Absolute dead-simple staple of my work. Transmit 3 is absolutely unparalleled. I pulled the trigger on Transmit 4 before I’d even launched it.

Dear Tony,

I think about you often when I work on the web. It starts out fondly, and quickly turns to rage when my browser crashes thanks to over-abundance of Flash advertising which destroys my favorite sites. I think of you, Tony, because, since you’re a Flash developer, this experience makes me hate you, just a little bit. That’s why I’m writing to let you know about ClickToFlash.

ClickToFlash is a browser plugin I’ve installed for Safari on the Mac which allows me to prevent you from taking advantage of me, Tony. It’s simple, and smart: load a page with flash without the plug in and see this:

But load a page with ClickToFlash installed and see this:

It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Page loads are nearly instantaneous!

But, I know what you’re saying, Tony. You’re saying, “What about my site — the one that’s all Flash and sweet, sweet sexiness. Can you still see it if you want to?” That’s the beauty of this plugin, Tony. Just click once on any flash box on the page and POW! … the Flash will load in a snap.

My browsing experience has become more smooth, more stable, and more sedate as a result, Tony. The preferences that ship with ClickToFlash allow you to do even smarter blocking than just turning off Flash. In fact, you can turn off Flash cookies, which are dangerous miscarriages of browser justice that do not expire by default, and store more information that you’d normally want in a cookie. I know you’d never use one, Tony, but if you want to learn more about them, read here.

So, I close by reminding you that as a person, when you’re not at a computer, there’s a lot to like about you, Tony. But the fact that you’ve devoted your life to Flash, well, it forces me to strongly recommend Safari users to cut you off by installing ClickToFlash. It’s donationware, and as such, worth exactly what you think it is.

Thanks for reading, man.

Pete

Anyone want to know how much I love this photo? Anyone? Seriously, ask and I’ll tell you. I love it with the white hot passion of a star gone super nova. I love it, because it’s a picture of rocks. It’s a picture of rocks about sex and God, with a dash of good humor and a pinch of humility.

I love it because the man who made it is a man who loves more than anything to work with his hands. You can feel it when you pick up one of these rocks, the surface so smooth it’s as if nothing is there. And yet, the messages are at once salient, and impossible — it’s a burning bush argument: am I really getting fortune cookie karma from a river stone? Yep. From a guy who has a singular focus on what he’s doing, and has just the right tools to get the job done.

So, this is a post about tools. I have a lot of them, the digital kind, and I’m often asked what I recommend and could I teach them, and should client x buy Illustrator or Photoshop or InDesign or Final Cut Pro so they can make quick edits on files and on and on. And I’ve worked up a bit of my own burnished stone wisdom that may help someone other there in the Interworld. Here goes.

1. If you think you need a piece of software, you don’t. Because if you think you need it, then you don’t know how to use it, you’ll be shocked at the price, and pissed at yourself for not being smart enough to know what it is in the first place.
2. Text is the most versatile format ever, ever, ever. If what you do is write things, do yourself a favor and get rid of all the shortcuts to Microsoft Word. Replace them with shortcuts to TextEdit and Notepad. Write there. These are the pencil and paper of computerized writing and will make whatever you write more portable to design, email, web, production, whatever. Make all the partners in your workflow happy and ditch the other cruft.
3. The most important skill you can learn that will improve your communication online and in person, is how to lay a few words on top of a photo. Exception to previous point, PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google apps are clever — and now even a bit sophisticated — graphics applications. You don’t need PhotoShop to build a graphic for a website or poster — just head over to iStockphoto.com, find a clever kitten hanging from a branch, write “Hang in There!” with a little drop shadow, and export to a jpg. That’s all. From there, the world is your oyster. I have a client that does 90% of the graphics work for here organization’s website in PowerPoint, I kid you not. It makes me throw up in the back of my mouth a bit, but it’s true.

Bottom line, simplicity should always trump ego. Software is a drug that feeds that ego, people. Don’t let it eat you up. If you put a few braincells to thinking about alternative methods to doing what you need to do, you’ll find more often than not you already have the tools you need to get the job done, and get back to work.

It’s safe to say that up to about two years ago, what we call social media was exclusively the domain of artists, teens, and the technorati. The idea of Facebook as a mainstream communication platform was just gaining momentum, and services such as Twitter still required a lengthy explanation in cocktail party conversation. Things have changed in the last few years, however. Now, The New York Times is discussing these services regularly, and Nielsen Online has been tracking explosive growth in the space; from February 2008 to February 2009, Twitter grew 1,382% — from 475,000 unique visitors per month in ‘08 to over 7 million unique visitors in ‘09. Facebook had 20 million unique visitors in February 2008, today boasting more than 65 million — a 240% leap. And 65 million is a fraction of the reported 150 million registered users of Facebook.

Project management is, of course, making it’s way to the social media universe. Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization, tells me that Paramount Pictures asked all employees to communicate with one another on Facebook exclusively for one week as a way of getting teams to understand the importance of online social interaction on the tool.

