Whilst perusing a brightly coloured website littered with animated GIFs I stumbled across a live recording of Bad Religion. It was the first MP3 I ever downloaded (American Jesus by Bad Religion) and it took me nearly a whole day to get it (I still have the file). A week or so later I had enough MP3s to fill half of a cassette tape. Within twelve months I owned my first MP3 player.

I’m not normally one to reminisce but the Internet felt good back then. It was completely open, democratic and innovative. This idealistic Internet is the one that I fell in love with. It felt like a step in the right direction and I like to think everyone else felt it too. I had arrived as a citizen of Cyberspace and I felt very welcome.

Fast forward to 2010 and things are starting to feel very different. Here are a few of my concerns:

Silencing of WikiLeaks

Have you heard about WikiLeaks? Of course you have! It is the website that governments of the World are currently trying to silence and yet over the last few days we have heard about nothing else. Whether or not you agree with the disclosure of the cable documents you have to be concerned at the techniques being used to bring down the site and the lack of support the site has received from the companies it relies on to operate. PayPal, Amazon and EveryDNS.net have so far surrendered to the pressure of hosting or being involved with delivering the content. For me the attempts to censor the site are more troublesome than the actual leaks.

It would be irresponsible to try and condense the news surrounding this site into a few paragraphs but the story is fascinating. John Perry Barlow, a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has declared this as “The first serious infowar… The field of battle is WikiLeaks”. The outcome of which will likely shape the future of the Internet.

The good news is that so far Twitter has stood up to pressure to close the @WikiLeaks Twitter account and it helps secure the site as the true pulse of the planet. I hope they continue to remain impartial throughout. After all it’s not about sides, it’s about protecting the Internet as an open platform. Everyone has the chance to speak (in 140 characters or less).

Rise of Facebook

Talking of social networks. I hate Facebook (there I said it). Why? Because it’s everything the Internet should not be. A walled silo of data, locking its users and their content into the platform. A citizen of Facebook is not a citizen of cyberspace. Of course it’s not just Facebook that suffers from this problem, however it is the monopoly when it comes to social networks and is the easy target.

I constantly wonder why it has become such a sucessuful website  and what our widespread usage of the platform suggests. Perhaps we just do not care that much about our personal information?

The fall of LimeWire and 82 other domains

While most peer-to-peer (P2P) technology has earn’t a reputation for offending copyright law it is a very clever use of the web and has brought with it a massive amount of change. It has forced age old businesses to rethink their strategy and has given individuals a platform for global distribution and almost zero cost. There are some excellent stories surrounding the use of P2P. For example the release of Swedish film “Nasty Old People” that was made available on the The Pirate Bay under a Creative Commons licence.

LimeWire has been a consistent and fairly quiet player in the world of P2P software. On October 26, the US federal court issued an injunction forcing LimeWire to prevent “the searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality, and/or all functionality” of its software. As a result LimeWire has had to close both its legitimate business as well as disabling the software. The interesting thing is that all of the older versions of the software continue to work without a problem. If your a LimeWire fan then simply do not upgrade to the latest/broken version. This shows the inherent strength and resilience of P2P technology. While I have never used the service myself I am sad to see it close, it has been around for 10 years (since the days of Napster) and has attempted to legitimise the act of file sharing during that time.

It was also just a few days ago that the US Government managed to seize 82 domain names and pluck them from the Internet. This is a new tactic in the fight against copyright infringement and appears to be scarily effective. Some of the sites were no doubt breaking the law and deserved to be closed but as far as I have been able to tell the site owners had no prior warning or opportunity to defend their actions. It seems wrong that governments have the power to take any domain name they choose without a fair trial and it undermines freedom on the Web.

App(le) stores

This year has been about the App store. Popularised by Apple and iPhone it seems that every mobile platform now has an App store. We have been here before with Windows, Mac and Linux software. One platform came along and made it possible to serve content and to some extent applications to all of these different operating systems without having to program the same application three times.  It’s called the World Wide Web. Yet we find ourselves in the same situation with mobile phones. All of a sudden the money I spent on my iPhone games is thrown away the second I move to Android or Blackberry or Palm or {insert another mobile platform here}.

Which agencies are mostly responsible for pushing into the field of mobile apps? Internet agencies. If they truly understood the power of the Internet then they would have not moved from an open, flexible and free platform to one governed by app store approval processes and split revenues. As data connections get cheaper and mobile browsers become more powerful it makes sense to build one mobile website that serves a whole range of devices. Not just one.

