Being a software developer, I am on my computer most of the day and anything that makes my job a little easier, catches my eye. There are three applications that I will be very briefly mentioning: Versions App, Omni Focus and Sparrow Mail. All of these products are beautifully developed and easily affordable.

Versions App 
Web: http://versionsapp.com/
Twitter: @versionsapp

Versions is a very easy to use OSX svn client. It does everything for you – you are able to view changes, view the timeline of past code commits, checkin, checkout, revert etc. For me, it gets the job done and it has an amazing interface that is user-friendly.

Well worth the €39.00.

Omni Focus
Web: http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnifocus/
Twitter: @omnifocus

I work at many different businesses, doing many different things. For this reason, I find it hard to keep track of all the tasks that I have to get done and when they are due. This application allows you to load tasks into projects and contexts which allows sorting and makes it easy to get a clear overview of all the work that you need to get done.

The product is sold for $79.00. A little pricy, however worth it.

Sparrow Mail
Web: http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/
Twitter: @sparrowmailapp

This again is another brilliantly designed application. It has a beautiful UI and also works so much better than the built in OSX mail client. It automatically links into Facebook and loads contacts images and details.

This application is priced at $9.99.

I have had my MacBook Pro for just over a year and a half and have never been unhappy with the performance until I upgraded to Lion OSX earlier this year. The OS seemed to be slow and buggy in general and this frustrated the life out of me.

Apple has released an Internet Recovery system which basically allows you to wipe your main hard drive clean and do a fresh installation using only the OSX base to run the installation over the internet. I admit – I was very nervous. With the bad connectivity here and the slow and unreliable wireless signal I use – I was scared that I would be without my main laptop for a day or so.

Anyway – I did a time machine backup as well as my own backup to multiple locations – just incase things went badly. I then restarted my laptop and waited for the Apple icon to show. I then held down the command + R key together to get into the Apple Recovery mode.

Here I erased my main drive (which took less than a minute to do – scary!) and then returned to the main recovery screen. I then clicked on the link that said something along the lines of “Re-install Lion” and logged into my Apple account. Apple authorized that I had purchased Lion and the download began.

It started at something like 197 hours remaining which worried me, but within about 4 hours, the download was complete and the system had completed the installation to the point of creating user accounts.

From what I can tell, the fresh install is much more responsive and has dealt with most of the issues that I had with Lion when I just did a basic upgrade. I have always been really scared of doing a re-install – especially without a disk.

Apple made this one real easy!

The services we offer are; graphic design, website design and development, hosting solutions, search engine optimisation, printing and corporate identity consulting.

Anyway, below is a screenshot of the design that I have been working on.

Enjoy!

One of the designs for the business website

Take a look at the post from 2009 (Review of noelharrison[dot]net) if you would like to compare results. When reading this post, do note that the data collected by the statistics package is not 100% accurate. It is near impossible to give exact figures when it comes to tracking visitors.

From the beginning of January 2010 until the end of December 2010, noelharrison[dot]net has seen over 5950 new visitors and over 165000 page hits. The blog has used over 1,6GB of bandwidth.

From the statistics generated, it is clear that the more I write, the more visitors I get (this is obvious). The monthly unique hits have grown from early January at 384 to 731 in December 2010.

When looking into the day and time that people view the website the most, the following was discovered; People view the website most on a Sunday and a Monday between 11am and 1pm.

The following I found most interesting. I am able to track great amounts of geographical information. Certain packages are able to break it down to suburb level, however for this blog post, I will keep it nation based. As it normally is, the United States of America ranks in first place. The interesting second runner is the Russian Federation. South Africa is third and Great Britain is fourth. Other nations in order – after fourth are;

• The Netherlands
• Canada
• France
• Germany
• Romania
• Ukraine
• Brazil
• Latvia
• Australia
• Japan
• Italy
• Indonesia
• South Korea
• Czech Republic
• Malaysia
• India
• Finland
• Saudi Arabia
• Poland
• Austria

The next bit of interesting information is the content that viewers have found most interesting – based on the number of views. Ranking very high up is the first blog post on noelharrison[dot]net, Government Intervention; Destroyer of the Free Market and the Hot Top: Gaza / Israel.

Again, on a more technical note, 67.9% of all viewers on the site were Windows users and 18,8% are Macintosh users. I have looked at the hits to date this year, I am very proud to say that Macintosh is on top in 2011 (I do wonder how long this will be the case).

Browser wise, in 2010, 47,2% of viewers were using Internet Explorer, 17,1% were using Firefox and a small 14,5% were using Google Chrome. In 2011, I have seen that Google Chrome is sitting at 49,1%, Internet Explorer at 26,2% and Firefox at a dismal 6,9%.

