Reviews Posts

*I’m a Mac guy, and so the software that I review is largely going to be for the Mac only. This review is no exception.*

For the last few years, I’ve used a time management technique called [*timeboxing*](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeboxing) in order to avoid spending too much time noodling about with a particular task. If I need to tackle a task, I’ll give myself a chunk of time, a timebox, in which to accomplish it. It’s a simple but powerful way to shepherd your brain.

It works very well with open-ended tasks and activities that can expand to fill hours of the day. A couple of examples: I give myself 10 minutes per to conceive and rough out posts for the week. I often limit my RSS feedreading to 10 minutes on a busy morning.

> Personal timeboxing works to curb perfectionist tendencies by setting a firm time and not overcommit to a task. This method can also be used to overcome procrastination (delaying activities or tasks).

Obviously, you need a tool in order to make use of this technique. Some kind of timer. You can buy a physical eggtimer or steal that kitchen timer magnetized to your fridge, or you can install one of the dozens of timer applications, many of them free.

But allow me to save you a little time and point you to the best timer app out there: Minuteur.

### Good time(r)

Lets face it: a timer isn’t a real complicated tool, so there’s not a lot of hardcore functionality to address here. Minuteur counts down time and does it well. What sets it apart from the competition is the interface.

It’s got very configurable and customizable display options. For example, it’s main window is a small, unobtrusive counter that can be set to float on top of all windows and be visible at all times. It’s got a menubar icon that lets you display the remaining time in a number of ways, as a counter, as a thermometer, and as a ruler. It’s got a fullscreen mode with giant numbers visible from across a room.

You can set and control the timer via it’s main window interface, but it’s got a few easily customizable keyboard shortcuts, and it also comes with a host of applescript samples that you can use as is or customize into your own workflow.

It’s got a host of alarm sounds and visualizations that’ll jar you awake, or turn down iTunes and gently beep to let you know that your time is up.

### It counts down and counts up…your earnings!

Minuteur is also a full-featured time-tracking functionality. It’s able to create projects and track the time you’ve spent within each project. It tracks the date, time, rate, and has a description field for each working session, which comes in very handy when you’ve got a project that requires you to track what you’re working on very specifically.

It also gives the user the ability configure multiple rate profiles. If the services you provide have different pay rates, this feature makes it very convenient to switch between them.

### The verdict

Minuteur is a great timer application with a ton of great features. At $12, it’s a little steep for just a timer application. But considering that this is a very easy to use timer, chock full of keyboard shortcuts that make setting the timer easy and intuitive, it might be worth the dough because you’ll actually *use* it. And with the addition of the nice time tracking functionality, it’s really two separate but closely related apps rolled into one. I think it’s well worth it.

### Links

[Download Minuteur](http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/19356/minuteur)

[Timeboxing - *Wikipedia*](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeboxing)

When it comes to the computer of your choice, it’s tough to tout yourself as budget conscious *and* a Mac user and come off as credible. Macs aren’t cheap computers. If you’re in the market for a $300 computer, you won’t find something in an Apple store. But Macs are *good* computers, and everybody seems to want one. But, and I’m speaking from experience, it seems like Apple’s offerings are always just a little bit more than one wants to spend at the time.

But this doesn’t mean that you’re relegated to the Windows world forever just because you want to save a few bucks. There is a solution for you: The Apple Special Deals website.

The Apple Special Deals website is a secret little spot where they sell refurbished computers and iPods at a significant discount. Rob Griffiths recently published an article on Macworld.com describing his experience buying a refurbished MacBook Pro, and I thought I’d just throw in my 2 cents on the topic.

I’ve had nothing but good experiences when buying refurbished Apple goods. I bought 2 iPods and my current MacBook Pro for about 20 to 30% off, saving a ton of money. When I bought the laptop, I saved so much that I was able to buy a 3-year Applecare warranty and 4GB of RAM from a 3rd party vendor and *still* spent less than I would have if I bought new.

There are a couple of drawbacks to buying this way, however. Buying refurbished isn’t the exact same purchasing experience as buying new, and there are few things that you’ll want to be aware of going in:

The most significant drawback is the lack of customizability. You can’t configure your new machine; they’re offered as is. No bigger hard drive, no bumping up of RAM. You’re stuck with the model that they’re selling.