Build it once. Build it on the Web – most native mobile apps require an Internet anyway. Sure they are great platforms with plenty of money to be made but we all end up paying in the long run.

And so…

It was about this time last year that I was drumming up support against the Digital Economy Bill (which looks like it may be reviewed soon). Perhaps this is when it all started? The problem is so many web professionals just don’t seem bothered by this stuff. Why should you care?

Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation. The Web is now more critical to free speech than any other medium. It brings principles established in the U.S. Constitution, the British Magna Carta and other important documents into the network age: freedom from being snooped on, filtered, censored and disconnected.

Tim Berners-Lee, Long Live the Web – December 2010

We need to start innovating once more to protect against these new methods of online control. Pick up your laptops and begin work on a peer to peer hosting environment, one that responds to HTTP requests or ensures there is no weak link in the delivery of information (perhaps it is P2P DNS we need?). Trash your Facebook account and pitch in with the development of the Open Source Diaspora project. Rely less on one single company to deliver your Internet experience. Don’t get complacent and let’s not forget why we fell in love with this place all those years ago.

The ubiquitous iPod has pushed iTunes into the hands of millions, after all if you want to sync media with the iPod or iPhone you don’t have a great deal of choice. My main gripe with iTunes is the fact it tries to control everything. By default it will duplicate every music file you own and attempt to sort them in a way it feels appropriate. Being a designer the neatness of my files matters to me. A lot.

It’s not just that though, iTunes wants to rip my CDs as M4A files – not ideal when all my other tracks are in MP3. I like MP3 files as they play on anything. I feel like every time I use iTunes I have to play with the settings to get it to behave how I expect it to. Finally, what’s with all those arrows and trays that try to sell me tracks I already own?

To be honest I miss Winamp. Back when I was a PC, Winamp was my player of choice. It let me manage my files and watched my perfectly sorted music folders for when I changed or added music. It played every file I threw at it and collapsed into a tiny little music bar that stayed out the way. The skins and the plugins rocked too.

But today I want to talk about Songbird, a player that’s been around for some time but recently caught my attention again. Songbird describes itself as “The Open Music Player” and looks like this:

The unique feature of Songbird is that it’s built around Mozilla technology, essentially it’s Firefox customised for music. That means lots of plugins and themes, but most importantly it can be used as a browser too. One of my favourite music sites is Grooveshark. Grooveshark allows you to play virtually any track instantly, for free via your browser. But what about Spotify? (I hear you cry). Well Spotify is OK, but I don’t like audio adverts and I don’t like having yet another piece of software to listen to music. Spotify is also partly owned by the companies that got it wrong the first time round.

With Songbird I can manage all my local MP3 files and enjoy all those tracks I find online too. I have also installed some great plugins that allow you to manage the songs on your iPod, broadcast messages to Twitter and display lyrics for the current song. The one plugin that would make this setup even better would be integration with Amazon’s MP3 store. As a substitute it does integrate with the 7digital Music Store, however I have yet to try it. I would be interested to hear any feedback on the service.

With Sondbird, Grooveshark and the Amazon MP3 store I feel like the issues facing the music industry have become a problem of the past. Rock on.

With the launch of the toggle design laundry™ service a few months ago we have found we are now generating more reoccuring invoices than ever before. The dates and amounts of these invoices vary from client to client and on top of that we have quite a few hosting invoices to get out each month too. Our plan was to find an Open Source invoicing application that would generate recurring invoices, let us know if any are overdue and allow us to use our own invoice numbers (were picky about these things). It also made sense for this application to be online so we could access it from anywhere and give a login to our accountant if they needed it.

Siwapp

In terms of design this is the most promising of the three systems we tested. The layout is clear and the feature set is spot on for what we needed (although custom invoice numbers were not quite right). One thing that we really liked about it was the running total on the dashboard (seen above). The huge let down at this stage is the installation procedure. The application requires the Symfony framework to run and as a result needs plenty of command line attention and the correct web hosting environment to get it running. Siwapp shows real potential and is worth keeping an eye on.

Simple Invoices

The latest 2009 builds of Simple Invoices feel much better designed that the previous versions but unfortunately the application is still in beta. As a result it feels incomplete and the generated invoices look unprofessional. As a design agency we have always take great care over the presentation of our invoices and it was one of the main reasons we decided not to use Simple Invoices. Once again though it shows the potential to become an excellent tool.

phpBMS

phpBMS is a full featured business management tool featuring calenders, to-do lists, detailed user permissions, sales, products and invoicing. The interface is a little clunky but it feels together and stable. If you are just starting out your business then you may want to consider giving phpBMS a try – for us though all the extra features were overkill.

