IrisInk Technical Blog - IT, Marketing, Business & More

Downloads folder bursting? Here’s a tip…

Iain Morris — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 23:32:26 +0000

I’ve found over the months my Downloads folder starts to fill up with all kinds of junk. Old disk images, versions of documentation, expense reports, you name it. All this stuff just sits in my Downloads folder until I consciously go through and delete the outdated stuff and organize the rest of it. To help myself out, I put a very basic bash script in a cron entry that removes old files from the Downloads directory. That way, I have a certain amount of time to move it out. If I don’t, it probably wasn’t worth keeping.

I made a folder in my home directory called “bin” for all my little utility scripts like this one. Here’s the script, which I’ll call “clean_up”:

#!/bin/bash

downloads=/Users/my_user_name/Downloads

find ${downloads} -mtime +7d -delete

This will remove anything that hasn’t been touched in over a week. That all there is to it! Now put it in your user crontab with crontab -e:

0 * * * * /Users/my_user_name/bin/clean_up

As an example, this will make it run on the hour, every hour. Adjust to something that suits you. But be careful tinkering with find! It can be easy to delete things you meant to keep if you don’t pay attention to the switches.

The Real Value Of Your RSS Reader

IrisInk — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 21:13:52 +0000

Oh, really simple syndication. How I love you. As the fine folks at Common Craft told us long ago, RSS is easy, and can save you a load of time. I’ve got hundreds of websites in my RSS reader; topics covering everything from Advertising to Art to Blogging to Facebook to Marketing to PR and PPC are categorized beautifully in my Google Reader. Thought leaders on any subject you can think of are pumping content in to my RSS reader daily – just waiting to be read.

Honestly, between you and me, I probably read 2% of all the entries. I’ve got tens of thousands of unread items. Way too many to ever bother trying to catch up on.

You’re probably thinking – if you only read 2% of the entries, what the heck is the point of having all those RSS feeds – or even an RSS reader at all?

After all, like most reasonably techie folks, I’m lapping at the great salt lick of social media these days, getting the latest, most interesting, funniest, or just plain best links thrown at me constantly by my network of faux (and real) amigos on Twitter and Facebook. I don’t have near enough time to read all of their updates, let alone the links they publish. But for staying on top of the latest in the ever-evolving world of stuff, nothing beats social sharing.

So why then? Why have an RSS reader at all?

Simple – it’s a personal, searchable, sharable database of content. See a sweet link on Facebook you want to read but don’t have the time? Flag it in your reader.

Trying to determine the most recent trends in email marketing? Search through your treasure trove of content in the Email category of your reader.

Wondering of there are better ways to save on your drinking habit? Pop open your Lifehacks category.

Ya see, social media is all about the latest, greatest content. The absolute here and now, real time. This is fantastic for staying on top breaking trends or news, but the shelf life on that content is extraordinarily low. The social web spits out so much content – all the time – that organizing anything other than a list of the latest updates is near impossible (at least, I can’t think of anyone who has cracked it.)

So your RSS reader becomes this kind of on-demand content repository of all that content that slipped through the social cracks. All that stuff you never had time to read when it was published a week ago could be EXACTLY what you need to solve a problem your working on, or when you need ideas or new a direction. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve searched and scanned through hundreds of entries to pluck out 2-3 articles that met my needs. Using Google search (or the social web for that matter) just wouldn’t give me as much content to pull from on demand, in one searchable format, from the authorities I want. RSS does just that.

Couple this searchable content with the ability to monitor and listen to the web for mentions of your brand or website - and respond accordingly when appropriate – and your RSS reader will bring you all the content you could ever hope to use.

Don’t have an RSS reader? Go get you one!

Google Reader

NetNewsWire

Apple Mail RSS Reader

Where to find blogs by subject/niche.

Technorati

PostRank

AllTop

Website Simulation for iPad

Paul Buerk — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:34:29 +0000

This, my latest installment in an ongoing series about what was new and cool two months ago, is a quick look at an interesting tool that’s new to me. Therefore it probably comes as news to others as well.

