how complex that can be. When we launched we could support western European character sets and we’d never tried a Chinese character set.

RM: He doesn’t mean on the web, he means in print as well. We were optimised for web languages, for UTF-8 Unicode, but when it came to printing it – printing Hebrew, or Chinese or Japanese or Georgian

SM: Gave our printer a heart attack.

RM: The thing we were worried about was scalability, initially not necessarily technical scalability, but operational scalability. But again, the machines that produce the cards can go incredibly fast. We can print around 3 million cards a day, we don’t get 3 million orders a day, yet, I think next week we’re planning on that kind of volume. But that was the thing we were initially worried about, but it wasn’t really a problem. It was unprecedented how many countries would be interested. I think we’ve shipped in about 107 countries so far and I don’t know how many languages we’ve printed in, but it’s certainly more than five or six.

V: You’ve been entrepreneurs in the past too. Are there any tips you can pass on?

SM: This is my third startup, my third funded startup. I would say the difference this time round is actually having really good investors who are interested. It’s true, I’ve done this before and last time we weren’t well looked after, there were conflicts and difficulties. This time round when you get good support, I think it makes all the difference to a starting business.

RM: My piece of advice is don’t work with animals or kids and you’ll been fine. And that is a metaphor, I think.

Watch the video!

Last.fm developers Matt Ogle and Anil Bawa Cavia talk to journalist Bobbie Johnson for Vitamin

Vitamin: Can you tell us a little bit about some of the problems that Last.fm has faced? What can people learn from them?

MO: Early on our biggest hurdles were technical. We had a product called AudioScrobbler that let people send information about what music they were listening to to our servers and wed use it to recommend new music, build up a musical profile and do things like that. The popularity of the service had us spending a good year or two figuring out how to scale it up and how to match the growth that we were getting. Wed been open from the start and that really fostered a community around the product, but as time went by we were getting hundreds of song submissions every second and a lot of our challenges were technical we had to learn how to scale that up to meet demand, so keeping our users happy and feeling like they were part of the project when inevitably we had server downtime and growing pains.

ABC: Later on we had to face issues about scaling the company up internally, about team communication and so on, and we came up with our own processes there. The real lesson we learned is to customise your tools. There are no off-the-self solutions for scaling a company, you have to find your own solutions or customise them.

We also faced challenges in how we design the product: when suddenly its huge and everyone wants a piece of you, you have a lot of affiliate deals to think about. We learned to put our users first, focussing on user feature design and on the product at all times; keeping our APIs open, promote ourselves as a platform and letting people run with it and do what they want to it; atomising aspects of our service and letting people run with those, freeing them up and making aspects of the service syndicable these were other lessons that we learned.

V: Last.fm took funding early in its lifespan and it is in a hugely competitive space. How do you try to remain independent and unique?

MO: I think it comes back to users and listening to them. Were lucky now that we have quite a considerable user community around the product and we let that drive our development and take our feature requests from them. Usually if someone else is doing a better job our users let us know on the forums. We think we can stay lean and small enough to remain nimble, and despite taking on funding weve tried not to lose the start-up hunger and to really keep that spirit alive. I think that will help us stay competitive even though a lot of big players are now muscling into the territory.

ABC: I think in the last twelve months the competition has really heated up. I think what we do very well is focus on socialisation better than most in the market. We socialised our products and have done from the start – so the process of building the product is a social process and thats how you stay ahead of the curve really.

MO: Our users will always be the ones to tell us whats happening in music. We also find that the best way to grow is to ensure that adding more people to the mix makes the experience better for everyone. So as long as we still have a site where the best way to have a great time is to bring all your friends along, we feel like thats a safe growth plan.

V: Are you looking to move into other kinds of content? Could your formula be applied to other kinds of information?

