Running The Ladder is the company blog of Bainbridge Studios, a tiny runt of a design practice based in lovely Tacoma, WA.
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Adobe Announces Release of Photoshop CS3 Beta
Thursday, December 14th, 2006 | Tom Carmony
For much of the (Mac-based) creative community, the official adoption of the new Intel-based Mac computers won’t be complete until the release of Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 as a Universal Binary sometime this coming spring. For those unfamiliar, a Universal Binary is a program format optimized to run on both older PowerPC-based Macs as well as the new Intel machines. Older (non-Universary Binary) software is capable of running on Intel Macs today, but performance in many cases (Photoshop in particular) leaves a lot to be desired.
Suffice to say, there’s a lot of excitement brewing today after Adobe announced that they’ll be releasing a beta version of Photoshop CS3 tomorrow (Friday, December 15th) for free download. The software will include a two-day preview period for non-CS2 users; those currently running CS2 and possessing a legit software license will be able to use the CS3 beta at least until the final, official release of the software in the spring.
MacWorld has a rundown on the release »
Introducing Coherence
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006 | Tom Carmony
I’ve been a big fan of Parallels Desktop since it’s initial release. For the uninitiated, Parallels is a virtualization solution for Intel-based Macs that allows you to run multiple operating systems simultaneously within OS X. Thus, I can run Windows XP within it’s own self-contained window on my desktop, alongside by usual Mac software. It’s an excellent solution for those who prefer the Mac environment but may still need to run a few PC-only programs. Here at Bainbridge, we utilize Parallels to more easily test websites and HTML emails across both Mac and PC systems, all on one machine, all on the same screen.
This week, the fine folks at Parallels have upped the ante, releasing an ambitious Beta upgrade to Parallels. It includes a number of significant new features, including drag and drop copying (the ability to simply drag and drop files between operating systems).
What really caught my eye, and what I think will really impress a lot of other folks, is the introduction of Coherence, a Parallels framework that basically hides much of the extraneous Windows desktop, showing just the actively running window/programs. So, what’s the big deal? The big deal is that now you can literally run Internet Explorer, Outlook, Office 2007, etc. side by side with Safari, iLife, and more, without having to switch between desktops.
Checkout these screen caps taken on my MacBook Pro. The first features a neat trick for hiding/revealing the Windows XP toolbar (using it’s Auto Hide function) by tucking it under the OS X menu bar at the top of the screen. All of my XP software is just a couple clicks away, but I don’t have to fully jump back and forth betwen the two operating systems to access them.
The second screen cap below showcases the side-by-side effect; Internet Explorer 6 and Safari are both open onscreen and I can easily jump between the two.
More Email Marketing Stats Goodness
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006 | Tom Carmony
Tis the season for email marketing research, it seems. MailChimp has posted a breakdown of open rates, click rates, bounces and unsubscribes for more than 30 million emails distributed by their system on behalf of their clients.
The results are broken down by industry (i.e., industry of the company from which the emails were sent). The best of the bunch? Legal services, with an open rate of 42.62%. The worst? The insurance industry, clocking in at an impressively low 14.75%. The only category lower was a catch-all of more obscure senders, aptly labeled “Other” (this group checked in a 9.38% open rate).
Check out the complete statistical goodness here »
Death and Business
Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 | Tom Carmony
I found out today that one of our clients passed away suddenly last month.
A fit, energetic man in his forties. The kind of person you never expect to be “the first to go.”
We hadn’t worked directly with this particular client and his company (of which he was a co-owner) since redesigning their website last year and I hadn’t had contact with anyone from their office in some time.
Hearing news of his death, it certainly got me thinking about business planning and addressing the “what ifs?” that so many of us don’t want to consider. Particularly for those of us that are either self-employed, entrepreneurial or running our own small businesses, planning for things like an untimely death is a significant issue (e.g., what happens to the business? To the client base? To employees?).
It’s not the kind of thing most of us want to consider, but it’s clearly important to do so. Sometimes we just need to be reminded of that…
Breakdown of Web-Based Email Clients
Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 | Tom Carmony
A number of posts have been floating around the email marketing blogosphere earlier today, detailing the latest demographic reports and trends on the email marketing front, particularly use of web-based email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and others.
For those unfamiliar with the pitfalls of designing HTML-based marketing emails, web-based services like Hotmail and Gmail are often the bane of many a designer’s existence. Their often difficult handling of CSS styling and other contemporary coding techniques leads (in many cases) to HTML-coded “mash-ups” of sorts, as the designer is left to work his or her way through a variety of hacks and other work-arounds in order to insure that the design of the email appears to the end user as close as possible to the way it was intended to look when originally designed.
One particularly interesting note is that perpetually Beta Gmail (are they ever going to lift the “Beta” tag from that service?) only ranks fourth among web-based email services, despite probably getting a majority of the press since it’s initial release.
So what beat out, Gmail, you ask? Well, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and…. drumroll please…. MySpace!
States EmailMarketingReports.com:
“As of November, 2006, the most popular email websites (based on US Internet usage and in descending order of popularity) were: mail.yahoo.com, mail.myspace.com and hotmail.com.”
While MySpace has clearly become the 800-pound gorilla of the social networking circles, one might not initially consider them in the context of web-based email providers. Of course, considering their 70 million + user base, perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised after all.
Click here for the full rundown of the latest numbers on email usage »