Issuing data through the command line, however, is a prospect most of us would cringe at but thats where S3Hub steps in and makes it painless.

If you have ever used an FTP client S3Hub will seem very familiar. After signing up for S3 you are issued credentials which you plug into S3Hub, then connect and away you go setting up your buckets, folders and transferring files from a sleek GUI. It’s free and really cool.

In this new age, with many of us still putting off redoing our old website with its multiple dead links, IE incompatibilities & latest blog postings dated 2007, the thought of extending our business to mobile and even facebook platforms is incomprehensible. The full range, what we term the 360° (website, mobile application and facebook presence) is certainly not for everyone, but for some this trifecta can be the impetus for revolution to your marketing arsenal, and we believe it doesn’t have to complicated.

Website

If your current site is static we encourage you to consider a solution that allows you to update it yourself without the headaches. I’ve found that joomla, drupal and other platforms out there just don’t have the intuition and ease of Wordpress. We exclusively develop publishing/content driven sites on this platform because its the best out there.

In some cases Wordpress doesn’t meet the specificity of your needs. For such custom oriented situations, we call upon the power or Ruby on Rails to build a custom whatever-you-can-imagine.

Mobile

Aside from iPhone applications, which certainly offer a fantastic platform for marketing products and services or pushing an application that is a product in and of itself, other smart phones are also a fantastic platform to extend to. Android and Blackberry have excellent native application support and a smart-phone optimized website (or web application) can be accessed by any phone equipped with a proper browser.

Facebook

Primarily a presence on facebook itself cannot be underestimated. It has significantly more active users then any single phone platform and the application potential is virtually limitless. Games, utilities entertainment/social oriented apps – if you can imagine it, it can probably be an app on facebook.

Marketing for your own existing service or product is also highly effective. In some cases an app with an angle can help, but there is also the use of fan pages with pay per click campaigns extended from them. A giveaway, perhaps, can be promoted through facebook giving you thousands of impressions at a relatively low cost in advertising budget.

Extending facebook to your own website can even further increase your functionality and the API is free to use. Your entire login system, for example, can be powered through facebook allowing users with facebook accounts to create accounts on your site with a couple mouse clicks! Users love not having to fill out a bunch of data you can get from their facebook already.

Conclusion

In closing, there are millions of possibilities and we don’t think you need to be scared about it. The web and media has become really intuitive and now is a great time to get a head start. Also, its not too late to fix up that old site of yours and get to blogging. ;-)

With the need to supplement many of our iPhone apps with a server side admin or source of content, we felt the cleanest most efficient approach would be in fact what is fast becoming the premiere platform for development out there.

Ben Mill’s, Ruby on Rails guru with over a decades experience in the industry, joined the nufish team last November to bring just that capability in full to our staff.

It’s not just iPhone app supplement admins that we will be sending on the rails, stay tuned for custom released apps for both client and nufish branded.

If you ever had to go through the process of selecting the right accounting software, you can relate when I say, its a jungle out there. I tried them all and went through the gambit, and nothing out there save one solution was worth its salt. Your thinking I’m going to say quickbooks? The best app by far for accounting is lessaccounting.com by the boys over at lesseverything.com. I would be lying if I said it’s perfect- I had a few glitches in the process as well, but after successfully balancing two years of books in less then 8 hours, I really can’t complain. So let me summarize my experience app by app then conclude with the thesis, why lessaccounting kicks the tail out of everything else out there.

Quickbooks

I didn’t get as far as I should with this because there is simply no way of importing bank data with the online version, and the trial download does not do it either. Unless you want to sit and enter every single transaction manually (despite what sales mislead me to believe) you will have to buy the premium version for several hundred. That aside, the interface was better than most of the others, though on the whole pretty cluttered. The online version just lacks the power and the premium version is messy.

Peachtree

By far the worst interface. While I can tell it has a ton of features, the simple process of importing bank data failed. So what else is there to say? Bad interface, not functioning and extremely confusing.  For some reason it breaks expense categories down as accounts, so a bank account and what you spent on gas are equivalent. Maybe you CPA’s out there get it but I don’t.

Quicken

I find it amusing that Intuit owns everything and none of it is great. Quicken is not much different then quickbooks, but marketed more towards the individual as opposed to company, though one of the apps has small business features. Very clunky interface and not useful for much beyond basic personal finance.

Freshbooks

Great interface, useful for invoicing, useless for accounting. Its just not robust enough. And I don’t know how else to say it, I don’t want to manually input every transaction.

Less Accounting

What sets it apart above all other things is the seamless bank integration. It literally updates itself with transactions every night. I even have my american express card on there. There is one caveat:  Unless your bank exports data from far enough back, any old data that you cannot get downloaded in the form of a quickbooks/quicken file you will have to input manually. Fortunately for me all I had was about 3 months of data past the range of my bank export.

