Recently John Gruber (over at daringfireball.net) posted a short quote titled The Power of Keynote, where Paul Woods from ESPI Design discovered Keynote as a UI design program for apps and websites. We recently discovered another great use for Keynote – we were able to use a Keynote presentation as a replacement for having an app developed.
Thanks to the newly added feature of Read More >>
We love MailChimp for its easy to use newsletter features – and when we found a way to use it for our upcoming trade show (CTIA 2012) to capture survey and lead data, MailChimp proved once again how powerful it can be.
The challenge: We needed a way to take down some information (like name, email, phone number, business type, etc) at a trade show using a custom form. We can’t rely on internet access (always spotty, at best), and we need multiple iPads to capture info and store the results in a centralized place. Also, we don’t want to spend any money (thank you economy).
Possible solutions: iForm (iPad app, $49.99/mo), Mobile Forms (iPad app, $10/device/mo), Chimpadeedoo (iPad app, free)
Best solution: Chimpadeedoo (plus a MailChimp account, also free). In a nutshell, you can: Read More >>
The data on your computers becomes more important every day. The more we rely on them, the more catastrophic it is when they break. In our office, it’s our entire livelihood – everything we’ve amassed over the years. It’s not just the frequent hard drive failures you need to be safe from – what about a flood? What about when you delete a file by accident? With the right combo of equipment, software, and services you can have a bullet-proof setup on the cheap. Read More >>
A lot of us at Clear-Coat like to cook, and if you do too I’m sure you’ve run in to this same problem: after amassing dozens of different spices – some in jars, some in bottles, some in bags, and some in vials – it’s nearly impossible to keep them organized and easily accessible. I’ve run the gamut with counter top solutions (carousel style, shelving systems, magnetic holders), but they all took up precious counter surface. Then I tried to organize them inside my pantry – alphabetical, in bins, by cooking style, and finally smallest to tallest. In the end none of them stayed organized very long, nor did they allow me to find the spice I needed any quicker.
I did some Googling and found a combination of products that works for almost any kitchen and has stood the test of time (I’ve been using it for the past 6 months), and here it is: Read More >>
“Don’t let your blackberry turn into exploding cats.” This is my favorite quote of the week, and it comes from an incredible video that will boost your productivity if you have trouble with overwhelming amounts of email (like me): Inbox Zero, by Merlin Mann. Read More >>
Breville YouBrew with Carafe
We’re pretty serious about the coffee we drink here at Clear-Coat – a few of us are downright coffee geeks. So while we normally don’t do product reviews, we really wanted to do a full-blown review on the Breville YouBrew since we purchased one for our office about a week ago. We love great products, we love coffee, and we love great blog posts…so this seems like fair game. Now, onto the review: Read More >>
A friend of mine was cleaning out his childhood bedroom and under the piles of clothes, baseball cards and CDs (remember those?) he found a diamond in the rough: a 1991 Apple Macintosh Classic. This happened to be the first computer I ever owned as a kid. Anxious to see if it worked, even though we had no mouse or keyboard yet, we set it up in an office and sure enough we got a happy face on the boot screen. More impressive than the fact this 20 year old computer booted up after being off and in a closet for more than 15 year was the fact that it had remembered, and restored, what was on screen the last time it was turned off – a ClarisWorks text file titled “Some Kind of History”.
To give you a sense of what kind of computing power we’re talking about, this Mac Classic has the following specs:
It’s been a while since our last blog post, and I’m going to try to tie together all that has happened as best as possible, because I definitely believe there’s a valid link between it all. Read More >>
SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is bad. Utilizing the same website censorship used by Iran, China, and Syria, SOPA would give the power of censoring the web to the U.S. law enforcement and copyright holders – mainly the entertainment industry. Read More >>
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