But all of these are just tools. While they might change the landscape of social interaction naturally, they will only change the landscape of your project communication if they make sense, if your people understand and embrace them, and if your project is a good fit. Here are a few tools aligned for project work worth giving a second glance.

Status

The greatest gravity in the social orbit is around the Twitter service right now — a microblogging service that offers space to answer the question “What are you doing?” in just 140 characters. If there ever was a service to serve project management, it’s Twitter. In just a few seconds, team members can post quick updates to project tasks, links to daily reports, questions for the team, and more. For teams, I recommend you “protect” and thereby render private all your status updates, as the tool doesn’t naturally lend itself to discrete team communication by default.

The recently-announced Lists feature in Twitter is a boon to teams, too. Just set up a private project team list and get real-time status updates from team members wherever you are.

Discussion

Facebook has made great effort to make the discussion feature on the site more clear and efficient for groups. Still, the idea of a project team on Facebook is typically anathema to IT security specialists. If your organization doesn’t offer support for team based wikis or SharePoint for team discussions, consider a service such as Ning. Ning offers you the opportunity to create a private social network all your own with rich discussion and file hosting support, all free. Ning keeps the lights on by offering ads on your pages, but for a small monthly fee, you can buy out the ads and clean up the site. It takes all of 15 minutes to get your own Ning site up and running — and only a few hours to move beyond the basic templates and create a project environment all your own.

File Sharing

It may seem simple, but just sharing version copies of your project schedule and plan can be a nightmare over email — an environment which still challenges many of us, fighting inbox overflow. While most corporate intranets offer a perfect sharing solution for internal teams, if you are working with any team members who are contractors or vendors, how do you keep them up to speed on the latest working project files?

Enter DropBox. This simple tool installs as a system preference, and puts a new folder in your documents called “Dropbox”. In it, you can share folders between computers and teams and watch as all your project documents are seamlessly duplicated across all users on your team. Dropbox is free for two gigabytes of storage which is likely enough for most projects. For heavy users, pay up $99 a year for 50 gigabytes of storage, and $198 for 100 gigs.

Most of these tools satisfy a single need for project teams. As an alternative to a piecemeal approach, 37Signals’ Basecamp offers a similar status feature to Twitter, and provides a full project environment, file sharing interface, and messaging platform for team communication. It is the only service in the batch that addresses the complete project environment and was designed specifically for project managers.

I don’t play hockey, but I hear there’s a rule players internalize early: skate to where the puck will be. The rule holds in the burgeoning social media space, too. The next generation of project managers currently graduating from school, working toward their PMP certification, these people have a radically different expectation for project communication than exists in the space right now. The sooner we move ourselves — and our teams — in a direction of communicating, interacting, and collaborating online, the better prepared we will be as the rules of the business continue to change around us.

When I started with Cadence over a decade ago, they were still on ProjectMaster 2. It was a tool that allowed you to create a graphical responsibility matrix assigning responsibilities to project team members, then print it in a slew of formats to hang it on a wall, drop it in a project binder, and so on. But that was it — just the responsibility matrix. Of course, it’s arguably the most important tool in the project planning process, but it’s followed at a close second by the Work Breakdown Structure.ProjectMaster 3 attempted to rectify this. It was essentially a series of scripts for Visio 2000 allowing you to create most of the other components of the project plan: Introduction, Objective, Scope, Deliverables, Issues and Risks, WBS, Responsibility Matrix… the works. So, great, right? Great in concept, anyway. The reality was that building an entire software package with a great big honking dependency like Visio makes this tool very expensive, not to mention notoriously fragile. I was around for this one — I was on the team. Once we got it actually functioning, it was a bear to keep it up. It was like a skinny kid on a Ducati: looks cool when he’s moving, but if you stop him, he’s gonna dump the bike.The intent all along was to move this product online. Of course, back then, it was really expensive to even think about a project like this in the online space, and since Cadence is on the other end of the spectrum from “dot.com”, there was no “boom” money to seed this sort of thing.CUT TO: 10 years laterThey did it. They finally did it. I’m only bummed they did it without me. It’s a subscription based product that allows you to create your project plan in minutes. I mean it… minutes. I used to work on building these things for clients and after a heated consulting session, we’d be looking at a days-long session of data entry and organization, not to mention Word scripting and formatting to make all the components stick together manually. ProjectMaster 4.0 works as it should work. Enter your data, your deliverables, your tasks, your resources and responsibilities, and PM4 formats it and allows you to export it graphically, or to Word in no time. And that’s a key point: at no time did I ever get the feeling that the system was working, choking, chugging along. It’s fluid and efficient.I cannot stress this enough: try this thing out. If you work on projects of any size and need a way to build out a project plan that clearly documents the work you have to do, subscribe.ProjectMaster 4.0 does not do scheduling. I’d be surprised if they didn’t add it to the system later on, but at this point they work around it by allowing what seems to be a pretty good export to MS Project tool. I’m on a Mac so I haven’t tested that out — I’ll have to see what the resulting document looks like in OmniPlan (another awesome program, by the way). Still, let that ring a bit — I’m on a Mac, and this thing works perfectly. Knowing what I know about Cadence, that they inadvertantly built in support for Macs has to sting a bit.