Internet Explorer is probably the worst browser out there among commonly used browsers. By commonly used browser I mean the following :

• Internet Explorer 7
• Internet Explorer 6
• Firefox 2
• Safari

Of course there are other rogue browsers that are rarely used, like Camino, Netscape, and some other nameless ones that most people do not know about, but the above 4 are the most frequently used browsers in the world right now.

Among all of them, Internet Explorer has, perhaps, the worst parsing and display system. It has problems with displaying PNGs (alpha layers will show as a weird light blue) while the CSS parsing as well as certain Javascript command handling are limited. Also the security vulnerabilities are not very nice either. Oh, did I mention, IE6 is the only one among the above list that does NOT support tabbed browsing? That means that if you wanted to have multiple web pages open while you navigate the World Wide Web, you need multiple windows open.

Many people still use IE6 because they are simply unaware of what is available to them - either switch to Firefox, or use Internet Explorer 7. Compared to IE6, the two browsers I recommend have far better parsing, security, and usability, with less errors.

Now let’s think about this from the industry perspective. Web development becomes more time consuming if IE6 compatibility is demanded, and that means higher production costs for websites, as well as bigger headaches for web developers like myself. The faster IE6 is phased out of common use, the more efficient our industry will be as a whole. Money will be saved, and time as well.

In an effort to convert more people to use Firefox or Internet Explorer 7, I have put a little addition on my company website for Synchronous Design & Marketing (www.synchronous.ca). If the website detects that it is opened by IE6 (or God forbid, lower than that), it will show a black box in the top space which is normally blank, and ask people to upgrade their browsers, since the one they have are outdated. Check out the following screenshot.

Section Two for the Pro-Gear series will cover the software I use in order to get my work done.

Since my new computer is a Macbook Pro as I discussed on Pro Gear - Hardware, many of my software are now Mac-Based software. It was quite a transition coming over here since my hard drive on my HP Pavilion blew up and I was forced to switch computers fast. I will categorize my software mainly into three categories - backbone, administration, and design & development.

Backbone

Backbone software would mean what I run all my stuff on, mainly operating systems, and whatever it takes to keep the OS running smoothly. Obviously I have the newest version of OSX Leopard, which is an amazing operating system accompanied with cool features like Cover Flow, Stacks, Time Machine, and more. For more details on the OSX Leopard, check out this video tour of the OSX.

Apart from the Leopard, I have VMWare installed, which allows me to run Windows XP on my Macbook Pro as well. This helps for testing purposes, opening files sent to me by clients in native Office 2003 environment rather than the shaky Office for Mac environment. Mainly it is used for testing websites on IE7.

My Macbook Pro also has AppZapper installed, which is a great app for cleanly removing applications I do not need anymore. For browsing, I generally use Safari for its fast speed and cleanliness, but for web development I use Firefox with some plug-ins that are absolutely critical for fast web development and troubleshooting.

On my spare Toshiba laptop, I also run Windows XP, and this is used as a desktop. My Toshiba Laptop runs IE6 in order for testing certain websites, although compatibility for IE6 is slowly becoming more of an extra than a mandatory part of web development contracts.

Administration

Administration software would include word processing, data handling, accounting and what not.

iWork ‘08 is my primary document processing software. It’s like Microsoft Office except it works on a Mac, and it works damn fast. It includes Pages (Microsoft Word equivalent), Keynote (Microsoft Powerppoint Equivalent, and Numbers (Microsoft Excel Equivalent). Together they make a very powerful administrative software group for everyday office purposes.

Quickbooks Pro 2007 for Mac is my choice for accounting. I’ve gone through demos of nearly 10 different accounting software. Quickbooks Pro was by far the best choice for professional accounting and tax preparation. Yes, even though it is not officially a tax software, it can do tax preparation for you by categorizing expenses and tracking them in detail, in a very easy way. The second best choice for accounting software is Microsoft Money. Some people might feel repulsed at the fact that it’s Microsoft, but trust me, if I were on a Windows based computer, I’d go with Microsoft Money any day.

Mail, Address Book, iCal are the main email/contact/calendar clients included with the Mac OSX, and it is the best way to go, as it synchronizes well with all the other parts of your computer. My advice usually for these is to stick with whatever the OS Vendor gave you. Likewise, if you’re using Microsoft Windows, you should be using Microsoft Office for your email/organization/word processing and all of that.

I also use a Web Based CRM for managing tasks and schedules between myself, my employees, and my associates. SugarCRM is my choice, and you can read more about why I use Sugar CRM. The only problem with most CRMs is that they only offer synchronization with Microsoft Outlook. My personal tasks and reminders are in iCal, while my professional calendar is kept in my CRM. I open my CRM at the beginning of each day to check what I’m facing that day.

Tomorrow I will post about the development and design production software I use, which are software such as

I have finally settled on a new CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system for my new company, Synchronous Design & Marketing, providing design and marketing solutions for small and medium enterprises in Vancouver, BC. This new system allows me to track clients, projects, new leads, marketing, sales, and task/scheduling online, through my web based CRM solution, Sugar CRM.

