Company Profile

Gmail adds the ability to video chat with available contacts within the browser. Will support all modern browsers; Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer and, of course, Google's own Chrome (still no Mac version!).

I did notice that it won't work on PowerPC based Macs. D'oh!

Flickr, one of the Web's premiere photo sharing sites, contains millions of stunning images from photographer's all over the globe. Everything from exotic landscapes to portraits of children uploaded by proud parents.

Using someone else's Flickr photos has always been a confusing issue to the design and blogging community that is hungry to embellish their work, be it Web site layouts or comprehensive blog posts, with just the right photo from a Flickr user's photostream.

Fortunately, someone has taken the time to create a simple, straightforward explanation of the many flavors of Creative Commons that apply to the millions of flickr images.

Read: A Complete Guide to Finding and Using Incredible Flickr Images by Skellie

On Thursday Plexus quietly launched a redesign of our Web site. For a company that specializes in Web technology, this isn't nearly as easy as it might sound.

The team pulled through though, managing to hit the deadline amidst a steady load of client work.

Design credit needs to be extended to the young Andrew Reifman, a relative newcomer to the Plexus team. After an initial attempt by yours truly to refresh the look I quickly realized a fresh perspective was needed.

While there was some sporadic collaboration at the beginning Andrew quickly proved he was up to the whole of the task. My role transformed into a one-man sounding board providing feedback on general design and usability.

I'll let Andrew go into detail about this evolution of the new Plexus Web presence in his own blog post.

Also, Travis and Charlie did the lion's share of the development work, while everyone pitched in during the couple of weeks to ensure the deadline was met.

With any new launch, there are always bugs and other little issues that survive until they're exposed to the light of a full public release. If you stumble on any of these, please let us know about it by contacting support.

If you work on a Web development team odds are you're using some form of version control to keep file conflicts to a minimum.

At Plexus, we use Subversion. Subversion is great at version control, but it can be an intimidating tool to learn how to use because of it's command line (CLI) nature.

Many have attempted to apply a user-friendly graphical interface to Subversion but most have been plagued my bad design and/or instability.

A few months ago I signed-up to be notified when a new Subversion GUI called Versions was released to the public as a beta on Mac OS X. Honesty, I had some doubts about whether it would see the light of day. So many iffy attempts had been made to beautify Subversion I figured there might be something about Subversion that is so inherently complex it couldn't be made to an intuitive, user-friendly experience.

The folks at Sofa, developers of Versions put that notion to rest.

Versions brings the excellent user experience aspects of the Mac to a complex version control tool that was never designed with a graphical interface in mind. Adding new repositories is as easy as sending a photo to Mom from iPhoto. Committing your changes simpler than composing an email in Apple Mail.

Not only does it make the most commonly accessed tasks in Subversion simple for the most novice of users, it's display of a project's timeline is a breath of fresh air for the most advanced users who may have spent tedious minutes deciphering cryptic results in the CLI. So, even if you live and breathe life on the command line, Versions is still an excellent complimentary tool when you want to know who did what when!

Who's guilty? :)

If you use Subversion on OS X you owe it to yourself to try out Versions.

Great sites when you're needing a design boost.

• CSS Beauty
• Best Web Gallery
• CSS Vault
• CSS Vault
• Unmatchedstyle.com
• CSS Remix
• CSS Elite