Microsoft Office and Dropbox announce partnership. Dropbox can now edit Office files. Wow, very smart move for both! http://buff.ly/1xY3eTG
Dropbox lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Never email yourself a file again!
Link to full article.
Excellent tips for a great app!
“11 Tips For Using Team Viewer – The Best Free Remote Desktop Connection Manager” http://buff.ly/1s3gAt2
Once upon a time, LogMeIn was the go-to remote desktop service. But TeamViewer has always been the superior alternative, even more so since LogMeIn ended their freemium model. If you’re new to…
Link to full article.
This is extremely cool! Can’t wait to play with these.
“IFTTT’s New Twitter Triggers Automate Monitoring Twitter” http://buff.ly/1zdVeTJ
If This Then That added some new Twitter triggers to its automation service that make monitoring Twitter a little easier.
Link to full article.
Interesting! This could either be relatively helpful, or horribly annoying. That being said, though, how many Evernote users here actually write content directly into the app versus clipping it or hooking it up to a watched folder?
“Evernote Unveils Evernote Context, An AI Play That Surfaces Content From Outside Sources As You Write” http://buff.ly/1ujjI9F
Today, Evernote — the note-taking and storage app now with 100 million users — announced one of its latest and biggest steps forward in its bid to develop..
Link to full article.
I have a soft spot for clever to-do list apps, and Moo.Do’s approach looks interesting. It’s basically taking the concept of tagging and hashtags with simple tabbing for hierarchy to populate a to-do list and connect pieces of data. Plus, cross-platform goodness! I may give this one a go. What’s your favorite to-do list solution?
http://buff.ly/1mGBDpm
Moo.do is the best and easiest way to organize everything in your life: projects, to-do lists, appointments, contacts, reminders, events, and anything else you can write down. Moo.do is available on any…
Link to full article.
Interesting enterprise-focused secure chat app. “Microsoft legend Ray Ozzie wants to kill the conference call” http://bit.ly/1uCKDLc
We haven’t heard from Ray Ozzie in a while, which is unusual. Ozzie has been a very busy man since the early 80s — he worked on VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet app, invented Lotus Notes and sold it…
Link to full article.
I like the idea of using hashtags for organization.
“Most of us use Gmail as our main email service, but it’s so much more. Gmail can act as your to-do list, your notes board, your reminders, your list maker, and all the other things you need to be productive.”
Link to article: How to Turn Gmail Into Your Central Productivity Hub.
Art management time! Has anyone created a wall grid full of printed art assets for basic tracking and visualization? How did you do it and what did you track? I decided to design a system for that today.
I do all my project tracking in Shotgun (www.shotgunsoftware.com) but I like the idea of a wall to visualize relationships between sets, with really limited tracking indications that map to asset-specific tasks.
Let’s choose a standard 8.5 x 11 piece of paper to print on. That’s 2550 x 3300 pixels at 300dpi. Let’s see how many figures (characters in this case) we can fit onto a sheet. The practical considerations here are:
1) Scale. How many can I fit onto one sheet and still be meaningful? If it’s too few it’ll take up too much wall space. If it’s too many it’ll make looking at it difficult. We can also use either portrait or landscape mode, depending on the proportions of the image. Additionally, if there are too many and you’re printing updates, if you update more than one asset in a sheet you’ll be printing up new pages all the time.
portrait:
5×4 grid: 510×825
3×3 grid: 850×1100
2×3 grid: 1275×1100
2×2 grid: 1275×1650
2) Buffer room at the edges in case you’re using a paper cutter. Do EVERYTHING you can to size it correctly so you don’t have to use a paper cutter to correct it. Trust me, I’ve been down that road.
3) Buffer room at either the top center (for magnets) or in the corners (for push-pins) so you’re not covering up information.
4) Clearly labeled asset name with stroke around text, for easier visibility in all conditions. I like white text in Impact with a black border, or inverted colors if necessary.
5) Limited colors so we don’t waste printer ink.
6) Character is on a neutral RGB 128 grey background, but outside of those bounds it’s white. This saves ink, and prevents the painful contrast of looking at a character with a bright white background. That’ll distort your perception of color and values. (note: I’m using a placeholder since I can’t show any of my game’s assets.)
7) Stroked inside edges of the image. This’ll aid in snapping them correctly (although you should be using Guides) and cutting them out, if you absolutely have to.
8) When you print, make sure to Scale to Fit Media otherwise it’ll clip the edges by default.
9) Clear indications of asset status at the bottom that you can mark with a ballpoint pen or Sharpie. I have “R C B S T I,” which stands for “Ref – Concept – Blockout – Sculpt – Texture – Ingame.”
After several experiments, this is what I ended up with:
This is what 4 of them on an 8.5×11 sheet looks like:
And this is what all my experiments look like on the wall:
Bottom right is the winner. 🙂 Obviously this is just the start of a LOT of effort, but I feel like I have the design down and have avoided a LOT of pitfalls I’ve subjected myself to in the past.
Hope that was helpful, or at least interesting! I’d really like to hear how your studios do it and if you have any suggestions on a simpler format, or if there’s anything I haven’t covered.
Cheers!
Just ran across an awesome new tool: Dropbox Automator!
This is a pretty wild one. Essentially, you can create rules (or “automations”) for Dropbox via this web tool that triggers certain actions based on filetypes. I’ll quote TechCrunch‘s linked article:
Not only are they trigged by file type (e.g. a photo, a .doc, a PDF, etc.), they’re also triggered based on which Dropbox folder the file has been placed into.
