Collab.ie Homepage
This week’s Tuesday Push is for Collab.ie, a site which aims to enable “collaboration by helping people with ideas meet people with skills”. Collab.ie is brought to us by SmartCube, the people behind SwiftStore.
So, how does it work?
Say you have a great idea but you don’t have the tech skills to implement it, you could come to Collab.ie and post an general outline of the project and ask for someone with the right skills to collaborate with you on it. Similarly, if you have a product but no idea how to market it, you could find someone here to help you get on track.
Now, at first this just sounds like another job / CV site, but (and I’m guessing here) there are other ways to collaborate other than just being paid straightforward salaries. Some people will no doubt offer advice for free. Others may even lend a hand on a small part of a project in their spare time. Others still might want a stake in the final company or product in return. I guess this whole aspect won’t become clear until more people are using the service.
Something that does stick out to me though is that a lot of the collaboration seems to take place behind closed doors. This makes sense for privacy reasons obviously, but also discourages people from joining in to collaborate. For instance, I wouldn’t spend my time on a message board giving advice to someone about SEO or SEM if someone else has already given them the same advice earlier in the thread. If the public’s responses to a Collab.ie posting are hidden from each other, they might be less inclined to take part in the first place. This is a little bit catch-22, so I’m not sure what the answer here should be.
I decided to try using the site and came up against some behaviour that was a little unexpected. When I hit the “Add a Project” button, rather than being asked to put in the details of my project, I was asked to login, with the usual “forgot password” link. However, I wasn’t given the option to register on the same screen, other than the link in the top right hand corner. Ideally, I’d have liked to see a form where I could post my project and add my login or registration details in at the end.
Apart from that though, the site seems pretty clear and functional to me. The latest projects list and the tag cloud give you a couple of quick ways into the content. All the expected links (Twitter, RSS) and pages (How, About, Contact) are easy to find. Overall, Lee Munroe has done a nice job on the design.
Any tool that can help move people and their ideas forward is very welcome, especially in current climate. A free tool like Collab.ie even more so.
Finetuna.com – Simple Image Annotation
Finetuna.com Homepage
It’s Tuesday Push time again and this week we’re talking about another nice product from Spoiltchild Design. Anyone who works with a designer will be familiar with the constant stream of back and forward emails and attachments to get the final draft of an image or layout approved.
Finetuna.com helps speed up this problem by allowing you to make notes directly on an image either taken from an URL or uploaded from your computer and add simple hand drawn instructions, such as arrows to show where to move things to, or boxes around elements of the image.
For a simple demonstration of how it works, I decided to “finetuna” the Finetuna.com homepage.
Using Finetuna.com to make comments about Finetuna.com
As you can see I’ve been able to add some text notes and some very simple hand drawn instructions. It was quick and easy to do, but not without its own problems.
I was going to share the URL for my notes with you, but just after I finished I decided I wanted to look at the homepage again in another tab, so I CTRL-clicked the Finetuna logo, but instead of loading the homepage in a new tab it loaded it in the same one. When I clicked the back button my notes and drawings were gone but the image was still there. (See http://www.finetuna.com/hx86vv)
I haven’t seen a way to change the shape (width) of a note speech bubble, meaning long notes become very tall. I also think it would make sense to be able to change whether the speech bubble pointer was on the left or the right. Finally, when I write a new note (in Chrome at least) and click outside the input bubble by mistake, when I click inside it again I can’t actually input any text. It’s not a big problem, but the numbering of your notes increments, meaning it looks like a note is missing.
Overall, I think this tool is incredibly useful. It would definitely have saved us some time on new designs for pages on RevaHealth.com. There are some bugs to fix, which I’m sure the Spoiltchild Design team are already working away on, and I would share the privacy concerns voiced by Dave Concannon, but I will certainly be recommending it to other people in our office when it comes to our next design mock-ups.
P.S. As with almost everything Spoiltchild do, it looks great and has some really nice little touches. I particularly liked the “fold” dotted line image on the homepage.
P.P.S. To the guys at Spoiltchild, if you can’t read my notes about the homepage in the screenshot above, I’d be happy to email them to you.
Philip Boyle
Philip is the marketing manager at WhatClinic.com.