GregBellDesign

Its been a while, but here goes another ScrnShots of the week. Actually today is more of a roundup for ScrnShots of the month

Here is a small roundup of some of my faves on ScrnShots.com over the past month (click the images to view the full screenshots of user profiles):

Hopefully things will slow down about around here and I'll be able to blog a little bit more about how things are going at ScrnShots. For now, hope you enjoyed the screenshots.

ScrnShots launched today. Signup now to get your free account: ScrnShots registration page.

When things slow down I should have time to write a better blog post about our launch.

Thanks to everyone who helped out with the private beta and everything else. Cheers!

Almost a year after the American release, Rogers finally announced that they'll be carrying the iPhone in Canada. Not too many details have been released yet:

"We're thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada," said company president Ted Rogers in a statement. "We can't tell you any more about it right now, but stay tuned." - CTV

A few questions are on my mind:

• How much are the data plans going to be? 
• What does this mean for us american-bought-unlocked-iphone users?
• When? When? When?

After days of deliberation, Derek and I finally decided on a company name: Orange Peel Media (website and branding coming soon!). After floating around so many different names, its such a relief to be moving forward with one. Never mind the fact that its a great name!

Derek and I both agree that the name has amazing branding possibilities as well as a great personality. At the end of the day, we want our individual products to speak for themselves, but it doesn't hurt to hurt to have a great company brand behind them. That's what we hope to do with Orange Peel Media.

For us, the next few months are all about ScrnShots.com. As announced earlier, ScrnShots will launch to the public on May 6th, which is only a week away! So we are super busy trying to get everything sorted for our first launch. Also, we have a crazy development schedule planned for the next couple of months that will see us launch a lot of new features, so here's to hoping that we get some sleep along the way!

Popular Mechanics decided it was time to settle the battle between Mac and PCs once and for all. So they did the Mac vs. PC: The Ultimate Lab Test for New Desktops & Laptops.

The final verdict: Macs win! (was there ever any doubt)

Not only did the mac win using Leopard, it also won running Vista:

We even tested Vista on the Macs using Apple’s platform-switching Boot Camp software—and found that both Apple computers ran Vista faster than our PCs did.

And my favorite quote:

Simply put, Vista proved to be a more sluggish operating system than Leopard. Our PCs installed some software faster, but in general they were slower in our time trials. Plus, both PCs showed weaker performance on third-party benchmarks than the Macs. Our biggest surprise, however, was that PCs were not the relative bargains we expected them to be. 

Quotes from Page 4 of the article which includes final benchmarks.

Small changes can have big impact on the user experience of a product. There's no doubt there. Making small tweaks to existing products is the sign of a team that cares about the user experience and is engaged with their product. I can't stand products that are stagnant whether they are physical or digital.

Here are two recent small changes that had big impact:

1. Starbucks Lid Plugs

We've all been there: walking down the street with our fresh coffee and blamo... burnt hand. It sucks. Up until now I accepted this as simple fact of life and tried my best to hold the cup steady.

Starbucks spent some time thinking about this problem and now offers lid plugs. I love it! A super simple solution that makes my day better. What more can you ask for?

2. Basecamp Project Switcher

I'm a long time Basecamp user and love the product. Although most of the app is set up for ease and speed of use, switching between projects has always been a hassle. It isn't a hassle until your account has lots of projects setup. Essentially you have a list of all projects categorized by the client. If a client has many projects, the list becomes very noisy.

As an employee, I only ever access a few projects at any given point in time. I don't need a list of the entire company's projects; I need a list of my current projects. So that's exactly what they did. They redesigned the switcher to give you immediate access to the 5 most recently accessed projects and left the rest of the projects in a drop down menu.

Immediately the noise is dropped from tens of projects to no more than five. And, the five that are presented are the projects that I am most likely to switch to. Since the redesign, I've noticed that I rarely ever use the full drop down list. The redesign, although simple, makes Basecamp more of a joy to use.

Sometimes we like to jump to the really complex solutions without considering making small changes first. If you find yourself in this case, try to find a simple solution to a small problem, then worry about the big changes. Sometimes they'll solve themselves before you even get to them.

With my recent announcement, I felt it was necessary to make a fresh start with a brand new site design. The purpose of this design is to simplify the site and move the focus onto the content.

I did away with a lot of the site structure and moved to a more classic blog layout. While I still plan on refining the homepage design, I do feel that the site gives me more room to express myself through the blog content without all the busy background elements.

Also, I plan on extending the type of content that I blog about. Up until this point the site has been more or less related to user experience design (and a little bit of self promotion for ScrnShots). Now that I'm starting my own company, I plan on extending the content to include web startups, web development and anything else that impacts my life as a startup founder.

If your reading this in an RSS reader, come check out the site. If your already here, what do you think? Leave me a comment.

PS: I haven't done a lot of browser testing, so things may still look funky on non-mac-os browsers.

On May 1st I'm embarking on a new journey. I'm leaving Analytic Design Group to create a new company with my friend and colleague Derek Kehler. Although we haven't decided on a company name yet :), we do know that we want to produce web based software products that we, and our users, are passionate about. The first product we're directing our ninja-web-fu skills at is our social design community ScrnShots.com.

My time at ADG has been both exciting and fulfilling, and I'll always look back at my time as employee number 1 with fond memories. But, the desire to work on my own personal projects (which are plentiful) has left me with very few hours in the day and a decision had to be made. Although the safe thing to do would be to give up on the personal projects, that's just not in my nature.

So, after many hours of deliberation, Derek and I finally made the decision to give up the cushy jobs and go out on our own. This decision has brought on a mix of excitement and anxiety knowing that our products need to pay our bills, but at the end of the day, we want to work on projects that we love. This will allow us to do that.

I'd like to thank Karyn for being such a great teacher and mentor. She made ADG a great place to work, learn and grow professionally. Also, I'd like thank the rest of team and all the great clients that made each day a pleasure. I wish nothing but the best to ADG and hope that this is not the end of a great working relationship between myself and the people there.

More info on the new company should be coming soon so stay tuned!

At ScrnShots, we created a quick survey to get some feedback from the community in regards to how they create and use screenshots currently.

If you've got a few minutes, please take a moment and fill out the super short survey: ScrnShots Pre-Release Survey (it's only 5 questions!)

The survey will be open for the next 24 hours and thanks to anyone who's already filled it out.

Sorry for the cross post if you are also a reader of The ScrnShots Blog.

Just want to give a quick shout out to the team at KillerStartups.com for reviewing ScrnShots:

"ScrnShots is a versatile and functional space for designers to get inspired while staying organized and in the loop. The site is itself well designed, with easily navigable elements and cross platform functionality."

Read the full review here: ScrnShots Review on Killer Startups