Another factor you’ll want to consider is that the inventory isn’t static. I found this out when I was in the market for a new iPod. One day, I checked the site and the one I wanted was there: the white 60GB model. I wasn’t quite ready to pull the trigger, so I put it off. Next day, credit card in hand, I hit the site prepared to place my order only to find that the white model was no longer available. I had to settle for the black one. Bottom line, there’s no guarantee that the one you want will be there when you’re ready to buy.

Lastly, and this isn’t really a drawback unless you’ve got odd priorities, the packaging that the new hardware arrives in is plain old brown cardboard. None of the fancy, nicely designed packaging that Apple is famous for. Everything’s in the box that’s supposed to be there, but it’s just a barebones shipping carton. And if you think about it, that might just be a positive instead of a negative in the grand scheme of things.

The Apple Special deals site seems to be the best, most affordable way to buy your next Mac or iPod, and I’m convinced that, barring special and unforeseen circumstances, I’ll be making all future computer and iPod purchases there.

### Links

[Apple Special Deals](http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals)

In October 2008, Adobe released Illustrator CS4 (in addition to a ton of other graphics, web, and video software). I use Adobe Illustrator to draw and letter the Q-Burger comic. It’s a fantastic and powerful tool that is uniquely suited to how I draw.

Which of these two questions will you ask?

If you don’t own Illustrator, but you want to get a vector-based drawing application, your question would be, “Should I shell out the tons of cash to buy this software?”

And for owners of the CS3, CS2 or CS1, the question that’s always raised when Adobe releases new versions of their incredibly expensive software is “Do I really need to upgrade?” It’s a wise question to ask, because these applications do a LOT of stuff, and if you only use a sub-set of features, it’s not inconceivable that these features won’t have been updated between versions.

I’ll try to answer both of these questions in the following paragraphs.

The Blob Brush is the Blomb!

The blob brush is the single most compelling reason for upgrading to CS4. This is a new feature that will appeal to newcomers to Illustrator and to old hands alike. It finally provides a somewhat natural-feeling tool to create brushstrokes that are editable with the eraser tool.

I’ve talked to many artists who are interested in using Illustrator, but experienced complete disorientation upon launching it and just trying to something as simple as draw something. And I understand that completely. I’ve been there, and it’s only after investing a ton of time in educating myself that I’m comfortable saying that I understand it.

Illustrator has had the paintbrush tool for a long time now. The standard paintbrush tool draws in paths, and then gives the path characteristics based on the setting used. This tool works very well with a Wacom tablet to create a line with pressure-based variation that closely emulates a real brush and ink. The problem comes when trying to edit the path.

If you use the eraser tool to edit a line drawn with the paintbrush toolo, it cuts the path into segments and destroys the appearance, removing any line variation. This is very frustrating to artists used to traditional media and/or Photoshop users who like to be able to fine tune their brush strokes with the eraser. It’s just not possible to do.

Blob brush to the rescue. Where the paintbrush draws paths, the blob brush draws in closed paths. The difference is that you can use the eraser tool to edit closed paths. You can shave off stray lines with ease just like you would in Photoshop.

If you’re having trouble grasping just how awesome this is, that’s not surprising. Especially if you aren’t a current user of Illustrator. The value of the tool is a little tough to convey just by writing about it, so I’ve linked to a couple of video tutorials I found floating around out there so you can see for yourself how this new tool will benefit Illustrator users, new and experienced.

Adobe TV. IIllustrator CS4 Blob Brush Tutorial – Web Design Library

Increased Speed and Stability

The launch times have been improved across the board with the CS4 apps, and that’s great. Adobe has also improved shutdown speed as well, which I appreciate. I’ve had far too many run-ins with Photoshop or Illustrator taking forever to close when I’m trying to quickly reboot my machine.

They’ve also increased scrolling speed. While zoomed in to 300x or 400x for detail work, I’m able to use the hand tool to zip to other parts of the panel I’m working on with greater speed. And CS4 is a modest improvement in terms of the render speed of Live Trace, but not nearly the same boost that I saw going from CS2 to CS3.