The winner is?

Having tried out a handful of options we decided to go with a product called The Invoice Machine. In this instance the Open Source options were not polished enough – we felt we needed a product we could trust and rely upon. So far The Invoice Machine has been excellent and the API means we can tie it into other systems if required. It also offers a full data export if we decide to go Open Source in the future.

Due to our office move and new site launch we didn’t get around to making any Open Source recommendations last month. To make up for it we will squeeze in two this month.

So far our recommendations have been desktop focused and primarily for the Mac (we are all Mac users at toggle). The Open Source movement extends way beyond desktop software and the Open Source business model is being adopted in some very unexpected places. Open Source cola, Open Source hardware and more recently an Open Source car.

A shift is occurring in the way we use technology and store our data, the shift is driven by the web and is moving the software we use online. The huge advantage to this is that our data follows us to any device we happen to be using. With this in mind we felt it was time to start looking at some of the best Open Source web applications.

OpenGoo

The sales pitch:

OpenGoo is an Open Source Web Office. It is a complete solution for every organisation to create, collaborate, share and publish all its internal and external documents.

In short, OpenGoo is a strong alternative to Google Docs, Zoho and Microsoft Office on the desktop. What really impresses us with OpenGoo is the amount of features available in the application. OpenGoo allows you to manage:

• Text documents
• Presentations
• Task Lists
• E-mails
• Calendars
• Web Links
• Contacts

From the looks of it they have more features on the way too. The application is the long lost cousin of ActiveCollab (a now commercial project) that we used to make use of in the early days of toggle. Essentially it is a mashup of many different Open Source projects rolled into one neat package.

We don’t make use of OpenGoo at toggle (yet) – we would need to have mobile access before jumping on board. OpenGoo could also be improved with cleaner interface, especially if our clients are going to be collaborating on documents with us. Playing with the demo we were really impressed and we will certainly be keeping a close eye on the projects future developments.

The main downfalls

Banking

As you all know, when you open a bank account you have forms to sign, you get posted pin codes, terms and conditions for banking, welcome packs, banking cards, cheque books, paying in books, login details for online banking, further reading for services you may need in the future, paperwork to close your old account – and all this information arrives in paper envelopes! About 3 months ago we decided to move bank accounts. Wading through old paperwork and replacing it with the new, really made us realise just how much waste paper banking generates.

Inland Revenue

We regularly receive information from the Inland Revenue (a copy of the same information is also sent to our accountant) about VAT , pay etc which usually comes in the form of an A4 envelope with a letter and a CD in a cardboard sleeve.

The need to get creative

Sometimes you just need to work on paper.

When given a brief I like to sketch. My head is full of ideas and I need to get them down visually and as quickly as possible. I find this much easier than jumping straight on the computer because it’s easy to get caught up with details rather than idea generation.

Useful tools and services

CD recycling

London Recycling service operate free CD and DVD recycling. All you have to do is post your box of CD’s and they do the rest,

“The CD material is delivered to the decollaion centre where the constituent parts are separated. Paper is baled, pulped and used in the production of cardboard. The jewel case is granulated and then fed into an extrusion system fitted with a laser filter for contaminant removal. A high quality Crystal Polystyrene pellet is produced and may be used for new cases or insulating foam. The discs are processed in another machine and paint, aluminium and data is removed from the surface. This is used to insulate electric cables.The clean discs are granulated, blended and compounded into a polycarbonate material. This is reused to make burgular alarm boxes or street lighting.”

Google Docs

We make full use of Gmail, Google Docs and the Google Calendars on a daily basis. The great thing about the apps is the collaboration; sharing not only between ourselves but with our clients too. Clients can just paste their content into a Google Doc which saves sending it on CD.

PDFs

Generating PDF rather than paper proposals and invoices wherever possible.

Not getting company stationery printed

We decided very early on not to get company stationery (letterheads and compliment slips) printed. One of the main reasons for this was that we were going to try and make use of as many digital services as possible to save on paper. There were also budget reasons – to get even simple stationery printed would have taken a large chunk out of our budget as there are minimum sheet orders.