Simulators exist for just about any kind of device you can find, and they’re typically included in SDK’s for various products. They’re tremendously useful tools for woodshedding and testing development, and in some cases are the only practical way to do things. A good example was the earliest micro-computers, where access to one may have been next to impossible, but they could be simulated on the mainframe and Mini-Computer systems.

Of course, there’s no perfect simulator, and it’s always important to check things out on the actual device. Having said that, here’s an example of a useful tool that can help you check how a website will look on an iPad without actually having to buy one. It’s also pretty convenient to have it on the same computer as the one you’re using to develop a website.

iPadPeek

The beauty of this is that it’s just a URL: http://ipadpeek.com . Just type that into your browser bar and you’ll get a page that looks a lot like an iPad in landscape orientation. You’ll also get a banner ad at the bottom, just for annoyance. If you click on the top border of the virtual iPad, it will switch back and forth between landscape and portrait. More on this later.

To check out a website, just enter in the URL in the address field at the top of the iPad. When you click in the field, it will bring up a keypad on the screen, but sadly it doesn’t do anything. You’ll also notice that the back arrow doesn’t do anything, and neither do the other icons. The only parts that do anything are the address field and the Search field. However, all the links should work, as do Google searches. Videos seem to play back on this simulator as well.

Let’s see how our Iris website looks on iPadPeek:

Pretty nifty. However, not so nifty is how the portrait view looks:

What’s up with that? I can understand the clippage on the bottom of the screen, just because it’s a browser window, but why is the right side all cut off? It’s a mystery.

Now it’s time for Audience Participation:

This is probably the easiest thing I’ve posted, and reasonably fun at that. So just go ahead and poke in the URL for ipadpeek.com and see where it leads you. Hopefully this gives you an idea as to what simulators can do, and maybe it will help you with your website development.

How to fade to black in iMovie for iPhone

Brian Middleton — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 22:25:52 +0000

With my first use of iMovie for iPhone 4 I noticed that something was missing. While they offer you a choice of two transitions that can be used between clips in your timeline, they offer you no way of fading from or to black on either end of your project. This got me thinking, since you can import photos, as well as videos, from the camera roll all I need was a photo of pure black to activate a transition. Instead of getting up off the couch and creating a black image file on my computer and syncing it with my phone, I simply tapped the camera button in iMovie, turned the flash off, held the lens of the phone’s camera firmly against the couch cushion and snapped a photo. What I got was a frame of pure black.

I moved that photo to the beginning of the timeline. At this point you can adjust the handles to determine how long you want that photo to display. Once you add the photo to the front of the timeline it automatically adds a tradition after it. For a simple fade from black, you can choose ‘Cross-Dissolve’. To have your movie fade-out, simply move that image to the end of the project and adjust accordingly.

This technique can mean the difference between this..

And this..

Two Useful Tools for Organization

Paul Buerk — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 18:25:01 +0000

OK. I know what you’re thinking… all you need is yet another application that somehow helps you manage your life/hobbies/fetishes/whatever. Ever since the invention of the personal computer, there have been countless applications available to help you get your stuff together. But please, trust me on these two – you may find them useful, and best of all they’re free.

Evernote

There are some people out there who are self-proclaimed OneNote junkies. For those of you who don’t know what “OneNote” is, it’s an organizational application from Microsoft (part of the Office suite on Windows) that has a large following amongst students. There’s good reason for it – the application functions as a virtual notebook where you can stuff all kinds of information into it in a semi-organized way, pretty much like a student would use a traditional notebook for. The plus side is that it takes more than text, including web pages, e-mails, pictures, and other files.

The downside for many is that it’s Windows-only, and it costs money, and either of those can be a deal-breaker for many users.