I’ve observed many, and tested some, CRMs over the last month or so trying to determine which one to use, and I settled for SugarCRM as my solution. Sugar CRM is a completely open-source commercial-grade CRM, and you can either use it starting at $40/mth on a fully supported/hosted environment, or, if you’re like me, download the software and then install it on your own server. One may ask : “Why would they put a price on it, but allow free downloads anyways?” Well, a complete CRM is not a simple installation - it’s quite a bit more work than installing Wordpress, I can tell you that much. Not to mention, to make the rest of the functionality work as well as allow automated upgrades and module installations, there’s a fair bit of server tweaking to do. With the help of solid service from Bluefur Web Hosting (Canada) I managed to get this all up and running, except very few functionalities I have sacrificed due to the fact that I’m not on my dedicated server with root access.

So now you can see why a lot of users would simply opt out to pay the $40/mth (or more, depending on your package) to use their CRM, while the open-source aspect allows over 2,400 developers to collaborate on fixing bugs, as well as creating plug-ins or modules, and also themes. This is the best of two worlds put together. And that business concept is what intrigued me, and got my attention to begin with.

Now, to the smaller details :

• SugarCRM is clean. It’s design, layout, menu options are all so clean and easy to read, dissect, and implement. It’s perfect for a business that cares only about efficiency. It reduced unnecessary clutter and graphics to a minimum while keeping a very professional look.
• SugarCRM uses very advanced AJAX modules to allow for faster performance of the software online, and it also provides ease of use.
• SugarCRM is a completely web-based solution, with no other plugins or software to install on your computer. That means you can be vacationing, and you can still access your CRM from a hotel computer. You can be at a friend’s place, and when an emergency call comes in, you can get on to your friend’s PC and deal with it.
• SugarCRM is quite powerful at importing data from other sources, mainly Salesforce (which is the most dominant CRM in the market, as far as I know), as well as importing contacts and account information from Comma Delimited Files and vCards. It was quite easy getting my data onto my CRM. I don’t have too many clients to import, but the set-up only took a few hours in total - from installation to data loading.

This will be my new platform for the new 2008 year, and I intend to bring lots of productivity and data-accuracy with this new software.

The emerging (or already emerged) trend of software is to be web-based, as a seasoned web developer who can read the trends, I cannot emphasize enough how important web-based software is. I am already in the market for a web-based recruitment management software, in which I compared PC Recruiter and Taleo(and I chose Taleo), and I am currently in the middle of developing a realtor’s website management platform.

And along comes Wild Apricot’s online membership and payment management system, geared towards organizations and other groups with memberships and recurring payments/donations. The moment I saw www.wildapricot.com, the first thought to my head was “Darn. They beat me to it.”

This software’s concept is simple : manage memberships of any sorts online. It could be used for a political clubs, charity groups, religious groups, student groups, sport groups - anything. The entire software is web based which means it automatically hooks into a website template that they can provide, or you can customize through custom CSS handling. The software also includes functionalities for automated membership renewals (which means you collect money online easily), and also is capable of accepting donations at will, as well as event management and notification functionalities!

The problem with many online software, or off-the-shelf CMS’s is that they are either too complicated in order to include all the possible functionalities people may want, and once you get into plugins that may conflict with each other, it becomes a headache. That’s why I don’t use Joomla. But this Wild Apricot software is something that I definitely can use without too much headache - it has a clearly drawn line of what it does, and if that’s what you need it for, go for it. It’ll only cost you $25/mth. If that saves you 1 hour of time updating your membership list manually and printing it out, it’s already paid for itself.

Just in case some people are unaware, let me explain the advantages of having such software running online :

1. Directly hooked into the database, which means upon member sign-up and renewal, the membership list is automatically updated.
2. Easy payment processing - if it’s online, it can take credit card payments instantly without having to hassle you.
3. Data is accessible anywhere. Since it’s online, you can log in and get your membership list and member details immediately.
4. Since the data is already online, publishing a website using that data is very easy.

Wild Apricot seems to be a phenomenal software that is targeted very precisely and can do its job very well, without too much bells and whistles or clutter.

The web page editing is very easy and intuitive as well - seriously, a housewife with very little web development knowledge could play with this platform and manage her charity club. I’m not kidding you - look at the following screen :

If a person knows how to use Word, they can use Wild Apricot. Get your 30-day trial now, to see for yourself what this software can do.

Things I like about the Wild Apricot platform are the following :

• Intensive use of AJAX to speed up page editing, event posting, etc.
• A very wide variety of pre-configured CSS for those groups that cannot afford the time/skill/money for a customized website. Even the included themes look wicked!
• Very easy menu navigation system - the whole theme is for this software to be easy to use and they’ve got that down right!
• The simplicity of it’s functions - less bells and whistles means more membership management

Things I question are the following :

• I don’t see any connection between the title “Wild Apricot” and online membership and payment management. I wonder why the picked that name… Well, if this software takes off, this can be a very unique name that actually makes them stand out, so who knows, it could work out to their benefit.
• The website color scheme makes it look more like some kind of an environmental activist group rather than an online software platform. I can understand why one would like to use fades and vibrant colors to get the whole Web 2.0 theme going, but my idea of a good software sales website is not this. Something that looks a bit more professional, but not too rigid would have been amazing.