MO: Were quite lucky, were all music lovers but it also works quite well as a unit of attention data. A pop song is three or four minutes long, has an artist and it has a title. You listen to music while you do other things in your life; that makes it an excellent candidate for the kind of service we offer. Videos a bit different; you dont generally watch a movie again and again, so it does change things. But having said that, its an exciting space and I think other companies with other kinds of attention records will emerge.

ABC: Yeah, I think in terms of attention theres a lot of opportunities. Youll see more and more companies capturing attention in more comprehensive ways, because it really becomes the core of your service, and that applies in other areas and not just our market. And socialisation is obviously a huge trend…

V: You call Last.fm myware, not spyware but youre in a unique position though, because although not everyone wants their data tracked they are often quite happy for it to happen with music. Are there problems people will have in that area?

MO: We definitely do need to be aware of privacy considerations, and thats something well be developing a lot this year. You might not want everybody to know what youve been listening to at this precise moment so thats something were thinking about. Privacy these days can be fairly fine-grained you can give people options. With the myware idea it only works if people feel confident that youre safeguarding their data and not using it in ways they dont feel comfortable with. And also providing ways to get it back out again; so people give you their data, you enhance it, they get it back out on the other end and can do other things with it.

ABC: I think youll find that data ownership is something well do a lot with in the future and so youll see a lot on that front from us. Hopefully we can set the trend or the standard for users to really own their own attention data.

V: So is attention data really the building block of hundreds of future web apps?

ABC: Yeah, lets take AdSense for example broad, contextual advertising: thats a step in the direction of concrete attention data. So theres a general trend towards what people actually pay attention to and how can we enhance their experience with related services. Youre seeing this in Google Reader right now; it measures how many articles youve glanced at while youve been in their interface, one by one, based on your scrolling. Theres more attention being paid to these aspects of software by people who are building software in all markets.

MO: As the web keeps exploding and so many Web 2.0 sites are all about user-generated content, its the classic problem when theres more content than ever, how do you filter it, how do you make it relevant and contextual. Attention data is a great solution to that, especially since it says dont change your behaviour, keep doing what youre already doing and well make your experience better. Which is a really great way to do user experience.

V: Outside of your company, where do you think there are interesting things going on? Where else would you like to work?!

ABC: I think most developers in the country will tell you that they want to work on OpenID in some form, because identity on the web is a massive issue how to create interoperable systems that work across social networks is really interesting to me. So, how you can build on Open ID and then attention and trust systems across the board, that applies to most software developers in the world. You could offer me any job you like but Im still staying!

MO: Its hard to think about leaving last.fm once youve been doing it for a while, because theres still so much yet to be done. Especially with the current state of the music industry with regards to digital music none of us are very happy with the status quo and we all believe we can help change that. One thing Ive been interested in lately is the rise of apps such as Twitter, which basically take one single function, do it really well and then try to open it up and syndicate it as much as possible. Youve seen that a lot in individual features on more comprehensive websites. But to me its inspiring to see a single website product like that succeed. I think that means a lot of ideas can have more chance to live on their own in that way then become a useful part of a whole.

Watch the video!

Simon Willison talks to journalist Bobbie Johnson for Vitamin

Read the transcript!

VITAMIN: Can you just run through exactly what OpenID is?

Simon Willison: OpenID is a decentralised system for single sign-on. So it lets you have one user account that you can use to log into lots of different sites. The thing that makes OpenID special compared to, say, Passport or Typekey or other things that have gone before, is that with OpenID you get to decide where your identity is hosted. You can host it with SixApart, or you can host it with AOL or you can host it yourself. The standard, the technology keeps on working no matter where youve put it, so you can even switch providers and say actually I used to be hosted with Six Apart and now I want to host it on my own – you can do that and your login keeps working.

VITAMIN: So what is the fundamental problem that it solves?

SW: Everyone has too many user accounts. Ive got dozens and dozens of user accounts of sites that I use – some I use on a daily basis, some on a monthly basis. Managing all of those usernames and passwords is just incredibly difficult. Everyone knows that you should use a different password for every service, because otherwise one service gets cracked and you lose everything but of course nobody does that, because managing two or three passwords is enough work for most people.