An alternative to OneNote is Evernote. It’s free, runs on both Windows and Mac OS X, and can also run on Android/iPhone/iPad as well as via the web. They also have a Blackberry app available, but sadly my ancient Pearl can’t run it. All of these vehicles for EverNote can sync with each other, so you could be running the application on your MacBook at work, adding clips or pages from your iPad at home, taking pictures on your phone and adding them to the notebook while on a job site, and organizing your thoughts from the web browser on the PC in the hotel Business Center. It can even be setup so that you can forward an e-mail directly to your Evernote notebook, from your computer or mobile device. If you get into Evernote in a big way, you can sign up for a paid version with more capacity.

This is one of those applications that’s pretty much self-explanatory, and the best way to get familiar with it is just to simply sign up for the service, download the apps for your devices and computers, and run with it. One of the things I like is the Safari integration, so if I’m on a website and I want to throw the page into my notebook, all I have to do is click on the elephant button at the top. The plug-in will grab that page and sync it with Evernote, sticking it in whatever your default notebook is. Once it’s there, you can easily move it to another one of your notebooks if you prefer.

It will sync periodically, or you can manually force it to sync by hitting the Sync button on the upper left hand side of the application.

Here’s a sample notebook that I’m working on.

I’ve got a project where I’m building jigs for fabricating guitar necks, so I’m sticking ideas that I run across on the web into a notebook labeled “Neck Jig notebook”. There’s a YouTube video that looked interesting, some websites with tools that I might consider, a page with pictures of stuff that might be useful, and a To-Do list that I slapped together. The websites were captured with the plug-in, the list was just edited on a blank page, and the pictures were things that I just dragged from a website directly into a blank page. Mindlessly easy, which is good for me. Here’s a screen shot to give you an idea:

Here’s the same notebook when viewed on the web:

If you prefer, you can do a list view instead of the thumbnails. If there’s GPS data (e.g. iPhone pictures), it’ll get tagged onto the entry. If you want, you can make the notebooks shareable so that others can contribute to it, or link to other’s notebooks. Again, not bad for free.

Reqall

Some people are “list” people, and if you’re one of those, you could learn to love Reqall (pronounced “recall”). There are lots of applications and tools to help you keep lists, one of the best being a good pen and a scratch pad. But Reqall adds a couple twists in that make it very useful, including synching and smartphone apps in addition to the web application.

Speaking of phones, Reqall’s most notable feature is its voice-to-text capabilities, where you can add something to a list by simply speaking it. It sounds kinda silly at first, but often times I’ll be driving around and something will occur to me that I know I’ll want to remember later. With Reqall, all I have to do is call a phone number, leave a message, and it will transcribe it as a note that I can access later from my phone app or via the web. There are all kinds of tagging features available in Reqall, but if you used nothing else but the voice notes, you’ll find it to be a valuable tool for business.

Like Evernote, Reqall is a free service with an enhanced pay version available. It’s very simple to use, and anybody can figure it out within a few minutes, but that’s not to say that these tools aren’t powerful. The speech-to-text thing actually works pretty well, but no doubt you’ll be amused as you go back in to edit the notes.

Summary

To get started with these services, just cruise by their websites:

Evernote

Reqall

The price is right, and they’re easy to use, so why not give them a shot?

Google Click Through Rates Now Available In Webmaster Tools

Michael Crites — Mon, 24 May 2010 18:21:18 +0000

For years the SEO world has been using some old AOL click through data to suppose just what kinds of click-through rates certain organic page 1 positions might fetch. It was limited, old, and certainly out-of-date – but it was all we had. Until now.

In what might be the most useful bit of data Google has ever exposed to webmasters, within Google’s Webmaster Tools you can now see organic impression, click-through and click-through rate data on as many search queries as have impressions.

For me, this is like a really awesome birthday present you never expected. From out of nowhere you get this amazing gift, and it’s up to you to make the most of it. That’s what this post is all about; how to get the most out of this new (amazing) information.

Just what is this data? And what does it do?

When you log into Google Webmaster Tools, under “Your Site On The Web” in the left nav you’ll see a “Search queries” option. That is where the gold can be found.

