Dropbox [link] is a highly recommended service that lets you share large files amongst different groups and machines. A typical use would be to sync your files between two or more computers, but I find Dropbox incredibly useful for my client work.

Like many of you, I work with virtual teams that come together on a project-by-project basis. With Dropbox it’s easy to set up a shared folder for each project and control who has access to it. As soon as one person throws up a file, everyone in the group has it there locally on their computer. Brilliant.

On the downside, Dropbox sorely needs a better public dropbox. At the moment, you can share a file with the world, but if you want to allow someone to put a file in your public drop box, they have to sign up for the service and install the app. Even though the service is free, this is a bit much to ask for these one-off uploads. Based on the forum traffic on this topic, I’m not alone in thinking this is a glaring omission in Dropbox’s feature set.

Dropbox is free for a 2GB shared account with paid options for more storage and workgroup options. For the typical web developer, the free option is just fine.

Dropbox can be found at GetDropbox.com. Sign up with this link and you’ll get an extra 250MB of space for free!

This year’s Webmaster Jam Session was a resounding success. Many thanks to J. Cornelius and the Coffee Cup staff for putting this conference together.

The WJS, if you don’t know, is a small conference held here in Dallas that attracts some of the top developers and designers in the business. Attendance is kept to 300 people, so the whole thing feels very intimate and focused, and while the conference is sponsored, the conference is devoid of booths and is, hence, free of the noise and distractions normally found at conferences. I can sum up the quality of the speakers by saying that in almost every case, I regretted not being able to be in two places at once.

Two things struck me at the conference that I wouldn’t have expected:

1) The majority of attendees were Mac people. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was among my peeps and didn’t feel like the outcast in the room for whipping out my shiny white Mac Book.

2) The general animosity towards Microsoft was palpable. Throughout the two day conference, jibes, hisses, and boos were thrown in Redmond’s general direction. What’s even more amazing was that Microsoft was one of the show’s sponsors, and they had representatives in attendance! What struck me most is how much this one company has made each and every web developer’s life a living hell. It’s one thing to read about this. It’s quite another to see 300 people in a room actually demonstrate this sentiment.

That aside, the point of the conference is to learn how to become a better web developer. Toward that end, the sessions were aimed a particular topics of interests to professionals doing work on the web. A small selection of the best sessions I attended:

The Dawning of the Age of Experience by Jared Spool
A look at how experience design is changing the Web
Jared is a highly entertaining speaker and gave this year’s keynote. The session focused on the radical notion of improving the user experience on your sites. If there was a common thread, it would be that simplicity rules.

Viewports and Byte-ranges and Bandwidth. Oh my! by James Craig
Standards-based, practical tips for developing for the next generation of mobile devices
James gave a very insightful talk about designing and developing for mobile devices. While he focused mainly on the iPod Touch and iPhone, he advocated the need to keep all mobile users in mind through standards compliance and previewing through emulators if you don’t have the means to test on actual hardware.

The Broken World by Molly Holzschlag
Solving the Browser Problem Once and For All
Molly is famous in the web world for her decades-long advocacy for web standards, and is one of the rare characters in our community. She’s a nut. And I mean that in the good way. Her session focused on why we are where we are with regard to standards support in the various browsers, and after hearing her speak, it’s amazing to me that we have a web at all. I definitely have a new appreciation for the difficult job the browser makers have, and the makers of Safari, Firefox, and Opera are to be commended even more.

Design is in the Details by Bryan Veloso and Dan Rubin
Sometimes the smallest things make the largest impact.
Brian and Dan from Sidebar Creative are two of the most talented designers I’ve come across in a while, and their camaraderie made for a great session. The take-away: pixels matter. As with many of the sessions, simplicity was the theme, here. Give your designs “breathing” room by bumping up fonts and increasing padding & margins. But most of all, take the time to check the alignment of your elements. They did a fantastic real-time fix up of the horrible Fox News web site. By aligning elements and giving the design some breathing room, they improved the site about 1000%. Great session.

All Systems Go by Stephanie Sullivan
Preparing your content for takeoff with CSS
Stephanie is the goddess of CSS and is, in fact, responsible for those fantastic new CSS templates that come in Dreamweaver CS3. She gave an engaging and informative talk on semantic markup and compliant CSS. Again, the drum beat here is simplicity rules (noticing a theme here?).