VITAMIN: So I create an OpenID and associate it with other identities I have around the place, and the sign-on procedure becomes basically non-existent?

SW: Exactly. In fact, if you’ve got an AOL messenger account already then you have an OpenID it will be openid.aol.com/ and then your screenname. But the idea is that you find applications that support OpenID (this is currently quite a small list but its growing all the time), and you can then sign into those with your OpenID, potentially merge that with an existing user account or create a brand new user account and just continue using the application without any further hassle.

VITAMIN: Support is growing quickly. How is the take-up growing?

SW: The problem OpenID has is that there are two sides to OpenID there are OpenID servers, the places that will give you an OpenID, and there are consumers, the sites you can actually log in to. And of course everyone wants to be a provider, because it feels great to have lots of user accounts and loads of people have big user account databases that they can open up. But people are much more cautious about being a consumer because its a lot less well understood what that actually implies. So its all about the benefits of being a consumer and the sorts of things you can start to do once you let people log in to your site with an OpenID.

VITAMIN: Can you give us some examples?

SW: The obvious one is that you get linked to from digg or Techcrunch and people click through to your brand new Web 2.0 service; then it asks them to create an account and half of them just walk off because they dont want to create another throwaway account just to try out your service. If you support OpenID you can instantly get a much larger signup rate because youve got a whole bunch of early adopters especially if digg is supporting OpenID, anyone who comes from digg has got an OpenID there already so you get lots more people trying out your service.

So thats the really simple case, but looking further ahead whats really exciting is the stuff you can do to innovate around OpenID. So you might find that if you let people log into your service with OpenID and theyre logged into other services as well youve got a bridge between those two services. You can say well, youre logged into this bookmark service but because you used your OpenID for your photo service as well we can start combining your photographs and your links, we can start doing clever things like that.

VITAMIN: Would people be able to bring their different social networking identities together as well?

SW: OpenID actually does very little, it just solves the authentication problem. But its designed as a small component of a larger ecosystem, so you could build friend import and friend export on top of OpenID. You log into a site with your LiveJournal ID and the site then goes to LiveJournal and says hey, who does this person have down as their friends?. And if those people are present in that sites system then it can set up friend relationships there. So theres potential for people to start building social networks that exist outside of the silos of individual sites, sort of decentralised social networks. First people need to start using OpenID and then they can start building on top of it.

VITAMIN: So is this something which is finished and ready to go, or is it still in development?

SW: OpenID works today, and actually the current version of the spec thats being implemented is OpenID 1.1. Theres talk of developing OpenID 2, which covers a larger amount of ground and is under active development on the mailing list – but for all intents and purposes its ready for people to start using it, its ready to roll out.

VITAMIN: And youve now got some pretty big backers like AOL have you heard any feedback?

SW: Thats an interesting question. Obviously the big names that are getting involved are AOL who have actually launched, theyve made 68 million AOL user accounts available as OpenIDs which is huge and Microsoft, who had Bill Gates make a big announcement at the RSA conference saying that Microsoft planned to integrate their CardSpace client-based identity solution with OpenID. I think thats something thats looking ahead to OpenID 2, but AOLs commitment is right now theyve already started supporting it.

VITAMIN: But youve talked before about the problems and gaps that are still in OpenID. Can you explain some more about those?

SW: The biggest problem OpenID has is just in terms of explaining itself. Thats not inherent to the spec, its something thats difficult to explain to people – but people are already starting to make the effort to do that. So the problem that everyone talks about and the one thats a really legitimate concern is phishing. With OpenID because youre going to an untrusted site and trying to log in, it redirects you to your identity provider. But of course it could also redirect you to an impersonation of your identity provider, and if you werent paying attention you could have your account stolen. So the OpenID communitys been looking at a whole bunch of solutions to that, and this is where Microsoft and CardSpace come in to try and come up with a solution to phishing. In the end, my opinion is that phishing will become a competitive area between different providers, so when youre picking your provider you might look at what measures they have in place to help protect you from phishing attacks and use that to help influence your decision.