Changes to the workspace

I like the interface improvements that have been made. Adobe added a single-window feature to the Mac version of the software that allows you to keep all of Illustrator’s panels and artboards in one application window, which makes things a bit more manageable.

The cosmetic changes to the work environment are nice when looking at the CS4 suite as a whole, as the entire line looks more similar. It’s more noticeable with Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash (the Macromedia acquisitions). They look like they belong to the family now.

But my favorite interface tweak, and it’s a minor one, has been the easier access to the custom workspaces. I’ve created my own workspaces for inking and lettering that have tweaked to show only the applicable tools. It’s nice to be able to check which workspace is currently in use, and then to easily switch between them.

Multiple artboards and the Appearance panel

Multiple artboards and the newly beefed up Appearance panel are very nice features that I just don’t have a use for currently. This is mainly because they didn’t exist in previous versions, and it doesn’t mean that I won’t become completely reliant on them in the future.

A big deal has been made of the multiple artboards, but when creating comics, I don’t see the value of having one file contain all 22 pages of an issue, or all 60 episodes of a season of Q-Burger. Maybe it’d be a time saver for sending materials to other collaborators or to the printer, but for my purposes, there’s no advantage. And what’s more, I’m afraid of file corruption. If all 60 of my episodes are contained in one file and that file gets corrupted, then that’s all 60 episodes gone. Not that, in this age of cheap external harddrives and offsite back up, that’d be a fatal event, but it’d be inconvenient.

The Appearance panel used to be the panel that told you what strokes, fills, and effects are applied to a specific object in your artwork. The improved version now makes it the place where you can directly edit those effects. Where you used to have to open other panels to edit strokes and fills, Illustrator gives you access to those controls right in the Appearance panel. This saves a lot of menu opening and clicking around in other panels. Nice, but I’m not in the habit of using it yet. That is likely to change.

Questions answered

Illustrator is intimidating and confusing for new users. But if you want to take advantage of vector art for your comics, Illustrator CS4 is the the right place to start. The Blob brush will give you the intuitive line editing functionality you’ve grown used to in other drawing apps. I think this is the single most beneficial feature for comic creators.

And if the blob brush doesn’t have the same appeal to you, and you’re still wondering about whether to drop the $199 to upgrade from a previous version, the speed increases, the interface tweaks, and the multiple artboards might be enough to justify the upgrade. It depends on what features you rely on to create your work.

Links

Adobe TV.

IIllustrator CS4 Blob Brush Tutorial – Web Design Library

This is the second part of a review of Warner’s Stellian. Part one can be read here.

I am continuing to do everything in my power as a writer and fellow consumer to influence you not to buy anything from Warners Stellian. Ever.

I’m dedicating two Q-Review posts to this effort because if I wrote it as one review, it would require too much of the average Internet reader’s attention span. Too many of you wouldn’t read it in its entirety. And I’d be doing you, my audience, a disservice if I didn’t do everything in my power to make this article as easy as possible to read and learn from.

But even if you only read these few opening paragraphs, I want you to go away with this simple message: Do not buy any major appliances from Warners Stellian.

Customer satisfaction not a priority

In late September of this year, we noticed that the fridge wasn’t cooling as well as it should. Milk spoiling in just a few days was the biggest indicator. Also, we’d noticed a gradual creep of frost that seemed to be moving from one side of the freezer to the other, accompanied by unfrozen water pooling just inside the freezer door.

A call was placed on 9/12, a Friday, where we reported that our food was spoiling and they weren’t able to get a repair guy out to our house until the following Thursday. This shows a lack of concern on the part of Warners Stellian for it’s customers. Going nearly a week without a properly functioning refrigerator is too long.

I can’t say much about the technician, because I don’t know refrigerators. But I was concerned because the diagnosis was completed very quickly and with only a few tests. Having been a tech support guy in a previous life, I know that a diagnosis made in 5 minutes is more often than not the wrong one. He was in and out of my house in the space of 10 or 15 minutes.