If you use Google Analytics you’ll see the a familiar interface of blue and orange line charts, with sortable source options such as image, mobile, mobile (smartphone) and web. Also you can segment by country. The data looks like it only goes back a few weeks, so there’s no option to do long term analysis, but what we do have astounds me in its usefulness.

For each search query you’ll have the associated impression, click-through and click-through rate data, but here’s where it gets good. Click on any search query and you get the range of positions within the search results along with the pages ranked for the term – AND impression, click-through and click-through rate data for each of these data points. Wowee!

Ok, I get more data – but how useful is this stuff?

First off – you get to not only see which pages rank for a given term, you get to see which terms have indented results and which pages those are! This is easy to determine by looking at impression data on pages other than your index page. The closer the impression count, the more often the pages are shown in conjunction.

Optimization tip: If you’re getting high impression data but low click-through on an indented result, optimize the indented page for the high-impression term.

Next, spot your high-impression, low rank keywords. Simply sort by impression count and check each of your top 25-50 search terms. Boom. Instant actionability. Laura Lippay refers to these as gaps. Whatever you call them, they’re likely some of the easiest wins you’ll come across in your SEO efforts.

With this data it’s never been easier to fine-tune your optimization strategy. I’ve always been an advocate for increasing rankings on terms you already rank for, but determining which terms had the sweet-spot of high impressions and low rankings was a laborious process. This data makes it point-and-click easy. I’ve used the available Webmaster Tools data in high-level SEO strategy before, but I can see using this new data for all kinds of things that are line-level, tactical optimization. Google has delivered one heck of a tool here.

But my Analytics data is way different, what gives?

Once we’ve seen this data we all naturally want to verify (or disprove it) with what we know to be true(ish); our Analytics data. And of course the data is different across the two systems. The only conclusion we can take from this is that different systems measure things differently, and an unknowable number of variables make this so. Big deal. With web data it’s never about absolutes, but looking at things from a variety of perspectives, until you find that little nugget of truth. This data is another decision making tool, but no tool should ever make the decision for you.

What’s the big takeaway here?

Patrick Altoft hit it on the head with this quote:

“Google has always told us to stop focusing on rankings and to focus on traffic instead, with this data they seem to be showing us that a ranking is just a probability rather than an exact number.”

Ranking reports have always been the shallowest measure of SEO success. Demonstrating past position placement (as all reports do) is a terrible way to look at what your SEO efforts are doing in business terms, or future potential. This new ranking probability concept is a much more accurate reflection of where the SERPs are these days – as your website’s position on any results page will slide around relative to Google Local listings, product placements, universal search elements such as videos and images, etc.

Really, there is no way to determine where you actually rank for any given query at any given time, but this new metric Google has provided is a fantastic measurement of where you have potential to rank – and coupled with all the actionable insights provided in the new reports, makes Webmaster Tools an absolute must for any webmaster.

Feature Request Success Story in Daylite Mail Integration

Paul Buerk — Tue, 18 May 2010 23:02:29 +0000

Yes, sometimes companies actually do something with Feature Requests

We’re pretty much addicted to Daylite at Iris, and for good reason. It’s an outstanding Contact Management System for the Mac from Marketcircle, and the amount of information we have salted away in its database is both significant and valuable.

Much of this is due to the Daylite Mail Integration feature which allows Apple Mail users to have incoming and outgoing e-mails automatically tagged with Daylite Contacts, Users, and even Projects. I can go back and see emails between a client and our team going back for years, even if that contact (or our team member) is no longer in the picture. This is extremely useful, and we use it all the time. Every team member has Daylite on their machines, remote or not, and it’s very easy to keep them all synched together.
As cool as that is, there was one problem with the way that Daylite Mail Integration (DMI) was setup. It has to do with the way that the application automatically tagged users and contacts, and as a result it was making the feature more of a problem than a solution.

Let’s say that I’m writing an email to a client, and for whatever reason they haven’t been added to the Daylite database, so DMI would simply tag that message to me, a user on the system, and completely miss the fact that it was going to a potential contact. At least with incoming email, DMI will recognize that the contact is not in the system and would ask you if you’d like to create that contact. But outgoing mail doesn’t do that.