For documents, you can choose from actions like convert to PDF, convert PDF to text, summarize, translate, upload to Google Docs, upload to Slideshare and more. Photos can be uploaded to Facebook, Flickr, rotated, annotated with text, a map or a logo, have effects applied, and downscaled.
Any file can be emailed, zipped, renamed, FTP’d, encrypted or decrypted, saved to another Dropbox, tweeted, or set as a Facebook status.
I use Google Docs extensively, but almost everyone else on earth uses Word Excel etc. I use OpenOffice for dealing with my non-Docs clients directly, but always manually import and sort them into Docs when I’m done. One use I thought of for Dropbox Automator is saving whatever Word documents I’m working with into a special shared Dropbox folder that I use with my crew, so that those files will automatically be uploaded into Google Docs without my having to manually importsavesort it. Timesaver!
Another example is having a secure offsite FTP to automatically back up anything my clientscontractors post into Dropbox, optionally with encryption for security. 🙂
This is incredibly cool, and I can’t wait to dig into this. Automation tools for the win!
Do you guys have any other cool ideas on how this could work? Would love to hear!
Hi, guys! I’ve been spending the last few months really digging into the most efficient ways to manage my business from wherever I happen to be while having plenty of backup options for staying communicative even if everything starts exploding. First off, I’d like to showcase my hardware!
These are the main tools I use for smArtist! Detailed below:
My command center! HP Pavilion dv6t quad core. Intel i7 Q 820, 8gb RAM, 500gb HD, etc. This is my primary laptop where I do all the heavy lifting, be it art, mass file storage, syncing data everywhere, etc. It’s heavy, but can handle anything I can throw at it. I take this laptop to client sites, set it up wherever there’s room, sync the data to my local HD and mirror onto an external HD then do all my work on this. This helps me work remotely and have everything at my disposal and help save my clients time and money trying to get a new system set up for me.
My Google Chromebook! I got this for free in Google’s very first round of beta hardware, and a year later, I still use it extensively. I use this for responding to email, dealing with documentation and spreadsheets, etc. I’m an ENORMOUS fan of Google and actively use most of their products, especially Gmail and Docs.
For the most part, everything I ever need to manage my business with exists in Google’s cloud — securely passworded a hundred ways, of course — and it’s all automatically accessible from this Chromebook. All I have to do is log into my Google account, and all of Chrome’s browser settings and Chrome web store applications and their relevant data are instantly accessible to me. The best part is that the Chromebook comes with 3G data plan through Verizon, so I can access the internet and all my data from wherever I am, at any time.
My Motorola Atrix laptop dock! This is the most awesome cel phone accessory ever devised. I have the Motorola Atrix phone with Android, which is an absolute beast of a phone. One of its most notable features is the laptop dock accessory.
It’s basically an entire netbook with a dock for my phone, and it’s powered by my phone’s hardware. The lapdock’s OS is actually Ubuntu, but the Android OS runs in its own window as a separate app. That window is everything on my phone. All my settings, apps, everything, 100% exact copy except I can use the lapdock’s mouse and keyboard to click on and run everything. I even unlock my phone and entire my PIN from the lapdock’s keyboard. 🙂
The way it works it that I dock my phone into the lapdock, then boots into Ubuntu and has a virtualized window of my phone’s Android OS as a running app. It’s incredible. It’s a fully functional netbook with 3G access through my AT&T data plan using my phone, and for no extra charge. The best part? The laptop dock has its own battery that automatically charges my phone when it’s docked, even if the laptop dock is closed.
My first-generation 64gb 3G iPad! This is the best piece of consumer electronics I’ve ever purchased. Except for the graphics work I can only do on my primary laptop, I can do EVERYTHING I need to do for my business through my iPad and with its keyboard dock. Emails, spreadsheets, reviewing portfolios, Dropbox, FTP, reading PDF docs, everything. I have apps to do basically anything I’d ever need to do, and since it’s 3G, I can do it from anywhere. 🙂 I’m writing up an article on how I use my iPad to manage my business, and I’ll be posting that at some point in the near future.
The net effect of having all this hardware is that I can pack as light or as heavy as I need and use any of these devices to access the internet and my data through a) direct ethernet connection, b) wifi, or c) two different cellular networks. I can do face-to-face calls through Skype or various VoIP solutions on basically any of these devices if I need to. Since all my tools are based online and backed up every which way, I can be on the highway in the middle of the desert and have full access to my entire business if I even have a single bar of cel reception on either AT&T or Verizon. I’m always on.
In addition to this, I actually have a really amazing laptop messenger bag from Timbuk2 that’s always loaded with all the cables and peripherals I need to work remotely. This enables me to simply toss my laptop in the bag and go where I need to immediately instead of having to wrappack everything and make sure I didn’t leave anything behind. Among the items in my bag are my earbuds, external speakers, extra mouse, extra USB cables and AC adaptors to charge my phone and iPad, a portable three-port surge protector with two USB outlets so I can split power in busy coffee shops, and so on.
Two of my next purchases are a keyed laptop lock for security and a spare AC adaptor power brick for my laptop so I don’t even need to pack my primary when I need to pack up and go work somewhere without wasting a moment’s time. It may not seem like a big deal at first, but I’m out and about working from a wide variety of locations all the time, and it sucks to spend a ton of time packingunpacking and forgetting something important as I go.
So, in a nutshell, that’s how I run my business from anywhere I am. What kind of cool tech and tools do you guys and gals use for remote work? I’d love to hear!
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