I have found that posting on Facebook is a huge traffic driver to the site, along with Twitter and actually interacting with other blogs – ie. commenting.  Some of the top keywords used to find noelharrison[dot]net are:

• Economy
• Free Market
• Intervention
• Forces (economic)
• Production (economic)
• Interference
• Government
• Africa
• Life

In conclusion, there has been dramatic growth of traffic on the site, which is exciting. The site has made it onto the first page of Google, in 2 or 3rd position over the singer – Noel Harrison. Silly, but it is a rather large challenge to compete.

Im looking forward to huge growth in 2011. Thank you for reading. Comments are always appreciated and generally (if need be) responded to.

Noel Harrison

Introducing the Classic Blend Framework.

Both myself and the other developer (a good friend of mine – Jonathan Wagener – http://www.espresso-online.info) have worked with many other frameworks over the many years that we have been developing. What we have done is committed to developing one of the easiest frameworks to use – both for ourselves and for anyone else – for free.

What have we done so far?

• Database Class: We have created a powerful database class which handles all database queries – from one -> x number of database connections
• Module Class: This powerful class allows the framework to be easily extended for any purpose. Third party developers will be able to create and edit their own modules and optionally make it a public module which will become available to any other developer in the Classic Blend community.
• Theme Class: This is possibly one of my favorite aspects of the framework. It allows for the development of themes for the system to run. However, it also makes use of the “Smarty” template’s engine (however is heavily edited), and allows for the assigning of theme variables from anywhere in the entire framework!

That’s it for now - take a look of the first screen-shot the public has seen!

It works well on mobile phones (so that you are able to access the system from the restuarant without a Wifi connection) and it is very simple to use.

Next time your mind goes blank at a restuarant – go to www.waiterlove.co.za for some assistance.

Cheers!

Noel Harrison

If you are looking for an article that will bash Windows, this is not the article you are looking for and also if you dont have much time, I can sum my experience of Windows with a single word – Wow! I am a very strong “follower” of Apple and have removed Windows and PC’s from my life in general. However, I was interested in seeing what all the talk about Windows 7 was about. A good friend of mine (he is sold of Windows) convinced me to install it as my main operating system on my designers computer, which I let him do.

Although it is still in Beta, it has proven to be brilliant in every aspect of the word. In general it has the same clean and dynamic looks as Vista, but it is better. They have added many minor tweaks which makes it easier to make use of. One of the issues for me at first was the ugly start bar, but now that I am using it, it aint ugly anymore. When you delve deeper you also realise how much work they have put into something as simple as the start bar.

An application when running is displayed in a small square along the start bar. When moused over, all the active open windows running with the program show in a small thumbnail above the icon. Also when mousing over, you will notice that it takes the most used color in the logo and makes it the highlighed icon color. See screenshot below;

The start menu is alot like Vista, but the main thing that is so wonderful about this one is that the shut down button is the first button – unlike Vista where you had to click and go into a small menu to shutdown. It is that kind of minor tweaking which makes it so much better in my opinion.

On a more intellectual note, Windows 7 is by far more stable than any other Windows OS that I have ever used (with Windows ME or Vista ranking as the worst). As far as software compatibility goes, Windows 7 runs like a charm. One of the huge put offs for me with Windows Vista was the fact that I could plug a memory stick in and it would not be able to locate the driver and therefore I could not use the memory stick. It was terrible, I could not use devices that I needed to do the work that I do.

The computer that I am running Windows 7 on was built to run Vista. It only had a gigabyte of ram and Vista was heavy on the system resources. Windows 7 on the otherhand starts quickly and runs fast in general and also shuts down very quickly in comparison to my experience with Vista on the machine.

They have built in many useful small things such as libraries. This makes it easy to share files with other Windows 7 users. The networking controls have been improved dramatically – one of those things that many Vista users hated about Vista.

In closing, it is the same beautiful look of Vista, but this time it is backed by the stability and speed of OSX. What do you think, have you tried it – what will you be willing to pay for it?

Noel Harrison

For booking, please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/southafrica/devdays/default.mspx

Noel

I still have some things to add to the system such as a few more image functions (editing the size of the picture) and being able to switch between images easily while editing. I have considered running one instance of the program and having all the clients logging into a single version of the system, but this does have some problems – such as;

1. Version control – If some clients pay for a later version – this could be dealt with with a few dynamic tampers
2. Database Failure – If the database corrupts, it could lead to; information displaying on the wrong website or if the database goes down, all the websites will go down

However, there are many positives to running a single instance;

1. When there is a system update, you only need to run one codebase update
2. Database backups are easy to manage – you dont need to backup multipul databases – you can do the one and when there is a problem, you only need to roll back the one version.

Anyway, those are just a few thoughts, I have attached a few screenshots of the content manager below;