Hi guys! I’m coming out of a post-Germany haze of sickness to link you to some handy tweaks for Google Calendar. I’m a total nut for Google Calendar and basically run my entire life through it now. Here’s the link:

50 tips, tweaks and hacks for Google Calendar!

My two favorites from the list are as follows:

16) Facebook Integration: If you’re a fan of the social networking program Facebook you’ll love this script. It allows you to easily transfer your Facebook events to your Google Calendar so you’ll never miss a get together.
25) Better GCal: This script combines several helpful scripts including skins, collapsed headers, secure connections, text wrap and more.

Enjoy!

This is extremely cool! Check out Google Browser Size.

Essentially, this web tool will draw an overlay map of your website marking the different resolution boundaries and showing you how likely people at different resolutions are to be able to see different parts of your website. Some people with low resolutions won’t scroll down to view the site. Here’s a quote from that page showing why this is important:

Using this visualization, Bruno confirmed that about 10% of users couldn’t see the download button without scrolling, and thus never noticed it. 10% may not sound like a lot, but in this context it turns out to mean a significant number of people weren’t downloading Google Earth. Using this data, the team was able to redesign the page to good effect.

This would be a great tool for artists to check the usability of their website at different resolutions and to get ideas on how to tweak the design for better results. What if potential employers simply don’t see all of your art or scroll to view all the content? Google Browser Size could be a great tool for analyzing that. Go check it out!

Here is my FAVORITE Outlook tool. It’s lightning fast indexed search that beats the pants off anything Microsoft has. Microsoft liked it so much, in fact, that they purchased the company, then killed the project completely. This paved the way for their horrible and criminally useless Desktop Search without any pesky competition to get in the way. Hooray!

Anyway, Lookout is the best email search tool ever devised. You can download Lookout here:

http://majorgeeks.com/Lookout_d4808.html

And if you’re using Outlook 2007, follow these VERY simple instructions to make it work:

http://www.belshe.com/2007/12/06/how-to-install-lookout-on-outlook-2007/

Once you have tons of email, you’ll see why this rules so much. :) The flexibility, speed and ease of use is astounding. To give you a brief comparison, I spent about an hour trying to figure out how to make Microsoft Desktop Search manually index my email. After I figured that out, it took 30 hours to index fully. Within 30 minutes of installing Lookout, everything was set up and fully indexed. Lookout’s search is also ridiculously faster and easier to use. It’s the first thing I install with any new Outlook installation. Enjoy!

Anyone have any other handy Outlook plugins? I’ve been meaning to do a post on Xobni as well…

Ever bookmark a website full of great information, only to revisit it later and discover the link is dead?

Worry no more! HTTrack Website Copier is here, and you need never fret over dead links again.

It’s a free, very easy-to-use, highly customizable tool that automatically downloads webpages in their entirety. You can set how deep you want them to follow links on the page, how to organize them on your hard drive, selectively include\exclude certain filetypes, and much, much more. And perhaps most usefully of all, you can customize how many connections to send at once and whether to cap the maximum download speed so you don’t hassle the server you’re accessing. It’s a very nifty, very clever little application that I’ve used for years.

In fact, I’m using it right now to back up an online copy of a beautiful Illustrated Architecture Dictionary, which has definitions for more architectural terms than I even knew existed. It’s fascinating and has been very educational. It’s the kind of site that I’d hate to lose access to… and with HTTrack Website Copier, now I won’t have to! Not to mention the speed bonus of having everything located locally, because that is a *LOT* of content to constantly be downloading and displaying.

Enjoy!

I just updated my Blogroll with links to a wide variety of the many friends and acquaintances I’ve made in the game industry. Go have a look! Mouseover links to see who they are and where they work, where applicable.

Lots of damned interesting, cool people in there. :)

My friend Nate sent me a fantastic article that was right up my alley: 19 Things NOT To Do When Building a Website.

The whole thing is so good I’d just paste the whole thing here if I told you which parts were worth reading. Instead I’ll touch on my favorite points:

3. If your website asks the user which version they’d like, high bandwidth or low, HTML or Flash, you ALSO LOSE.
5. DO NOT try to reinvent the website navigation.
11. Text navigations are better than images
12. A well thought out site map with logical sub sections is better than using “drop downs”.

The whole thing is a fantastic read. Go look at it and commit it to heart!

There’s a piece on game industry career advice from the Tech Jobs Expert on Monster.com. And guess what? The article in question features a handful of quotes from little ol’ me!

That’s always fun. :)

I discovered a fantastic application recently called NetVibes.

It’s helped me keep on top of all the game dev news sites and blogs I like to keep track of, as well as collecting other various pieces of information that are important to me.

Basically it’s a My Yahoo! custom home page portal, but it’s INCREDIBLY customizable and allows you to embed miniature applications as well as RSS feeds. There’s a MASSIVE user community behind it that’s constantly developing new embeddable mini apps for anything and everything you could need. Normally I hate apps like this, but there’s some really useful, really smart stuff out there that I’ve made use of.

In addition to that, it’s tabbed like Firefox, so you can have different tabs for different subjects. It’s also super easy to use and set up and modify. Click drag to move stuff around instantly, drag and drop anything anywhere, ‘X’ to close, ‘_’ to minimize… it has a fantastic interface, even though it’s entirely web-based.