VITAMIN: So although OpenID has a weakness in it, you think its the job of other providers to come up with a real solution?

SW: I think its something that OpenID providers have to start tackling, but of course phishing is a problem that everyone on the web has, and its incredibly difficult to take on. They do academic studies against phishing protection and find that 90 per cent of people dont even notice that the phishing protection is there. So its really a problem for the whole industry and OpenID is actually benefiting from the amount of effort people are putting into solving this.

VITAMIN: So how easy is it for developers or service providers to implement it? Why would they?

SW: So the reason you want to do it is that you want more users, more people trying your stuff and you want to make life better for the people who are using your service you want to make it easier for them to manage their account with you. From the point of view of implementing stuff, there are libraries available to do all of the tough encryption side of things for PHP, for Python, for Ruby, for Java and for ASP.net as well – so any web environment that youre working with has probably got libraries, relatively mature libraries, for integrating OpenID functionality already. Its just a case finding the library, reading the documentation and glueing it into your existing accounts system.

Successful web apps use similar formats when it comes to user interaction on their homepage. For instance, most feature an explanatory strapline that tells you what the service does, many show you screenshots of their service, and they all entice you to sign up or register with a prominently placed button. But is it really that simple?

If you design a site with this simple checklist of ‘must-haves’ in hand, is the resulting site guaranteed to turn your visitors into users? What are the elements of a home page that make it really effective at transforming visitors into users? And how does the design itself contribute to this?

Most designers agree that not only do you have to have brilliant navigation, impeccably-crafted copy and a great sales message, but you also have to have that something extra in the design that will speak volumes to your potential users.

We invited some leading designers to look at a selection of high-profile apps to examine how they’re attempting to turn visitors into users through user experience design.

Building Trust is key

First up, Blinksale and Freshbooks, which both offer services that will help the small online business get bills out quicker or easier. Blinksale’s strapline is ‘The easiest way to send invoices online’, whilst Freshbooks is ‘The fastest way to invoice your clients’ – essentially they are competing for the same users.

We asked two designers, Andy Rutledge from Design View and John Zeratsky from Feedburner to give us their thoughts on these two different approaches. Both saw benefits and disadvantages to the way these sites had worked their layout, content and design.

For John, “Blinksale’s home page clearly and attractively outlines the benefits of the application and makes me really want to get started. But unfortunately, it’s not 100 per cent obvious how I get started. The big “Sign-up for your free Blinksale account” was below the fold (for me at least) and did not look like a link.

“FreshBooks is the exact opposite of Blinksale. Their home page is not as good at getting me to want to sign up, but it’s very obvious where I need to click to do so. It’s impossible to miss the blue “Try it for Free” that appears above the fold and very prominently on the page.”

It’s all about trust, says Andy: to turn visitors into users your homepage needs to make them feel the way they will feel when they use your service – happy, satisfied, excited. And this kind of trust begins with how the information is presented on your site:

“Blinksale’s main page embodies the confirmation of its promotional statement, which it claims is ‘the easiest way to send invoices online.’ The page design and content offering is based on simplicity. The product claims to be easy and the page is, in fact, easy to consume and digest. This inspires trust.

“FreshBook’s main page design and layout is clean-looking. The content, however, seems to get in the way of this clarity. It seems that there’s too much to read and too many different types of content on the page. The promotional claim centers around ‘fast,’ but the content is a bit pedantic.”

The Shop Window Approach

In the web metrics space we looked at Mint and the recently launched CrazyEgg. What’s immediately noticeable is that both sites think its important to let their clients know how the application works by prominently featuring screen shots of their application in action on the home page.