He ordered a couple of parts: a new gasket for the freezer door and a new controller board for the fridge, and I was told that if a part was going to take more than three days to arrive, I’d get a phone call. I didn’t get that phone call. I had to call them.

And we wait…for over a month

Over the course of the next month, I made four calls to the customer service line, asking for a status update, about once a week. I got a number of different responses from the customer service reps.

The first call was placed about 4 days after the service tech had come and gone. It was very nice and civil, and I was told by a respectful and sympathetic that the part hadn’t come in yet, and there was no ETA, so I’d just have to wait it out. But I was assured that once refrigerator parts come in, they’re made a priority, often getting a service call scheduled same- or next-day. (I didn’t ask why that priority wasn’t also demonstrated when the customer first calls in.) Frustrated by not having received a call about this, but disarmed by the pleasant conversation, I hung up.

The second call was made a week later, and I was was told by an unconcerned sounding rep that there was still no ETA for the part. But that I would receive a call when an ETA was given. I was given no new information.

The third call was made a week later. The same rep I had talked to a week earlier, and without my request, my call was forwarded to what I was told was the Parts Department, but was actually the voicemail of the rep who initially opened the service ticket three weeks earlier. I left a voicemail expressing my concern that I was now in the midst of a third week without a refrigerator and that this was quickly becoming a major inconvenience. Small children needing unspoiled milk to drink and living out of a cooler was not really a good solution. A note of irritation may have made it into my voice at that point. I got no significant response.

The fourth call and how it delayed the repair even more

The fourth and final call was made later that week. And this time, I wasn’t just calling to check up on the parts. This time I was calling to report yet another issue with the refrigerator. That morning, Erin had discovered water on the floor behind the fridge. Upon pulling it away from the wall, we discovered that the water hose was slowly leaking.

I placed the call to customer service, letting them know that I had another issue to report, and much to my amazement, that I would have to wait for this new part to arrive before a tech would be dispatched to install the other two parts. Apparently, the company who sold Warners Stellian the extended warranty that had then been sold to me would not pay for more than one visit from a tech.

Because my refrigerator broke again while I was still waiting for other parts, I’d have to wait longer still before getting a repair. Didn’t matter that the first issue was reported a month earlier. And so, because WS didn’t have any control over what the warranty company did, my concerns and protests were easily deflected by the snotty and increasingly dismissive rep.

What’s worse, I decided that I wasn’t going to call customer service again because I was genuinely concerned that this service rep would exercise some influence to delay my repair order further out of spite. This is not an exaggeration. I was truly convinced that any further calls to their service line would have a negative impact on my situation. So I decided to call the sales guy who originally sold us the unit. I left my name and number and pleaded with him to help use get somewhere with the service department. After this message went completely unreturned, I had no choice but to just let it go. I bought a few bags of ice from Target and prepared to live indefinitely without a refrigerator. It just wasn’t worth the stress anymore. I had more important things to focus on.

The parts arrive…but the story doesn’t end

My last contact with WS was on 10/17, a Friday, eight days after the previous call. I was told the parts were due to arrive the next Monday, and that we’d get a call Monday night letting us know when the service tech would be coming out on Tuesday. And we got that Monday night call, at about 7:30pm, and we were due to get a visit between 10:30 and 1:30 the next day.

This late notice wasn’t a problem because I’m now a stay-at-home dad and was going to be home anyway.

The tech arrives, installs the parts quickly, tested them, and was on his way. Quick and efficient. No complaints.

The fridge works correctly again, and we were all very very happy…until the next morning when we saw a huge amount of frost in the freezer and some droplets of unfrozen water just inside the freezer door.

And this past Monday, I placed another call into the service department.

Verdict: Don’t buy anything from Warners Stellian

Thus concludes my review and recounting of my experience with Warners Stellian. Odds are, you’ll never go through this, but if you ever have any problem with an appliance that you have purchased through them, be prepared to be seriously inconvenienced. Be prepared to go without the use of that appliance for days, weeks, or even a month or more. And be prepared not to be assisted in any helpful way by their customer service or sales staff after they have your money in hand.

Links

Warners’ Stellian