Pick of the Week #22: 1Password

Everyone reading this knows you shouldn’t have the same password for more than one website. And, I know that everyone on this site has unique passwords for every site they use.

But this can be complicated to manage and remember. And, people tend to pick simple words. Purple, password, that kind of thing. A brute force dictionary attack can crack those kind of passwords in seconds. What you really need are total hash passwords. Things like fs63djsGQE8912NS. But nobody can remember more than three or four of those. With most people having dozens of user accounts, it can be impossible.

Enter 1Password. I use this religiously and it really is fantastic. When logging into a new website, 1Password offers to save it in its secure database. When making a new account, 1Password offers to create a new random, crazy password. It’s simple and perfect and just good sense.

Not only passwords though. 1Password also saves software licence information (just drag the app in question onto 1Password’s icon). That’s invaluable. It can also make secure digital vaults to hold credit card info or bank info or anything which needs to be kept secret.

Face it: using the same password everywhere is bad. Using a word from the dictionary is very bad. Keeping all your passwords in a spreadsheet is bad.

Just use 1Password. You can get it for Mac and Windows (and your passwords sync between all your computers). What possible reason is there not to have it?

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Pick of the Week #21: GitX

We recently told you about Git Tower, a git client for Mac. And, a very good one at that. But, paying for software isn’t for everyone and there’s a perfectly good – great, even – git client for Mac OS X which is free.

GitX let’s you view a detailed commit history and gives you a great committing mechanism itself. Let’s face it, committing with the command line, especially if you’ve got a long complicated message to write, isn’t always the best experience.

So, if you write software and use a Mac but Git Tower isn’t for you, download GitX now.

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LINK: Google In-App Payments for the Web

Google has launched an in app payments service for the web, which looks pretty neat. Just like what we’ve blogged about before.

Take a look.

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Pick of the Week #20: Git Tower

We just recently bought this piece of software and already it’s entered our daily workflow. Git Tower calls itself the “most powerful Git client for Mac” and it certainly is.

Most IDEs/text editors that you might use have bad Git support, usually just allowing you to stage and commit. Or, you might be using Git over the terminal, which really isn’t much fun. The small team at fournova have made an amazingly beautiful, clean and simple client. Even if you don’t use Git, it’s a great lesson is UI/UX design. At just $59 (£39.95), it’s well worth it.

We’ll let their video do the rest of the talking:

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LINK: .bind(), .live(), .delegate() – OH MY!

Our brains melted when first trying to learn how to use jQuery that’s been loaded over AJAX calls. This blog post by Steve Schwartz solves all that. Indispensable reading:

http://www.alfajango.com/blog/the-difference-between-jquerys-bind-live-and-delegate/

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Pick of the Week #19: zRSSFeed

We’ve been looking for a good way to display RSS feeds on our webpages for a while now, and zRSSFeed seems to be perfect. It’s a jQuery plugin and, as we already use jQuery on our sites, doesn’t have a very big footprint at all.

With just a line or two of code to get the actual feed, the plugin produces simple, structured HTML to display the feed and – what we were most looking for – a great set of CSS classes to style it exactly as you want. It also has some of the clearest, nicest documentation for this kind of thing we’ve seen for a while.

It is perfect for putting your latest news or most recent blog posts right there on your homepage, or placing a third party’s RSS feed on your site somewhere.

Check it out.

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Pick of the Week #18: Fantastical for Mac

Fantastical is that rare breed that falls into the category of beautifully designed app which happens to be incredibly useful. Once installed, it sits on your Mac menu bar and, when clicked, provides an incredible interface for entering events into your iCal (or Entourage or Outlook) calendar.

iCal is one of those apps which you know Steve Jobs doesn’t really use. Someone else enters his events for him. Because, entering events into iCal is an arduous process of “click here, type, click here, type, repeat again and again”. Fantastical, however, provides a natural language tool to enter your events. All you need to do is click on the icon once (or use the customisable keyboard shortcut) and you type whatever your event is, like, “dinner with John at 9pm tomorrow” or whatever.

Not only the event creation is great, but you can also view your upcoming events in list and calendar forms too.

Fantastical is one of those apps which really does transform the way you work in a major way. At just $14.99USD and £8.99GBP is really is a bargain and one of those apps which we would happily give double the asking price to developers, just to say thank you…

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Pick of the Week #17: Pttrns

We could not be more in love with this service if we possibly tried.

Pttrns is an incredible tool to aid in your design of (primarily iPhone) mobile apps. Pttrns does one thing very, very well: it collects a load of screenshots from the most well designed apps together in one place.

It organises all of the screenshots into many categories, such as splash screens, login screens, messaging, notifications, profiles, settings and dozens more so you can quickly see how other designers tackled the same task as you and be inspired. And, when you have ten or so screens chosen from the hundreds of thousands on the store, you’re bound to get the best stuff.

In the words of Picasso: “Good artists copy, great artists steal”.

Check it out: pttrns.com

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Pick of the Week #16: SLOCCount

SLOCCount (Source-Lines-Of-Code Count) is a tiny Linux program which, basicly, counts the lines of code you’ve got in a partiul directory.

Naturally, lines of code isn’t a good way to tell how much you’ve done or how far along you are in the project. It does, however, provide an interesting metric to see how much you and your team have written.

You install SLOCCount with a simple apt-get install sloccount and its usage is even simpler, with just sloccount directoryname being used.

Even more fun than this, though, is its ability to tell you how much that software would have cost to develop (using the COCOMO method). The software tells you how long it would take, an how much it would cost to pay developers to do that coding. Of course, this should be taken with a big pinch of salt, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Full information can be found on the developer’s website. Enjoy!

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State of Deverous Address: May 2011

Every now and then, we are going to post short updates right here on the blog to let you know what we’re doing in the future and what we’ve been working. Here’s the first.

April was a good month. New code was published to the Deverous.com website around twenty days out of the month. Mostly, they were small updates bringing a few requested features and UI improvements. We also fixed every outstanding bug (yay)! Be sure to keep using the feedback form to tell us about the features you want and any bugs you find.

In the next month or so, we are making a lot of big changes.

Firstly, the UI will be changing a lot. For example, people have told us they want adding tasks to be faster. So, soon, adding tasks will be done via a modal popup and AJAX rather than pushing you to a new page and back again.

People all tell us they want it to be easier to sort tasks. It’s fine now if you have less than, say, forty, but gets unmanageable over that. So, we’ll be adding tags, folders, searching and sorting soon. Task dependancy is also something we’re working on.

Also, we’ll be adding more criteria to the projects and tasks’ options. For example, you’ll soon be able to enter user stats into Projects and provide more data for tasks (such as a version target rather than date target).

Also, developers want to do everything very fast, so we’ll be implementing what we think is a pretty innovative solution to speed improvements on the web soon.

On top of all that: a mobile site!

So, that’s where we’re headed. These features are targeted for the next month or so, so it won’t be too long. We’re also working on our plan for integrating teams back into Deverous (and we think we have it pretty much sussed now – it’s so much better than before)!

So, thank you for using the website and a big thank you for reading the blog – our stats tell us that most traffic to Deverous.com comes from first time users from the Deverous Blog, so that rocks.

Now: let’s checkout that branch, baby!

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