Ryan Shelton, designer from Mutado and of DropSend), believes that using big design statements to direct your users to a call for action is key for converting visitors to users. “The central row of images on CrazyEgg that give you a quick overview of the features on offer work well, especially since you have the option of opening a larger image without leaving the homepage. Although Mint gives me more information about its features, I find that reading a lot of text isn’t as appealing as the simplicity of looking at screenshots.

“Both sites make it easy to sign up with clear and obvious call to action buttons. Mint is upfront about the cost and the orange splash draws my eye directly to it. The fact that Crazyegg had a free option meant that I signed up and gave it a go right away. The ’sign up now’ on the CrazyEgg homepage is constrained to the size of the button but I think they could have made the entire ’sign up now for free’ module a button (and applied this ‘big button’ language to the feature buttons too).”

There’s a good example of displaying your wares in a ’shop window’ stylee over at photo-printing apps, Shutterfly and Zazzle. Although the services are offering slightly different products they share the fact that both services result in tangible objects. These are fully displayed in large colourful images on the homepage that you can almost reach out and touch. The images make you want the products.

When The Homepage Doesn’t Matter

In these days of RSS and APIs, where content is often viewed separately from its source, how important is the design of your homepage? Will your users even make it there? Or will they slip in the backdoor through a followed link?

Ryan Singer, designer at 37signals believes that in many instances, homepages don’t matter – at least when your content does the job of turning visitors into users for you as it does on sites such as YouTube.com.

“I don’t visit YouTube and click around. But I see blog posts with cool videos all the time. I don’t think of YouTube as a site. What draws me in is a blog post, IM or email. Then, when you end up watching a video on YouTube’s site, you realize there are more cool videos there, and might start clicking around. In this way the root of each visit is a permalink, a particular video, a certain experience – not the home page. The video is the epicenter of the permalink, and the permalink is the epicenter of the whole site. Everything revolves around the videos you love, not the farm that feeds them.

“Based on this view, the home page is secondary to the permalinks. The home page should show me permalinks I’ve recently visited, recommendations based on those, and so forth. It should provide history and continuity of experience.”

So remember – if a big part of your success is going to depend on links, RSS feeds or blogs, you need to make every single page on your site just as effective at generating those all important new sign-ups: getting the positioning, colour, language, shape and prominence of every element on your homepage right is just the beginning.

Questions and topics we cover in the interview

1. What’s the story behind Cork’d?
2. How did you manage to grow your user numbers?
3. What’s better – working for yourself or working for clients?
4. What are your plans for the future?

URLS Mentioned

1. Cork’d
2. Hivelogic.com Dan Benjamin’s blog (co-developer of Cork’d)
3. Flickr
4. Netflix
5. SVNOpen source version control software

Full transcription of the interview

RC: We’re here in London with Dan Cederholm and I’m just going to ask him a couple of quick questions. So Dan, why don’t you introduce yourself real quick and then we’ll get started?

DC: Yeah, thanks Ryan. I run a site/business called SimpleBits which is basically myself! I’ve been doing client work for the last couple of years. I enjoy writing about CSS-based design and web standards and all that kind of stuff, and uh, that’s me.

RC: Sounds good. So the first question I have is about Cork’d. You just launched it, can you tell us what it is and why you built it, and the URL?

DC: Yeah, so it’s Corkd.com, which is essentially a wine community site. It originated with a friend of mine, Dan Benjamin, who’s a well-known developer in the Ruby on Rails scene and has a site called Hive Logic that’s been well read over the last few years. So we’ve been chatting back and forth about wine and how we like wine but we’re certainly not wine experts and we’d occasionally trade bottles and say ‘Oh yeah, so what did you have last night?’ and ‘Oh yeah, this was really good’ and maybe using Flickr to post the bottle and make a comment on it and started thinking you could really turn a site into this… Create a site that’s sort of – and this was sort of tongue in cheek at first – sort of like Flickr, that lets people enter wines, keep track of their cellars and make shopping lists like Netflix. And so we had all these community site features that we wanted to apply to wine, which seems almost like silly at first but as we started building it we realised that this is pretty cool and we’re going to use this, so at least two people will use it!