Instead we bought some good quality paper and just print them as and when we need them. We will be moving offices in a few weeks (more details coming soon) and we are very glad we didn’t get them printed because we have sent less than 20 letters in 18 months of business.

Moo minicards

Moo minicards are only 70mm x 28mm compared to the standard business card size of 80mm x 55m. Using minicards instead of standard business cards means we are using half the amount of materials per business card. Why are business cards so big!?!

Dropbox

Dropbox is a tool that enables you to sync and large files across the internet and computers. Dropbox has proved an invalauble tool here because it means we can share large files (like video) with our clients without the use of CD’s and DVD’s.

Reuse

Reusing old printouts for sketching on.

Conclusion

Anyone who claims to be paper free probably isn’t. How can you stop post coming through your door? Although we aren’t completely paper free, we are using as many tools as possible to continually reduce the amount of paper we consume at toggle HQ.

What makes it great?

If you have ever played with other media center offerings (Front Row, MS Media Center) you were probably let down. Out of the box, certain files wont play and to access web content (iPlayer, Flickr, YouTube) you have to exit the media center application and head for your browser. Boxee pulls it together by not only supporting every file I have thrown at it but by connecting to many web services as well. From one interface I can grab files over the local network, pull in tonnes of web content, download from BitTorrent and even check the weather. The Boxee interface is surprisingly clean and easy to use and the app is also kind enough to fetch film and tv show information from sites like the IMDB. Adding to the excellent experience is a remote control application for iPhone and the recently released Boxee app store which allows you to add extra functionality and content sources.

Boxee is available for Mac, Linux and Windows and requires a Boxee account to download. With your Boxee account you can share your content recommendations with friends on Boxee and other social networks. There is also talk of seeing Boxee ship on standalone hardware (think Apple TV) in future.

On those rare occasion that we do need to make a disk (normally for backups or freebies) the tool of choice has been Toast (at least for the last few years). Toast is a great application but the version we have is three versions out of date and the cost of grabbing new copy cannot really be justified (it is a recession after all!). It was time to go find open source alternative.

Burn

Burn is a beautifully simple application (OSX 10.4+). The interface is uncluttered and making a disc is extremely straight forward. It supports all of the features you would expect: data discs, video discs, audio discs and also copying. We downloaded a copy of Burn a few months ago and they have already released an update… not only is it free and open source, it is also under active development. We cannot find a bad thing to say about this application and suggest you download a copy right now.

Simply Burns

Burn is not the only open source CD writing application we found for Mac, we also found Simply Burns. Unfortunately it does not have all the features of Burn and we had a hard time getting over the clunky interface too. It is worth a mention though as it does show some promise and it is always good to have options.

What is your favourite disc writing application?

Last year we posted up some of our favourite Mac applications, and in that list was Parallels Desktop; a visualisation software that allows you to run Windows as an application on your Mac. Visualisation is an important part of our web development process as we check all of the websites we create on a range of browsers and operating systems. With software like Parallels we can run Linux, Windows and Mac OSX together without the need to constantly reboot or own a bunch of different computers with varying software configurations. Shortly after we had purchased two licenses for Parallels, the software was upgraded to version 4 and over the last 6 months our version has become increasingly unstable. It was time to look for an alternative.

Enter VirtualBox, developed by Sun Microsystems and distributed under the GNU GPL. VirtualBox may not be tricked out with all the eye candy of Parallels but it is extremely stable, fast and in my opinion much easier to use. You will need to make sure you have installed guest additions from the menu within VirtualBox to get the most out of the software. Guest additions makes integration between the two operating systems much more seamless, features included mouse pointer integration and arbitrary screen solutions (e.g. by resizing the guest OS window).

From the main VirtualBox window you can easily control the amount of system resource available to each guest operating system, organise snapshots (e.g. revert to a point where Linux still worked before Scott broke it) and install new operating systems. I have both Ubuntu and Windows XP installed so far. VirtualBox even handled running a few games too (for testing purposes of course!).

Overall we are really impressed with the VirtualBox and suggest you give it a try. It runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.

Google Apps

• By: Google
• Cost: Free

Google Apps needs little introduction these days. We make full use of Gmail, Google Docs and the Google Calendars on a daily basis. The great thing about the apps is the collaboration; sharing not only between ourselves but with our clients too. If you want to know more about getting started with Google docs then I suggest watching some videos on the subject. We have also transferred some of our clients over to the platform as well.

