Xero are making changes. I've talked about kashflow and freshbooks in more detail and I have touched on Xero before in another post.

They seem to have listened to recent complaints about pricing and have created a tiered structure to allow small business and freelancers to use the service for less. If you ask me they should have tried harder. 5 invoices and 5 expenses a month + 20 reconciled statement lines a month. It's not awful and it may suit a lot of freelancers but it isn't enough to make me feel safe. How about 10, 10 and 100. That would be better if you ask me, which no one did but that doesn't matter as this is my blog.

freshbooks is really well excuted online invoicing, expense and time tracking software. As a hosted solution it has proved itself over time by consistently improving without becoming over burdened with features and extras you don't need. The creators have intelligently decided two things from my observations. The first is that they have build a solid API that allows others to write plugins. This means they only need to provide a good solid foundation and others can create need specific application add-ons. The second thing is they have listened to their users and reacted accordingly which has improved usability no end.

Google has launched fast flip which in my opinion is a pretty cool addition to the Google family. Designed with the intention to merge offline and online reading experiences it provides a user experience not dissimilar to reading or scanning a magazine or newspaper.

By providing screen shots of major media sources you can get a quick visual fix with ease. It helps to have a decent size screen resolution in my opinion.

The only way to really get a feel for it is to try it.

http://fastflip.googlelabs.com

From the title you may think I might have made some drastic changes like giving up coffee or exercising but sadly this far too geeky a post for that.

This week I got the Drupal Boost module working. That with the Drupal simpleCDN module means I now have a much faster site (not this one). Boost allows you to serve static pages to anonymous users rather than Drupal loading them all (including views).

Upgraded to Open Atrium (beta2) which is making life much easier for me in relation project management / collaboration and knowledge management. Especially work on jagajum

Got Drupal bubbletimer going (mostly) to allow people to track the time they spend on tasks and similar. Cool module for time tracking/timesheets in Drupal.

I have a few large sites. Some over 30,000 pages and some only a few pages. I usually use Drupal XML Sitemap on my sites but I don't always build sites in Drupal, and at times the Drupal module can be buggy if it is undergoing version changes (as it has recently).

So I started looking for sitemap software that would deliver the goods without crashing my server or my computer. I found a few local java clients that were buggy on Mac to say the least and few others that instilled me with confidence. I like stuff for free, as do most people but I am always happy to pay for quality products if they add value. I found xml-sitemaps.com as it is always at the top in Google but put off using it for a few reasons.

In a surprising move, only surprising as everyone thought Apple would say no for sure, Spotify has been approved for use on the iPhone and is due to appear in the iTunes store very soon according to reports.

This is happy days for spotify and iPhone lovers. I have blogged about the goodness of Spotify before and with the looming purchase of my first iPhone soon the only thing holding be back from totally delight will be getting a big enough data allowance on my iPhone.

So after working on a few new projects recently I realised I needed tools faster and smarter than the ones I was using for pre-site work. In the 1990's used to start a site using Adobe Illustrator for wireframing and all the intense layout work to then present to the customer for approval and changes. I then moved to doing it in Photoshop and finally in recent years have switched to Fireworks and even tried Omnigraffle Pro. All these methods work but there are a few reasons why they slow me down. Firstly, I get distracted by design and end up trying to do the whole look and feel of the design at the wire framing phase. Secondly, working with fully rasterised layers just feels slow. Finally, my Illustrator wireframes especially, whilst awesome, were crap to edit.

Skype have launched their newest version of their Mac OS X client (2.8) which comes with some great new features. The main one being screen sharing, something usually only PC users could enjoy with MSN and Skype but now also available on Mac. This is great news and a positive improvement for Skype. It should further enhance their popularity over other IM clients like iChat mainly as they are cross platform.

Other new features include nice new icons, oh, and better sound and audio. There is also PAYG WiFi access but I haven't quite figured out what they are on about there.

It's the little things in life...

Get it from Skype