It just puts in with the rest of my records, and the only way to find that message in the future is to plow through all the ones that were tagged to my user account. Not so good, or useful.

So, to fix that, and to make up for my laziness in not promptly staying on top of entering clients as they contact us, I submitted a feature request to Marketcircle asking them to add an option to have DMI tag messages to only clients and projects, not users. I’m pretty sure others asked them for the same feature, but since this is our blog I’ll take credit for it.

Here’s the fix:

It’s really pretty simple. Just open up Apple Mail, then open up the Preferences from the Mail menu. Then select the “Daylite” icon for the preferences pane for DMI. There are several tabs on that window, so select the one for “Inbound”:

It’s pretty obvious how to set this up. I’ve got it so that it Auto-selects contacts but not users. I left “Auto-select project” checked just because I’m lazy. Since I don’t have a lot of projects setup in Daylite (but probably should), it’s never an issue. Even if I do have a project or opportunity associated with that client, I can always select the check box in DMI and have the message tagged to that project in Daylite.

The outbound tab needs to be changed, too:

Just close the preferences pane up, and you’re good to go.

I have no idea if this was a particularly difficult thing for Marketcircle to fix …

… but I am very thankful that they did. Now at least I get a chance to add the contact into Daylite if they don’t exist in there yet, instead of having their e-mail automatically tag itself to my user record. It’s setup very well and easy to implement, and I can tell you from experience that it works extremely well.

If you’re looking for a contact management system, groupware, or just a good shared address book, then it’s worth giving Daylite a look. There’s also an add-on for iPhone and iPod Touch users (and I guess iPad users, too) called “Daylite Touch”, and it allows you to basically carry your CRM in your pocket. But the DMI tool itself is worth the price of the application. Other contact management systems I’ve used fall far short in this area.

Apple V. Adobe

Nick DeMarc — Thu, 13 May 2010 19:00:23 +0000

It is a well known fact that Apple’s iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad do not support Adobe’s Flash media player. While many people complain about the lack of Flash, not many people understand why Flash is not present on these devices. There are a few primary reasons for this and they are a lack of a mobile version of Flash, HTML5 with MPEG-4 and the App Store.

How did this all start anyways?

The start of this argument is a relatively simple one. Adobe, at the time of the launch of the original iPhone, did not have a mobile version of Flash to support both ActionScript 2.0 (for legacy Flash 8e and earlier) and the newer ActionScript 3.0 (Flash 9 and higher). On desktops, Adobe just simply included both engines in it’s players for legacy and more modern content. The problem with doing this on a mobile environment is that the Flash runtime is supposed to respect the limited processor and memory resources of a mobile environment which isn’t really possible with a dual engine solution like the one for desktops.

Adobe’s prior solution has been Flash Lite which wasn’t really a solution but rather just a subset of the legacy Flash runtime in Flash 7. Flash Lite was delivered more as a way of saying that Flash would play on a phone without actually doing the work to make a Flash runtime for each platform. Flash 10 mobile provides current flash support to some mobile platforms (Windows Mobile, Nokia S60/Symbian, Palm WebOS and Android) but does not support legacy flash.

Adobe will eventually be releasing Flash 11 across all desktop and most mobile platforms (except for BlackBerry, iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad) but they will be missing the two largest, fastest growing and most popular mobile platforms and that, presumably, will be a problem for Adobe.

Web Standards 1, Adobe 0

The next reason is Apple’s stance of supporting open web standards in HTML5. HTML5 allows the web to deliver multimedia without a plugin (such as Flash or Microsoft’s SilverLight) allowing the browser to render video via the MPEG-4 open specification (which Apple’s QuickTime was adopted for as the container specification back in 1998). Go figure that Apple wants to support open standards when it means supporting QuickTime…

Anyway, the lack of a plugin typically translates to a better, more seamless experience. Apple’s opposition to Flash isn’t really an attack on Adobe so much as it is an effort to support open standards on the web. After all, Adobe could always open up Flash.

