Do you sometimes scratch your head and ask WTF (I said "frick" in my head. Really.) when projects suddenly fall apart? Suppose you're a project manager. Your team is steadily moving along on a project. There is no indication that anything is wrong, and your team says they're on target to hit their deadlines. Then, all of the sudden, things seem to be out of control with the application, and there seems to be no explanation as to why everything is screwy. Everyone begins to panic towards the end. Features that should have been completed a long time ago still aren't working, developers are sweating profusely, and throwing up in the corner periodically. If your development team seems to have a hard time estimating tasks or consistently misses deadlines, then this article is for you.

Organization, consistency, and having realistic expectations are key to predicting more accurate timelines and avoiding unexpected last minute failures.

Read on.

As of the first Creative Suite, Adobe made the decision to remove the simple yet uber-helpful feature from Photoshop that allows you to see thumbnail previews of PSD files in Windows Explorer. If you upgraded your older version of Photoshop, you still have this feature, but if you installed CS, CS2, or CS3 from scratch you don't.

ThumbView Lite solves this issue immediately. Enjoy your thumbnails. I know I am.

I came across an interesting article on Techcrunch that discussed How to Build a Web App in Four Days. I really like this approach, and I've always felt it could be extremely successful given the right team and the right environment...

I noticed an idea in the article that I liked so I thought I'd blog it. The author makes a great suggestion to paint an entire wall with blackboard paint. I've used blackboard paint in the past in my daughter's room, and it works really well. If you have an extra (yellow) wall, and creative people around, you should give it a try....I'm sure they'd fill it up in no time.

As for the website that they built in four days, well, you can watch more about it here:

jottit.com

Good news from Techcrunch:

Adobe has created a special Flash player for the search engines that acts like a virtual user going through each application. It actually goes through the runtime of each Flash application and translates it into something the search engines can understand. So all of those fancy interactive Flash Websites and other rich Internet applications that have been invisible to search engines, can now be seen by them.

Techcrunch Article