Things We Like
Time to talk about a few things I've used lately that I like:
Artisteer - I blogged about this recently on Drupal For Users. Artisteer is a theme generation program that lets you build themes for Druipal, Joomla!, Wordpress, and a few other environments. It's fairly bare bones in a lot of ways - it lets you generate pretty and well-formed themes (at least in Drupal, which is the only place I've tried it). On the other hand, it currently only runs in WIndows (ick and double ick) and won't do any of the really neat things possible in Drupal. I can see myself using this as a rapid prototyping tool though, doing the first 80% or so of theme development, after which it will be time to drag out the PHP and CSS skills to do the rest of the stuff. I'm hoping this tool will improve with age. Even with the limitations, the standard version is $129 which will probably pay for itself the first time I use it.
NOTE - Artisteer 2.1 just came out - it's a big improvement. The primary improvement is a lot of bug fixes, a little more flexibility, and the fact that the default themes are now built with multiple real Drupal regions, so in a lot of cases you're not going to have to muck around with sticking new regions in the themes. This site is currently displaying using a simple Artisteer theme that I built in about 15 minutes.
Swekey This is another product that gives me mixed feelings. Basically it's a little USB key that you insert into your computer, and that generates one-time passcodes. Typically you'd use it to secure web sites and applications. I use it to make sure that nobody is logging in to my web sites as me - if the key ain't plugged in to the computer, I can't log in. If the key gets unplugged, I get logged out. There are fairly nice integration modules available for it in many different web applications, including Drupal, Squirrelmail, and more. My main reservations about it involve the fact that I've had some issues with it in Windows. Works pretty well on my Linux and Mac machines, but it's had fits with both of the Windows systems I've used it with (though apparently this is due to various issues Windows has with hot-plugging USB devices - I actually mostly got this squared away, but it required a lot of disgusting register editing - on the other hand it fixed a coupel of issues I've been having with CDROM drives in Windows as well, so --- Gist of it is, this was mostly Windows brokennes, not Swekey brokenness.
CrashPlan - This is a great backup system that we've been using internally, and that we're starting to offer as a backup product. It's the first backup product that I'm really happy with (other than big expensive backup systems that I used to wrangle, and a few of the open source apps like Bacula). Once it's set up and installed, it just takes care of itself, continually backing up your system while you work. One of the innovative things about this is the ability to back up to a remote server on the Internet and to a local system in your office at the same time. Gives you the best of two worlds - quick restore from your local server and an archival copy off-site for emergency restores in case of a physical disaster. We're now offiering a managed service basd on CrashPlan where you can automatically back up your systems both to our own backup servers and to your own local server or spare drive. Highly recommended, works with Linux, Windows, MAC, and Solaris. There's also a smaller version that's available as a free download if you just want to back up to disk amongst your own systems (though you need to pay for this if it's for commercial use, or if you want the full feature set of the system). Let us know if this interests you. Backup prices start at $5/month per system, depending on how much disk quota you need for backups.
AlertThingy - This is the first tool for tracking social network updates that I've actually liked enough to use. Follow your Tweets, Facebook, RSS Feeds, and a lot more in one window, and post to Twitter and Facebook from it. This just gets better with every release, with more added features and services. Now if I could only convince myself that all of this constant interruption is really a good thing.