I have one page set up with my Google Calendar, a miniature To Do List application (for personal life To-Dos, not work-related ones), and a small persistent notepad I scribble things on. I have Google Calendar’s settings set up to email me my daily agenda and TXT message my phone at a user-defined time before an appointment.

Anytime a news site is updated, Netvibes knows within five minutes and it shows up in one of my little tabs.

Netvibes also lets you share tabs. Here are the ones I use for my game dev news… click the link, then click ‘OK, Preview it’ to see. It’s all web-based and fast and simple. My other pages are for game dev news and news sites I like to read.

These are my game dev news tabs that I share:

Game Industry News

Game-Specific News

Game Industry Articles and Blogs

Netvibes is free, no strings attached, no software to install, no browser plugins required. You go to the website, and it just works, from any location. It’s crazy!

Do any of you use NetVibes, or something like it? How? :)

I found something awesome on LifeHacker a moment ago that smArtists may appreciate. It’s called The Freelancer’s Toolset. It’s a list of 100 web applications to enhance freelancers’ productivity.

It looks like a fantastic list! Here’s a few highlights from it:

• Stikkit is a central sticky note repository that interfaces with apps like Outlook. It stores names, addresses, birthdays and other snippets of information. It’s also open for collaboration even for people that don’t have or use Stikkit… and you can email it notes, too, which is pretty cool.
• NetVibes which I use. Basically it’s the ultimate customizable homepage, much like My Yahoo, except more flexible. You can turn any RSS feed into its own window, as well as drop all sorts of kickass productivity applications onto one page. It even has separate tabs you can load up with different categories of information. For example, I have a tab that contains a calendar, my personal life todo list, upcoming holidays and weather. On another tab, I have a series of small boxes that contain RSS feeds to every major news site I visit. On another tab, I have useless crap I waste time with. :) There’s a huge, thriving community of amateur developers that make modules and custom applications for it to make it infinitely extendable. I highly recommend checking out NetVibes.
• Google Calendar – I use this as an embedded window in NetVibes. It’s simple, straightforward and fun to use. I also set it up to email and text message me on my phone anytime I have an upcoming appointment so I never forget. It’s indispensible!
• FreshBooks – The Fastest Way to Invoice! This is a really cool and well-positioned company. Invoicing can be a bit of a bitch and this can help you keep track of it more easily. You can manage a huge series of invoices, send them by snail mail through the website, track the time spent on the job, accept payment online, manage work orders and generate reports. What a kickass idea!
• ConceptShare – An online visual collaboration tool. Basically, add notes or paintovers to anything you need to, and have small sticky notes that can turn into miniature discussion threads that float on top of the image and have pointers everywhere. This is so damn cool, I may try using it myself with my contractors.
• Meebo – Gain access to every single IM app on the planet through their website without downloading or installing anything. This is such a mind-bogglingly great idea. smArtists, listen up — IM communication is incredibly useful, and offering it can often be a good thing. Whenever possible, offer it as a quicker alternative for email for smaller, quicker questions. Even if you don’t use that app normally, Meebo can help. :)
• K7 – A terrible name but an awesome service. This will set up a temporary phone number for you to receive faxes and voicemail messages, which are emailed to you. What a great idea!
• Nolo – Got a legal question that pertains to contracting? Have it answered here and check out their articles and how-tos.

Any other gems I might have missed?

I just found a great post by Gianfranco over at GBGames that’s called What Would A Game Developer Do?

Gianfranco starts out detailing focus problems we all relate to, then drops some knowledge in the form of solid tips on surrounding yourself with things that motivate you. Then he breathlessly goes straight into conditioning your mind to think more like a game developer and to help stay focused. A choice quote:

Would a game developer come home from a day job and watch television? Would a game developer feel much anxiety about sitting at the computer to work on a game? Would a game developer procrastinate on game development in favor of chatting online with friends or reading random articles online?

No. A game developer would BE a game developer.

A simple mantra like “WWAGDD?” is a fantastic way to focus your mind on what’s important by asking a tough, no-nonsense question you can’t shy away from. This is good stuff! Go read the post!

I just checked out Rick Stirling’s excellent blog and found an article for young artists that I wholeheartedly agree with… it’s called Art for games, not games for art. Basically he posits that one of the chief considerations of art for games is putting the needs of the game above your own art and your need to feel creative for yourself only without consideration for the project. Very true, often overlooked, and needs to be said. :)

Found a cool article this morning: 101 Hidden Tips and Secrets for Photoshop

Some useful information in here I didn’t know. A few repeats, but here were some of the highlights I found most useful:

• 5. Sick of the default gray background around your image? Select paint bucket, hold shift and click on the gray background, it will change to whatever color you have in your foreground color box.
• 10. Hold Ctrl will temporary make any tool into move tool until you release Ctrl.
• 19. When free transforming with Ctrl+T, hold Alt to keep the original image and then to transform a duplicated layer of it. Ctrl+Shift+T to repeat whatever you did in the last transform.
• 28. Hold Alt while clicking on the eye icon beside the layer, it will hide all other layers.
• 39. Ctrl+Tab allows you to switch between different image files you are working on.
• 58. Change the active layer : Alt + [ or ].
• 59. Move the active layer up and down : Ctrl + [ or ].
• 62. When using the Polygonal Lasso Tool, click backspace to undo a lasso step.

Hope these are helpful. :)