We just wanted to keep track of what we’d tasted and what we thought about it, and as we were building it we thought, this is pretty cool, maybe people will use it, and there’s a lot of different directions we can go with wine. So we took several months on our spare time to build it because it was just the two of us, and we didn’t think of it as a legitimate company per se, but it sort of tuned into this neat thing that a lot of people are using now and sort of opened the doors for the other sites as well, so that’s the quick, or not so quick introduction!

RC: So, how is it going? Do you mind sharing how many users you have and what the revenue model is, and if it’s going to become a pretty big part of your business and life?

DC: So we launched, and in about a month’s time we’ve had 6500 members sign up and about 5000 wines were added by users, which is great. We started with just 1200 wines from Wine.com, actually, an affiliate thing with them just to see the database but now that users are adding wines there’s tons added each day, and we have a lot of members, so I think that, y’know, the revenue model, there’s a couple of different ways we could go. Right now there’s a lot of vineyards that are contacting us, and wine sites and wine companies and we’ve been on a lot of phone calls with wine people, which is sort of weird because we weren’t in the wine world before this, we like to drink wine but all of a sudden ‘wine people’ are taking notice and saying ‘Wow, this is a cool way of discovering wine’ so there’s some advertising opportunities there.

Because it’s so targeted I think that’s why it’s attractive to all these wine people, so there’s that, we could create a ‘Cork’d Deluxe’, where signing up, having a fee that offers extra features beyond what the free Cork’d does, that’s a possibility. Secretly, or not so secretly I guess, we’ve been thinking about other sites, I won’t go into detail right now, but there are other beverages beside wine, so we’ll see what happens.

RC: So, it’s pretty amazing that you’ve got 6,500 users already, would you say that’s largely because SimpleBits is a popular site, or did you guys do something saucy and magical to make that happen?

DC: I think part of it is the way we were able to announce it and the blog community certainly was helpful in spreading the word about the site when we launched it, but based on the feedback we’re getting from people I think it spread quickly to the wine people – the people that really love wine. You know there’s this whole other world of wine put there that we didn’t really know about, wine blogs and wine podcasts. There’s a strange connection, I think, between wine or maybe alcohol in general and geeks and web people, so I think it helped in that we could announce this on our blogs and knew that the web design community would sort of look at it. But they’re not necessarily the target, so I think somehow we tapped into this other wine world so we hope the sign ups continue.

RC: Sweet. It’s so cool to hear about people like you building, essentially a web app. I know you’re calling it a site, but, you know, a full on app that’s attracting users and I don’t know about you but I came from client work, building sites for people and so on, as we started building web apps for ourselves it was just so much better, so why don’t you talk about that real quick? What’s your preference, working for clients or working for yourself? I think I know the answer but maybe it’s not, and also if that’s the plan for the future?

DC: A really good question. It’s so much more satisfying working on something for yourself. I’m looking forward to and writing about that more. I come from the client world too, working for clients and it was really fun building this with another person, Dan Benjamin, and we use, well he set up Ruby on Rails, and we had something called SVN, which is sort of a code repository and it really allowed us to collaboratively work on this. You can work on your own, commit changes, send a message with that change, I’m totally hooked on this way of working on web apps. Yeah, it’s so much fun working on something of your own. You feel more invested and you don’t feel like you’re on the clock so you put more detail, more attention to detail, and you’re just more excited about it. It’s fun. With a lot of the client work I do, because I’m focused on the UI a lot of times I’m handing off what I did to someone else, they’re implementing it, it usually gets messed up, that’s sort of par for the course and it’s rare when it doesn’t. Working on something yourself with somebody else when you’re both in tune with what this product is, it’s so much fun and it’s far superior.