Remember the Milk

• By: Remember the Milk
• Cost: Free or a pro account for $25 a year

Remember the Milk is one of the newest apps in the toggle tool kit. After deciding to leave Basecamp we needed a robust to-do application and found Remember the Milk. The great thing about it is the fact you can add to-do items from a whole range of devices and services; our favourites being Gmail, Email and via the iPhone application Todo <- iTunes link.

Pixie

• By: Toggle
• Cost: Free

Shameless plug alert! – We use Pixie every day (I am writing this post in Pixie). It allows us to easily manage the content for the sites we make, and our clients can join in too. For those of you who have not tried Pixie, it is our open source CMS. Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Delicious

• By: Yahoo!
• Cost: Free

Tired of never having your web bookmarks with you? Try posting all your favourite sites to Delicious. We have been using Delicious for quite some time now, its one of those services that quietly gets on with its job and works flawlessly. The tagging is great and the recent re-design has made it even more of a pleasure to use.

I think that just about covers the really important applications we use, other honourable mentions go to Flickr, FeedBurner and Google Analytics.

Everyones favourite web browser is attempting to set a new world record with the release of Firefox 3 towards the end of June on Tuesday 17th July. Click the banner above to pledge your support and register to be notified when Firefox 3 is ready. Firefox is our browser of choice, its range of extensions and ability to render web pages make it a great web development tool that we could not do without.

I guess you could say its similar to WordPress, except Pixie builds complete websites not just blogs. We have been working on Pixie for quite some time and have always planned to open source the software and today I am pleased to say we have a schedule for its release. So when can you get your hands on it?

Beta testing – 14th April to 25th April:

Those of you who have signed up to the Pixie mailing list will have chance to beta test the software before the official release. The mailing list sign up will close on the 14th April.

Pixie release day – 29th April:

Pixie will launch. As part of the Pixie launch we will be producing 400 CDs that we aim to give away at this years extremely geeky Internet World exhibition at Earls Court, London (its free!). We will also be posting out a number of CDs to people who have helped support the project with code they have written.

One of things we are most proud of with Pixie is its ease of use which is largely due to the interface we have designed. To wet your appetite for the launch we have uploaded some screenshots of the application to Flickr. We are really excited about this release and look forward to your feedback.

Xscope

• By: Iconfactory
• Cost: $16, 1 license

X-scope is probably one of my favorite applications we use. Lining page elements up in Photoshop is easy because you have horizontal and vertical rules to help you; but this isn’t possible in a browser.

Until we got this application, I would either use a piece of paper (suprisingly effective!) or take a screen shot and apply the rulers in Photoshop, especially when it came to cross browser testing.

Most frequently used features:

The guides – Great for lining elements up.

The rulers – Great for pixel measurements.

Loupe tool – (magnification and colour picker). Before we had this, if we wanted to know a colour value on a site, we would have to take a screen shot and colour pick the value from Photoshop.

Parallels

• By: Parallels
• Cost: $80

Parallels is well worth the $80! Plus we got a free £25 gift card with it, which we used to donate money to open source software developers. Parallels allows you to run a virtual copy of Windows on your Mac.

Our main use for this application is cross browser testing (although we do use it for good games that you can’t get on a Mac!). We run Parallels in ‘OS Window’ mode, which means that Windows is running as if you have opened another application on your Mac. It makes switching from Windows to other applications on your Mac very easy. Parallels allows us to drag and drop files between Mac and ‘Windows world’ with ease.

Coda

• By: Panic
• Cost: $80

Coda is our preferred text editor. The application not only works brilliantly, it also has some nice design touches too! In the ‘Sites’ section, each of your websites is displayed as a site thumbnail taped to a background (see below). This makes finding the site you need out of a long list much easier.

It is very easy to publish local changes to the remote copy of a site. After you have saved your changes, a small upload icon appears next to your file, which you just click to publish.

There are two editing modes for CSS; text mode and visual mode. The visual mode is great for people who are learning because you can click on your element and use tools such as colour pickers and drop down boxes to create styles.

MAMP

• By: Living-e
• Cost: free

MAMP is an open source application that enables you to host sites on your local machine. Having the ability to set up an Apache server with just a few clicks has been really useful for testing sites and demoing Pixie to potential clients.

Integrity

• By: Softpedia
• Cost: free

Integrity is a free application that checks for broken links on your website. Using this application means that you don’t need to open up every link to check it works! You simply put in the url of the site you want it to crawl and voila! Need we say more on this one!