Link Photoshop Files Together With CanLinkIt

I've worked on several teams of designers, and we've always had the same kinds of problems: Photoshop files are too large, and only one person can edit a file at a time, and so parts of files get out of date.

So I’ve spent some of my spare time to create a solution: http://CanLinkIt.com

This is a Photoshop Plugin that lets you “include” or reference other files. This is similar to the “links” panel in other Adobe products, but somehow they never managed to make one for Photoshop – I don’t know why, it was easy enough for me to write it.

Do any of you use Photoshop? If you do, will you try this out and drop me a line? Let me know if it works, if it looks useful or not, and if it’s missing anything you would like to see.

Synchronization Update

Two years ago, I blogged about synchronization across multiple computers. The landscape of tools has changed quite a bit, and a few winners (and losers) have emerged.

File Synching
Winner: Dropbox
Losers: PowerFolder, Jungle Disk
Last time I reviewed these, PowerFolder seemed better than the alternatives, but a new competitor has joined the scene: Dropbox. Although a few years ago when I first tried it I couldn't even get it installed, now it is mature and is everything you'd want from a file synchronizer: Simple, minimalist, correct, and the PackRat additional feature automatically backs up every version of every file as long as you pay for it, with instant backup and great cues to let you know whether something is backed up or not. There's also a great free trial. It's got a great GUI design, and it just works... PowerFolder and Jungle Disk corrupted my file structure, gave me many error messages, and had a confusing and complicated setup process. There really is a clear winner now: DropBox.


Bookmark Synching
Current Best: XMarks (with weaknesses)
Loser: Firefox Sync
After I heard XMarks was planning to go under, I started to switch to Firefox Sync. I used it for only a few weeks. During my test, it doubled the number of bookmarks I had, duplicating the same ones and putting them in many different, wrong folders. When I tried to reorganize them, the random synch duplication started again. Firefox sync worked only on Firefox, and it caused me at least 10 hours of manual de-duping and sorting of my 2600+ bookmarks. Then, Firefox got bought and announced it would stay in business, and I can now announce I'm sticking with XMarks. XMarks isn't flawless... It can still give you some strange error messages and occasional bookmark corruption. However, it does have backups of just about every synch version from years in the past, so you can quickly restore to an uncorrupted version. Tip: If one computer is corrupted and another one isn't, you can restore on the corrupted computer but "merge" on the uncorrupted computer, thus allowing you to avoid losing any new bookmarks added on the uncorrupted computer. Tricky, but it works.

Avoid Pingo.com if you don't want to feel like you're reading John Grisham

At first, my experience seemed great -- good rates, good call. However, I only used it once. The end customer experience is more like the insurance company in John Grisham's the Rainmaker.

6 months later, I discovered they were charging my account $0.98 every month that my account was inactive... I didn't see anything like this in the documentation when I signed up -- and I tried signing up again and still didn't see the note about a inactivity charge. Pingo auto-charged my credit card when it went under $5.00. This is when I wasn't using the account at all.

So I finally called to get my account cancelled. If you call their 1-888-878-8838 number, the machine tells you that for any help other than problems making phone calls, you must email customer service. I emailed customer service, and they told me to call their 1-888 number. So I called again, and after waiting 5 minutes, listening to the prompts repeatedly several times, it finally told me to press 4 to talk to an operator. This is the way they run you around to force you to keep paying their un-announced $0.98 a month forever. I finally reached an operator who apparently has no power -- he just "sent a request" to cancel my account to a different department, their "verification" department. This "verification" department will apparently decide whether to refund my credit card charge or not, and this operator couldn't tell me anything.

At the beginning, I was ready to say "hey, great rates -- I'll keep my account open for a while so I can use it again when I need to" Now, it's "boy, this is nearly a scam to force you to pay $1 every month for the rest of your life even if you are doing nothing." Stay away from their terrible customer service runaround. This was more like the subject of the lawsuit in John Grisham's Rainmaker, with each department pointing at each other and saying the other department will solve the problem -- each giving you instructions to deal with the other, both with instructions not to help you until the other one does.

My advice: find some other pre-paid card instead. The runaround at the end isn't worth the nice rates they offer.

Mini-Review of Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story

Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story: More like the story of bowser's insides. It's a bit wierd, but very interesting. Rated as #2 for 2009 for the DS on Metacritic, it's clearly both creative and entrancing. There are many mini-games and the pace of new and interesting things to do is very quick at the beginning. The use of the two screens is creative -- the top screen controls bowser, and the bottom screen controls Mario & Luigi, and what they do affects the other. They also ask you to turn the DS sideways at one point. The tutorial and beginnings are well written and easy to get into, despite controls that would be confusing if they didn't give you a great tutorial. Overall, it's a game well worth trying.

Mini-Review of Peggle Dual Shot, Nintendo DS

Metacritic rated as #5 top game of 2009 for the DS, this is a fresh rehash of pinball gaming on the DS. The touchscreen is interesting, the startup and tutorials easy to learn, so it's understandable that it's rated well, since the full game is well balanced. The gaming is addictive, even if there's very little to it.

Mini-Review of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars (Nintendo DS)

Rated on metacritic as the best DS game of 2009, as usual, the series is very creative, both on how they use the touch screen and on how they integrate the mini-games into the real game. As usual, the way they load games automatically is really smooth -- except when you have a rental or used game and can't figure out how to start a new game (maybe it would be nice to add "New Game" to the startup screen). Of course, the morality of the game is highly debatable, as always, but there are also many mini-games that have their own non-morally dubious qualities to make it a fun experience.

Mini-Review of Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time, Nintendo DS

Clearly designed for kids and at about that maturity level. The name "Mystery Dungeon" refers to the developer's choice to make each dungeon random, instead of designing each one to have some interesting puzzles. It could reflect an internal surplus of programmers and shortage of designers, or it could be that they hoped it would be played so many times people would prefer random dungeons to seeing the same thing multiple times -- for me, I'll never see it multiple times because about 2 hours was enough to feel like I'd played as much as I'd ever need. The gamplay lacks creativity, and needs better introduction sequence instead of throwing the player straight into full-fledged battle instantly. I don't recommend it unless you're a kid not looking for a lot in a game.