So in terms of the future, I think largely it depends on how well something like Cork’d does, and if it leads to other sites. I’d love to continue to do that. I think that to pay the bills I’d have to do some client work at this point still. I shouldn’t say I don’t enjoy client work as I need to do that at this point, and it’s fun working with different people and working on cool projects and stuff.

RC: Thanks Dan and thanks so much for taking time. I hope you enjoy your time in London and we look forward to hearing more from you later.

DC: Thanks a lot Ryan. Cheers.

Transcribed by Scott Morris

Questions and topics we cover in the interview

1. What’s next according to the O’Reilly Radar?
2. Why people are getting the whole web 2.0 thing wrong
3. What’s critical for web developers to understand today?
4. Only a year and a half left for start-up excitement?
5. Design and commoditization

URLS Mentioned

1. sketchup.com
2. instructibles.com

In this 12 minute audio training clip, David Heinemeier Hansson (37Signals & Ruby on Rails) discusses how Ruby on Rails makes coding easier, quicker and happier, by creating common conventions.

This session is from the 1-day event The Future of Web Apps, hosted by Carson Workshops.

TextMate is not just a text editor for Mac OS X, it’s ‘the’ text editor for Mac OS X. Or at least if you believe the hype. Created by self-confessed UNIX geek, Allan Odgaard, TextMate has quickly risen to the top spot when it comes to Mac editors and now enjoys a somewhat charmed life in the glow of developers the world over. So the question is, what makes TextMate so special? Let’s have a look.

Generally speaking there are two reasons why TextMate has been able to push so many people’s buttons. Firstly, common conventions are elegantly handled by TextMate’s intuitive interface. In short, the software does a lot of things for you without getting in the way. Secondly, when you open TextMate you’ll notice it consists of a window and a standard Mac OS menu. The UI is certainly simple to look at. There are barely any icons or visible features at all. Yet underneath this there are so many features packed in that it is comparable to any other fully-featured text editor. You could say that its simplicity embodies David Heinemeier Hansson’s mantra, ‘convention over configuration’.

There are quite a few features TextMate that undoubtedly increase your productivity but yet are easily missed. Column Selections is one of them.

Column Selections

If you press alt, the mouse pointer turns into a cross. You can use this to select rectangular regions. This particular feature is very useful when editing HTML. For example, you may wish to add a <div> around a group of elements. To keep your indentation, hold alt, click, and drag down in a straight line. At this point, whatever you do will be multiplied on each selected line.

Quick access from the terminal: mate .

This is a great feature for those who came to Mac OS from a UNIX background. And it certainly makes your life easier. To use it, navigate to where your code’s directory is in the terminal, then type:

mate .

This opens a TextMate instance with a project containing all the files in the directory you specified, and its subdirectories.

To set up the command line tool, go to Help → Terminal Usage… from within TextMate.

Find in Project (cmd-shift-f)

This feature will come into its own during an intense re-factoring session. ‘Find in Project’ enables you to search through every file in the project for a pattern. You can enter regular expressions and replace text from the same dialog.

Search for a file faster using cmd-t

We think this feature will single-handedly be responsible for the most significant increase in your productivity once you start using TextMate. Press cmd-t to open a window that enables you to search, in real time, for any file in the project. Any letter you enter is matched, so you don’t need to enter ’controller’ to find every controller in your Rails project. Like the others this feature is simple but immensely useful.

Bundles: ctrl-escape

Bundles are basically collections of macros (these are called bundle items). Press ctrl-escape to bring up the bundle menu. Your current language (if applicable) will be selected from the list, and then you can easily use the keyboard to select the macro you want to use. For example, when writing PHP code you may often use this to type the names of the predefined variables, such as $_REQUEST['variable']. With this example, TextMate will automatically select ‘variable’ for you, so you can enter the variable you wanted with little effort.

Another way to access bundles is to use tab triggers. With tab triggers just type the trigger and then press tab (as in the example below). The trigger is replaced with the bundle item text. Using the previous example, you can type $_ and then press tab to bring up a list of PHP’s predefined variables.

