Looking to upgrade your bathroom. Veerle highlights a fine selection of bathtubs. Some of the bathrooms highlighting these lovely bathtubs are bigger than my house I think. :/

Something for the creative types out there. Quirky and amusing short film from Coudal Partners, a Chicago based creative agency.

Copy goes here...

Keith sent me a video advertisement yesterday for Saab. We like their cars, especially this bio powered beastie.

Like all good advertisements this video elicits an emotion whether it is moody or just downright hilarious. This advert with its dark visuals and backed up by a beautiful song: Release Me from Swedish band Oh Laura certainly hits the mark for me.

While I have seen many great video adverts for a multitude of products from cars to personal hygiene (Lynx/Axe) to even computer hardware (Apple 1984), I can't recall ever seeing a great commercial for a software product. Of course there is this cringe inducing effort from Microsoft, wait for the rap song, it's worth it :D. Though I suppose there is the Get a Mac commercials (Shameless Mac plug).

Anyway, here is the Saab one we like so much:

Panic software which makes the excellent Transmit FTP client for the Mac has released a new web development application called Coda aimed at the professional web designer. I downloaded it last night and tried it out and it really is a beautiful piece of software. I particularly liked the code completion on Coda. John Gruber has a good write-up on Coda on his Daring Fireball blog.

I currently use a combination of TextMate (great editor, especially since we work with Ruby on Rails), CSSEdit and Transmit. Am happy with this set-up, but Coda is certainly tempting. MacRabbit the makers of CSSEdit have just released an update to 2.5, which adds some great new features and improvements including tabs. Am looking forward to see what the new version of TextMate brings. :)

My favourite things about all the above software mentioned is their elegance and simplicity.

The only thing that is really missing for me at this point is a great Subversion Client. At the moment I use the cross platform Java based SmartSVN but it just does not have the polish that native Mac apps like CSSEdit or Coda have.

So all these lovely updates along with the recently released Adobe Creative Suite updates makes these happy days for a web designer using a Mac. Yeah, we love our Macs here.

Fintan Palmers blog has some coverage of Barcamp Dublin which was on over the weekend. We would loved to have gone but we had other commitments. Will really have to try and make the next one. Great to see some events like this happening in Ireland now.

More about Barcamp Ireland here: http://barcamp.org/BarCampIreland3

Smashing Magazine has a great article, 35 Designers X 5 Questions. The results - over 80 CSS-based tips, design ideas, suggestions, fonts, design-related books and online-magazines.

While browsing through some items on the iTUnes site it really became apparent how much the changing exchange rate play havok with pricing on electronic products. There really is a need for more dynamic pricing.

Right now Apple have a number of albums on sale in iTunes at $7.99. Which works out at only €5.88. However, on the Irish iTunes store the same album is €9.99, a huge markup even taking VAT into account. Thats some joke for an electronic product which doesn't even have to ship anywhere. A 41% markup. Soon the DRM version will cost even more!!

Strangely it doesn't seem as bad for some physical products. The Apple TV is $299 dollars which is €220 euros. The €299 charged by Apple in europe is a 26% markup, not much over VAT.

If electronic items such as music, tv and video are ever going to catch on in Europe its time they priced them based on what they actually are, a non-manufactured, non-shipped, drm crippled item. It completely unfair to overprice items like this for Europe. It seems the sensible thing to do is wait until the CD you want it in the 3 for €20 sale in HMV.

PS. I am not 100% blaming Apple here, I know its probably the record industry behind it.

Perspectives on the Dublin market. Current market problems are a temporary setback and this makes it an opportune time to buy, says Mark FitzGerald in the Irish Times.

Future Shock:Property Crash which was shown on RTE the other night offers an extremely pessimistic view of the Irish Property Market and is presented in a laughable way with doom laden music, and at certain points, film like visuals which seem to have been inspired by Hitchcock or David Lynch. Also features sinister voices.

Prime Time has some discussion on the what's possibly going to happen to the property market here. Professor Morgan Kelly of UCD and Jim Power of Friends First offer differing views. You will need Real Player to watch the videos on RTE. It's a pity RTE don't offer the ability to embed videos in your blog yet. Though it is great they are putting more video content up the web now and the new site is a great improvement.

The impression we get here, is that some people almost seem to be willing a property crash on. Others obviously want to talk it up positively as it is in their interest. Somewhere in the middle there is reality, which seems to indicate a cooling market/soft landing in progress without all the drama.

Some interesting insights from an ex Adobe Illustrator product manager on the building of software and how features are introduced to an already established product.

The features for the second iteration of our product mProperty are driven by a combination of feedback from our sales channels/customers and ideas developed within Marino Software to solve specific problems identified in our target market. A big advantage for us is that our target market for mProperty is very clearly defined, but as we move forward with additional strategies for this product we need to factor in new audiences for the product such as designers/ developers and sales channels that are not within the company. The challenge here of course is keeping the simplicity, usability and vision of your product intact while reaching out and facilitating new audiences.

The big frustration we had when working for web agencies in the past, is that you worked to often crazy deadlines with rushed and poorly defined objectives with design by committee ruining what creativity might have managed to survive the process. Then as the project goes live you jumped to the next project though maybe some great ideas were developed during the development phase which just get lost as it is not in the project scope etc.

With regards web based software as a product, the joy in all this is that we get to constantly refine and improve our product offering. And for our customers they benefit from our focus and long term commitment.