Real World Accessibility by Derek Featherstone
Get the scoop on creating accessible Websites from one of the world’s top experts.
The closing keynote was given by Derek, one of the world’s leading advocates and experts on developing accessible web sites. Developers need to do more than simply run down a QA checklist and make a site “compliant” (whatever that means). Rather, you should put yourself in the shoes of those who use your site in an unconventional way and pay attention to details. Just one great example: Google Maps. By failing to make their controls actual button elements which could have been styled to look exactly the same as the current controls, those using a screen reader were completely shut out from the app. Something so simple had such a massive impact on the user.

I could keep going since there were many excellent sessions. You can check out the rest of the session details here, and the WJS site promises to have podcasts available soon. In all, the WJS was a fantastic conference and an incredible value. If you get a chance to go next year, I highly recommend attending.

Best Buy acquired one of my favorite ISPs for $97 million. Great for the Speakeasy guys! Bad for us. I’ll be taking them off my list of ISPs I recommend to my clients based on Geek Squad’s less-than-stellar performance to date.

Sidenote
One thing that jumped out at me:

In 2006, it had more than 40,000 customers.

This is pure speculation on my part, but there’s no way that figure is right. That would mean that either Best Buy paid over $2,500 per customer, or that number is seriously under-reported.

If you are like me, you struggle with finding time to be productive. My computer used to be a veritable fire hose of inputs. Email chimes every 5 minutes; new RSS feed updates every time I open Safari; one of my contacts coming online or wanting to chat with me in Skype. I found it almost impossible to concentrate on any single task for more than 5 minutes, so I reclaimed my productivity by turning off automatic updates or closing these apps altogether. Now, my computer is silent until I tell it to sync with the outside world?¢‚Ǩ¬¶on my terms.

Tip 1: Turn off Automatic Email Retrieval
This is a big one. I often find that I have to send a quick email, but doing so means opening my mail application, which, in turn, means that I have to respond to any number of new emails that flood in. By turning off the automatic retrieval feature, I’m able to send email and get back to what I was doing. Then I can go in later when I’m ready and click the “Get Mail” button and see what’s been happening.

Tip 2: Hide Feed Counts in Safari and Move Your Feeds to a Dedicated Reader
One of Safari’s greatest features is its ability to tell you right there in your bookmarks bar how many new articles have been published to your various RSS subscriptions since you last checked in. I have about two dozen of these, so I found that opening Safari became a pavlovian exercise in checking the new feeds before remembering that I was opening Safari for a reason?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùto check on something actually work-related. At some point, I’m sure Firefox and IE will catch onto this great feature and start doing the same thing. As much as it pained me, I simply had to turn this feature off. In Safari, go Preferences > RSS and uncheck “Automatically update bookmarks in bookmarks bar.” You don’t have to get rid of this feature completely, however. By keeping “Automatically update bookmarks in the bookmarks menu” checked, you can get your RSS feed update counts simply by clicking the bookmark menu button.

Alternatively, you can move your RSS feed subscriptions to an external app that does pretty much the same thing as Safari. The best one I’ve found on the Mac is called NetNewsWire (by News Gator). They have a Windows reader that appears to be similar to NetNewsWire called FeedDaemon, but I have never used it. There are plenty, though, and the concept is the same: you open those apps on your terms, and read your RSS feeds when you want to, not when you’re trying to get something done.

Tip 3: Turn off Your Chat Client
I liken chat clients to working in a cubicle farm: it’s noisy and your are constantly getting interrupted. I, for one, find that open-door policies and open-air work environments are an anathema to productivity. So I turn off my chat clients and open them only when I need to make a call on Skype or ping someone at a pre-determined time. Yes, this is antithetical to the purpose of chatting, but chatting is antithetical to getting things done, so it stays off.

Give it a try. It takes an adjustment since are changing what are, in effect, addictive behaviors, but once you get used to the change, you’ll come to find that by keeping your apps quiet and the number of inputs you have to a minimum, you’ll be able to carve out longer periods of productivity throughout your day.

I have just launched a brand new tool called LockBox. LockBox is a free, lightweight, purpose-built, ad-free AJAX app that lets you store little bits of sensitive info like passwords, serial numbers, account logins, and the like.

LockBox is a tool I wrote for myself about a year ago. It quickly developed into something I use on a daily basis. With dozens of clients to keep straight, along with a seemingly endless stream of unique crypt keys and and serials to keep track of, LockBox has proven to be incredibly useful.

The beauty of it is its ease of use, flexibility, and ubiquity. The app is a one-trick pony, and is very lightweight. Yet, you can store just about any kind of info in the system you like. And because it’s browser based, you can access the info from any location.

The data is protected by strong and proven encryption techniques on the back end, and is kept private all the way to your screen through SSL.

And did I mention it was free?

Head on over and sign up and see how this tool can be useful for you.