Finally, and now the biggest reason Apple continues not to support Flash, is the App Store.

By not allowing Flash on the iPhone, Apple is actively making it more attractive to develop in wed standards instead of proprietary binaries. This is encouraging developers to build web apps and media content based on open standards. The benefit of this to Apple is that a better user experience and a very strong app store that is easy to develop for. In contrast, other platforms that do support Flash have weaker native development communities and fractured support for both Flash and native apps as a result which works to Apple’s competitive advantage and further solidifies them as the strongest app store.

In conclusion, it is reasonable to see why Apple did not support Flash immediately for the iPhone because of a lack of a native runtime, why they still do not support it because of their support of open web standards at HTML5 and why they will not support it anytime soon because of the wild success of their App Store.

Little-known OS X Keyboard Tricks I use every day

Logan Holmes — Tue, 11 May 2010 18:40:47 +0000

Inspired by a previous post titled Stupid OS X Keyboard Tricks, I’ve decided to mention a few that I use almost everyday, but are not the most obvious. All of these should work on native applications, but you may have limited success with some third party.

Home and End

For those of you who may be used to the Windows environment, you may also be used to hitting home or end to get to the beginning or end of a line of text. You’ll notice that most Mac keyboard have these same ‘home’ and ‘end’ buttons, but they really do not seem to do what you want.

There are many keyboard fixing applications out there that you can install to fix this, but there’s an easier way – use ctrl-a for ‘home’ and ctrl-e for ‘end’. When I first learned this trick, I thought I would never use it, after all I made it this far without them, but once I got used to it, I found it’s invaluable for getting back to writing after having to edit a typo earlier in my sentence.

Letter Switch

Speaking of typos, I make them all the time. My most common typo is switching letters around; such as, “teh.” Luckily there is a keyboard command for that too. Take “teh” for example, if you place your typing cursor between the ‘e’ and ‘h’ in “teh” then press ctrl-t the ‘e’ and ‘h’ switch places and you now have the word “the”

So those are the keyboard tricks, go ahead and try them a couple of times, I think you’ll find situations for these commands come up more often than you would expect.

Pivot – A cool new way to explore stuff

Paul Buerk — Sat, 01 May 2010 00:07:42 +0000

I don’t get around to saying nice things about Microsoft very often, which I’ll admit isn’t very fair. They’ve been good to Iris over the years, and we’ve sold our share of Microsoft licenses, too. To give them credit, they are always working on interesting things, and occasionally really interesting work comes out of Redmond. The subject of this blog entry, Pivot, is one of those interesting things.

So, what is Pivot?

It’s kinda hard to describe. One way to start is to list the things it isn’t. It isn’t a replacement for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, or other browsers, although you can use it that way. It isn’t a Digital Asset Management system, although it makes it much easier to find things buried in a huge data haystack. It also isn’t a typical Business Intelligence tool, but it’s easy to see where it could be used to spot trends or patterns in business data, do drill-down analyses, KPI dashboards, or similar functions.

Maybe we should start is by quoting the people that put Pivot together:

Pivot makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun. We tried to step back and design an interaction model that accommodates the complexity and scale of information rather than the traditional structure of the Web.

The first sentence there describes a benefit of using Pivot, rather than a feature or a functional description, but you can get the meaning pretty easily. It gives you a way to play with information, move it around, “see what comes out of it” kind of experience. You could say the same thing about Business Intelligence tools or DAM’s, too. I don’t know that I’d classify the experience as “fun”, but you can do all kinds of sorts and filters in those tools, too. What Pivot adds is the stuff in the next sentence, which is a way of saying that web search tools are good, but not necessarily good at handling complexities on the fly.

What’s the catch?

There are two big things that have to be dealt with before you can use Pivot. The first one is that it only works on Windows 7 and Vista. For most of the world, that’s not a deal breaker, but for some people it will be a tough pill to swallow.