For premium users there is a reconciliation feature that lets you compare statement to entries- something I used a lot of. The invoicing is an excellent, seamless feature. You can import contacts from a variety of sources, including basecamp and gmail.

The other primary function is how they designed invoicing to work with payments. If your bank states a deposit you can select the corresponding invoice thus updating its status to paid. It also handles partial payments, by marking down the total but leaving the invoice open. Unbelievable!

The app isn’t perfect, there are bugs I ran accross and some of the time the site runs pretty slow and gets hangups and error redirects (probably due to server load they are still trying to adjust to). But I found the support to be extremely good.  I mean if you have an issue, basically your emailing the founder. Can’t really complain about that.

Recently I’ve come accrost an interesting dillema. Being the new media gurus that we need to be, having a mastery of twitter is, of course, essential. The complication, however, is in the situation I have of dual lifestyles. Most web/new media gurus base their social life and professional interactions around situations compatible with their geek identity. Sure they do “cool” things like watch 24 or go to a new club every once in awhile. Hell they may even see the occasional Colplay concert. But these things can all be lumped into a twitter alongside their fascination with the newest task management app or their website relaunch.

I have the unfortunate circumstance that does not offer this compatibility. Whilst I only embrace the identity that defines me as a developer, its only my geek half typing this blog. At roughly 8pm tonight “In a rock band” Kevin will take over and be more inclined to twitter about antics that any would be geek followers will not quite relate to. More to the point, anyone interested in following the social/music activities of my band doesn’t at all want to be getting any twitters about iPhone app releases and website fav pics.

So I know the answer is probably not to twitter for both purposes from the same account, but I’m not entirely sure the best way to manage this complexity. The obvious solution seems to be to create a twitter account for nufish (since my current twitter has more band followers then web interested followers). I’m curious however if anyone else has come accross this dillema and how you may have handled it. Feel free to comment your stories. Over and out.

So if your not savvy to it yet, coda is amazing. I like TextMate just as much as the next guy but lets face it, it needs features. personally I want my FTP, SVN and text editor  in one. Top that with access to terminal, fancy interface, customizable theme and, my favorite, editing the files right on the server, and Coda wins. You know what I noticed though? No developer blog on their site! I mean WTF? I like to see how active an app is to know that its going to be rolling new features consistently but Panic doesn’t have a dev blog and their other apps look pretty dead. I will say that coda seems to update somewhat often, so I know its still active, I just cant say how active.

The updates don’t seem to push new features and personally, I would love to see better text completion. A feature I’ve only seen in Dreamweaver (I know, shut up. This feature is awesome though) is the way it closes two part tags. If I type <a> It doesn’t immediately close it, instead it waits for the </ and closes it with the right tag. Whereas coda and others simply through this in <a></a>. The issue is that if you are putting the tage in front of something you want to wrap you get opening and closing tag in front of it and then have to delete the closing tag EVERYTIME. So if anyone knows a plugin that fixes this, well that would be swell.

Other then that, I love coda more then anything I’ve used yet and the FTP is very reliable. But hey, Panic, BLOG!

Why you may ask? Development is not a menial task, that’s why. You can’t farm something that should involve a significant understanding for the product being developed and the environment it is being pushed to. Starting from the top with creative and concept development, all the way down to the method involved to program the countless details.

I thought this was a lesson we all learned, it keeps being rehashed but here I am today seeing the same patterns repeat. Projects handled by people that should know better, sending their labor to Eastern Europe. Even worse still Elance, scriptlance and all those other useless services, cluttered with hundreds of projects touting absurdly low budgets, insanely high expectations being met with hundreds more bids by armies of drone programmers. Programmers dialed in to churn out fast, cheap and buggy software by the cart loads.

Where does that leave those of us that do it for real? Well with the decline of the economy its left many of increasingly more dire. Fortunately anyone that doesn’t know the rap will learn a harsh lesson soon and the rest don’t have the money to pull it off for real, anyways. So why am I writing about it? Why should I care? Frankly its that smaller percent that should know better, that really think they are saving anything at all by scimping on one of the most vital aspects of their app. Why would some do that and I be so opposed? What is my difference in mentality?

Original software. For every twitter there are 30 twitterdees. For every facebook a dozen Faceshmooks. Rehashing old ideas certainly has a market but if any longevity is to exist in your application, any new niche or spin, you would be insane to outsource it. Copyright infringement on your code, by your developer, being one of the least of your issues, the code will suck anyways.

A good developer works closely with creatives to provide a seamless integration, we already know (or so I hope) that Indian creative blows chunks but somehow we think the coding will use all the best practice we don’t want to even think about. Well, it won’t. American programmers with solid porftolios will save you money because your app costs something in real terms having nothing to do with the artificially low hourly rate of the guy who will be figuring it out as he goes. So you might as well hire an alpaca, they are much cuter.