Things I encourage them to do are the following :

Create a Facebook Application called “Mygroups” or “Advanced Groups” that steps up the current “Groups” section of Facebook - add the function to collect dues online while advertising Wild Apricot link somewhere in a corner. That might generate some business for those groups who are serious about moving over to their own stand-alone platform. Or maybe it can provide a great source for advertising income as well!

I got absolutely schooled and destroyed today by viruses, it’s not even funny. Here’s how it worked :

One of my close associates that I help out often needed a favour - he got a new laptop for his daughter and needed it set up and all. So I went ahead to install some software, including the Norton Antivirus 2007 Suite, downloaded from a torrent source. The keygen.exe file which is used to crack the software was infected with a virus. Of course, the irony is that an anti-virus software downloads with a virus in itself.

When I rebooted, NOTHING but the last Windows Explorer windows showed up. Black screen, no start menu bar, no background photo, no desktop, no bars, no buttons. Just 1 window floating in the middle of a black screen - that was it. The evening was getting late, so I had to bring the laptop home to fix it up.

In that process, I had attempted to download the keygen file on my own laptop, and tried running it but failed - and now I came home, re-booted my laptop, and I have the same symptoms. My own laptop is screwed. I’m writing this on my spare laptop which runs Windows XP, that sits on my desk at all times.

So, I ended up with 2 laptops that are completely nuked by viruses and I do not know of any way to fix it. I tried manually running the system restore program through the task manager (which I can still get by hitting Ctrl+Alt+Delete), but it failed. The program won’t even run.

Right now I’m trying to back up some of the most recent changes I made (I still have a backup from a week ago on my gigantic external harddrive), and see what steps I need to take to revive these computers. If anybody knows a solution that does not involve re-formatting my entire computer (which will take about 4 hours to wipe and then re-install everything) please let me know.

I run Windows Vista Home Premium.

For the last 3 days I have not been able to send emails out of my Outlook 2007 on my computer. I could only write emails through my Blackberry (thankfully). I contacted my hosting company Bluefur Hosting, and started troubleshooting. The error I got was that my SMTP server cut off or did not respond.

First it was determined that it was a network issue of some sort, as the problem was consistent with whether I was at home, or at an internet hotspot at the coffee shop. It was not singled out to a specific router or an IP address. Also, when I tested it with my spare laptop with Windows XP and Office 2003 on it, it still gave me the same errors. So my computers were ruled out - 2 computers running on 2 different versions of Office/Windows could not have the exact same problem at the same time.

The next thing to check was the server responsiveness through a more manual mean : telnet.

Get into your command prompt, and type “telnet mail.yourdomain.com 25″ and also do it with port # 26.

In my case, port 25 gave me no response, and port 26 was fine. Hence, somehow port 25 was not working. Bluefur’s response was that both ports 25 and 26 (which are the most common for SMTP ports - POP3 for incoming can usually be found at 110) were responding fine for everybody else, so it must be an ISP blocking port 25 on other SMTPs!!!

My only conclusion is that, for whatever reason, Shaw Cable has cut off connections to ports 25 of all foreign (in other words, self-hosted, instead of using myname@shaw.ca type of emails) servers.

If you are having troubles with this in the BC/AB region of Canada, try changing your port # on Outlook to 26.

ActiveX controls - a method of an embedded controlling system that gets deployed on your computer from a website so that certain websites can perform more robust functions - that’s what it is basically. It was a Microsoft creation, and when the internet was young and not as powerful, it was a goldmine for web-based software. Some major websites that use ActiveX controls is MLSLINK for realtors (Multiple Listing Service which provides real-time online listing data). Also, Quickbooks online (an accounting management system that tracks income and expenses) uses ActiveX control for their online platform.

It’s getting out of fashion. It’s in its dying breaths, because web languages have evolved enough to be able to handle very complex tasks in a visually friendly and speedy manner without having to rely on ActiveX controls anymore. I have observed how the MLSLINK system works and all of these functions could be performed just the same (if not better) using a blend of Javascript, AJAX, and robust server-side scripting using PHP or ASP.

Why use ActiveX controls to program your stuff, when other more common codebases can handle it all the same, and you have more learning resources for Javascript/PHP/AJAX online than ActiveX documentations? Also note that having to install ActiveX to be able to use a platform is a tedious task. The whole point of many web-based software is so that you can observe and modify your data from virtually anywhere in the world where you have internet. If I were using Quickbooks online, and I was in a hotel far away from home, it would take me a few extra steps to be able to use it at that computer.

Javascript, PHP, AJAX is more than enough to create very robust and functional data handling web-applications, and you don’t need to install anything everytime you use it on a different computer.

Down with ActiveX controls - in comes Web 2.0.