The other thing is that the data needs to be put together into a “Collection”, which is basically a database of things that will be in your Pivot display. The website for Pivot, http://www.getpivot.com, has descriptions of how you can create your own Collections, different kinds of Collections, etc. It also has a free downloadable plug-in for Excel 2007 (Windows, of course) that can assist you in building these collections. There are also other tools available and probably more to come.

Why don’t I just show you an example of Pivot?

If you’ve got a Windows 7 or Vista machine, you can just download the free Pivot application and just start punching buttons yourself. It’s not very hard at all to get a feel for what it does, and that will probably help you to imagine other ways that Pivot could be deployed. For me, personally, I’d love it to take a crack at our inventory systems we use at work, both our own and at the distributors we use. Or put together a Collection of all the sales transactions we’ve ever done.

But enough of that. Here’s an example using something fairly simple, which is a Collection of the “Top” 500 Movie Actors. To help you imagine what’s going on, picture a big stack of Baseball cards, but instead of players there are Actors on each. Instead of stats on the back, there’s information on what movies they appeared in, a bio, their age, who they co-starred with, etc. Also picture a stack of cards with every movie ever made, with info on who was in the movie, when it was made, what awards it won, etc. Here’s what the Collection would look like in Pivot:

This is a histogram-type view, where the actors are grouped in sets based on how many movies they appeared in. I know this because above the 1st column is a control that says “Sort: Number of Movies”. On the left hand side of the screen, there are controls that we can use to filter the data. For example, we can click on the term “Number of Movies, and we can grab the handles on the bar underneath the graph to narrow down, slide, or expand the filter set. Since we’re dealing with fewer things, the scale of the images gets a little bigger, and we can now start picking out faces from the deck.

Let’s say that from that group, we want to find all the Actors that have Co-Starred with Steve Buscemi, for example. To do that, I’d just click on the Filter heading that says “Co-starred With”, which will bring up a list of the actors and you can just click on the ones you want to include in the filter. Another way to do it would be to click on “Filter By Keyword” and type in what you’re looking for. But we all love Steve Buscemi, so let’s stick with that. Here’s the result:

We see that Steve has been a busy guy. But now that there are fewer entries, the pictures are bigger, and I just happen to spot Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the Collection. If I want to, I can click on his picture and up will come all kinds of data from the back of his “baseball card” showing on the right hand side of the screen:

It’s hard to see on the last picture, but if you look closely at the top right hand corner of Mr. Hoffman’s picture, you’ll see a green rectangle. On that rectangle is the word “More”, and if you click on that you’ll get a collection of Movies that he’s been in:

From there, you can get the idea. I had forgotten for a moment that he was in “Almost Famous”, but that picture of Kate Hudson reminded me.

Reality Sets In

That may or may not have been a useful thing for anybody to know, but you should be able to see where this would come in handy. Going back to my wish for a unified theory of inventory databases, this could make quick work of trying to find the right part to order for a specific machine made several years ago, or the right software license to order for a particular client, and perhaps even a picture of the widget that I’m looking for. If you’re doing that using a web search engine, then you already know how frustrating that can be. With Pivot and a collection of available parts, I could really speed up that process, and even find alternatives that I may not have been looking for originally.

Another tack would be to sort and filter by other tagged data, such as product movement, compatibility with other parts, or whatever. You could also use this for figuring out trends in customer purchases, identifying key clients in segments (known or unknown), things like that. If you can sort and filter, and still do goofy things that may or may not help, but it’s definitely more fun than your typical DAM or search engine.

Going Forward

This blog entry doesn’t show some of the more attractive features of Pivot, such as the way things move around when sorts or filters are applied. It also doesn’t show how you can use the history tools to see where you’ve been, undo things, or go back to scratch. To see that, you’ll just have to download it and kick the tires.

Pivot can be embedded in your own websites, and there are different ways in which you can put Collections together. Things can be relatively simple like this Actors Collection, or more complex involving lots of different sets of data interacting in complex ways. Again, the website at www.getpivot.com has more info for developers, and it’s worth taking a look at. As for me, I’m waiting for the definitive Collection on guitars…