Even if you’re the type of person who would normally shy away from creating bundles and adding snippets, don’t worry, TextMate makes it easy. Go to Window → Show Bundle Editor. If you open up a bundle from the list, you’ll notice several icons next to the names of the bundle items. These icons represent the types of bundle items you can add:

• Commands – use scripts to do various things in TextMate, including: replacing text, inserting text and showing tooltips
• Drag Commands – helps TextMate handle you dragging something into the editor
• Languages – helps TextMate work with a given language or document type
• Snippets – pieces of text to include into your document, including: code to run at the insertion time and TextMate variables (such as selected text)
• Templates – use shell commands to generate new files based on a template
• Preferences – helps the editor adapt when different settings are required for the current file type

We found it was best to start adding snippets for your common coding tasks. This helps you get used to working with bundles. TextMate’s help section has all the information you need to create bundle items, including the syntax for snippets. Just click on the question mark after you’ve created a new snippet to find out more (see the example below)

Handy bundles

You may want to use TextMate to write weblog entries. Many weblogs and content management systems generally use Textile, so it’s nice to be able to
preview Textile before inserting the text. To do this, select Textile
from the bundles menu. There’s also a shortcut key set up for this bundle: ctrl-alt-cmd-p. However, you must have Textile selected as your language to use the shortcut.

TextMate also has bundles that help with version control. Many people use
Subversion, so the TextMate Subversion bundles menu is obviously very useful. You can commit changes and view diffs with very easy to read syntax highlighting. All of which will add to your productivity.

Macros

The software also has support for traditional macros and in true TextMate fashion they are extremely easy to use. You can activate and save a macro by pressing alt-cmd-m. Then, to replace the macro you just created, press cmd-shift-m. You can save the macro to the Bundle Editor by pressing ctrl-cmd-m and to view the available options for macros, look under the Automation menu.

What’s the downside?

We’ve talked a lot about what’s great with TextMate, but in which areas does it fall down and where can it be improved upon? There’s a few interface issues: it doesn’t handle lots of tabs very well and the distinction between macros and bundles confuses new users. Undo behaves differently to many popular editors — when you press undo it reverts changes letter by letter, rather than a set of changes. Many editors for Windows and Mac OS support FTP and SFTP, but TextMate only does through another FTP client (Personally, I use Panic’s Transmit.) This could make using TextMate awkward for you if you’re used to having this feature.

If you’re using TextMate to access files on a remote filesystem, there’s a few glitches that occur: TextMate can stick as it polls the remove files when you bring it into focus. This can unexpectedly change the position of the files in the project draw. Finally, there’s no way to search for text within a directory, you can only search an open file or across the entire project. Project searching works 90% of the time, but can produce too many results for a large project.

Community, support and themes

Certainly one of the ways in which TextMate has captured the community’s imagination is through its support of plugins and themes. You can easily change the software’s behavior or color-scheme which is if you want to personalise your prefered working environment and workflow quirks. Another boon is the TextMate community and wiki which are good places to find plugins and themes, as well as the User Submitted Themes list.

TextMate also works with many popular Mac OS X applications.
For example often you may need to login quickly to a server and change a script. In this case you would open Transmit, ctrl-click a file and select ‘Edit with TextMate.’ This opens the file in TextMate and automatically uploads the changes when your save it.

Another thing that sets TextMate apart from its rivals is its promptness in replying to support e-mails. When writing this review we emailed the support team with a query about how TextMate handles Mac OS X’s remote volumes, and they promptly responded. Generally, it’s rare to encounter this level of support with online software.

In conclusion it’s clear thatTextMate does deserve the applause it has been getting from certain camps. And once it has perfected the handling of tabs and working with remote files, it will be nigh-on perfect.

Rating

• Software name: TexMate
• Maker: Alan Odgaard
• Price: 39 Euros ($47, or £27)
• Rating: 4 out of 5