Following on from our previous post on the importance of quality photography for selling property here are a couple of web based photo editors that are free and easy to use. They do all the basics to fix those unruly photos.

Picnik (Nice clean User Interface)

Pixenate (From Irish company Sxoop Technologies based in Cork)

Below is an entertaining and thought provoking presentation from Sir Ken Robinson at last years TED conference. He makes a case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it. We were talking about this in the office today and our own experiences with the Irish education system which like most, completely undervalues creativity in all forms. I believe it's safe to say, most people who flourish creatively do so despite the lack of respect, understanding and passion for creative thinking within our education systems.

We have spoken internally about how important it is for us to keep customers.

With a recurring business model even if your acquisition of customers is slow, so long as you keep every customer you win, you can at least mark a date on the calendar when you will be in good shape. As soon as we have mProperty live we will be building in the customer service features.

Scott Carson, mentioned this on the Carsonified blog a while back and I agree with his sentiments. Build in your customer service features into your app and also empower your support people to use them. For example, we need to have a button for refunds in our back office and anyone who is dealing with a customer has to have the power to click on it.

Anyway, the main point of this post was Dyson. Seven years ago I bought a Dyson DC01, their first mass market model. Over last weekend it's main belt broke due to me not cleaning out some crud that got caught up in it. I considered buying a new one but I decided to chance giving them a call. Their phone system was quick and to the point, no shouting "One", "Two" down the phone. I spoke to someone quickly who took my address who agreed to send out the belts for the price of postage only. Considering this was a seven year old vacuum cleaner which only had a five year guarantee I thought this was great. I have since told several people how good they were about it. And I would definitely buy another.

So they prove the point up above. My seven year old cleaner will probably die sooner rather than later anyway, and for the price of one piece of rubber they have ensured I will spend about three or four hundred euro with them in the near future.

The New York Times has an interesting tool for comparing the costs of renting or buying equivalent homes. Try it out here...

I love the interface on this. Simple and useful.

The Dublin Docklands Development Authority has unveiled a dramatic design for the new Luas Bridge across the Royal Canal at Docklands North Lotts.

More details here...

There is great article on the New York Times covering the importance of photography in selling a property. There are some excellent before and after examples too.

With the convenience of modern digital cameras and computer software you would think that most property for sale or let online would come with strong photography showing the property off in its best light. From the research we have been doing for our product mProperty, this is very often not the case. Many of the images I have seen have put me off the property rather than raising my interest.

There are many reasons for this, lack of photography or software knowledge, poor software, poor website support for adding imagery. If you are a Property Sales Agent, surely photography is valuable asset in selling the property and it is worth taking the time to improve your photography skills or getting a professional property photographer to take some shots. Getting a professional photographer would make a lot of sense considering the price of many properties, especially here in Ireland.

With mProperty we have made sure it is simple for users to add images: photography, visualisations and floor-plans so they are available in an easy-to-use gallery. As broadband penetration increases in Ireland it is becoming more practical to add more bandwidth intensive content such as video. We will be adding this ability to mProperty in the near future and hope Estate Agents take advantage of this. What better way to get a great feel for a property and its local environment. Maybe you can get to meet the neighbours too!

If you are interested in improving your photography of property here are some links which we hope you find useful:

www.photographyireland.net/
www.dublincameraclub.ie/
http://galleryofphotography.ie/courses.html

Larry Lohrman has a great weblog covering all topics property photography: http://larrylohrman.wordpress.com/

One of the benefits of starting a new company is the fact that you start with a clean slate.

Given we have no previous investment in hardware etc we can select the best items for the job instead of sticking to something we have already spent money on.

We went with MacBook Pro's for all our machines and at this stage we will probably never bother with a desktop machine.

The laptops have a number of benefits for a start up company. For a start, they take up less space. But another one hit me while reading a Slashdot article, they use less energy.

If you want a computer to use less power you only have a couple of options, use an older less demanding processor in a machine with integrated graphics or use a laptop. Laptops are already designed for low power consumption so essentially they are the green option. So we should keep our carbon footprint down by our all laptop 'policy'.

Now of course someone will tell me that for every laptop made a whale drinks a litre of battery acid and trackpads are made from the left eye of an african child.

I have to say I applaud the Irish Government for making the effort on E-Government.

We had to do our first annual return recently and it was great to be able to use the web based system to file the return. The system also has a lot of helpful prompts when you make a mistake which of course a paper form can just never do.

There was one silly problem though. I got to the end of the form and everything validated fine and then it explains I needed an account with CRO.ie, right at the very end. Now to get this account you have to fill out and post a paper based form. Had they have explained this at the start I would have filled it out in advance but now I have to wait on the Irish postal system.

In the last few days I wanted to create part of our address entry partial using text_field_with_auto_complete. I did some googling but in the end it required some brain power to figure out myself.

Adding them is easy. I have a Country, County and Location entry field so I added three text_field_with_auto_complete boxes, one for each like so:

<div class="formElement"><label>Country: </label>
<%= text_field_with_auto_complete
 :country, :name,{}, :indicator => "country_activity" %>
    <span id="country_activity" style="display:none;" ><%= image_tag 'spinner.gif'%>
</span></div>

and so on. The indicator attribute allows you to specify an element in the document which becomes visible while the text_field_withautocomplete is carrying out a query.

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