In my day job – that as a web developer and graphics designer for a Portland Oregon church – one tool that I’ve experimented with and have found more and more use for is something called Yammer. It was a recent winner of the TechCrunch50 award, which is one of the larger yearly events that recognizes the best web tools being developed by cutting edge companies around the world.

Why Yammer? One of the great challenges in any organization with teams of people working on projects is communication. Essentially, what Yammer provides is Twitter-like services to organizations so you can track your team – what they’re working on plus anything they want to pass along – via a simple web interface and/or a desktop application (available for all platforms). The service itself is domain-name based which means that it’s limited to JUST your organization and only users with an email account under your domain name can be a part of your Yammer network.

Example: If I ran a cool company like “Snowboarding Year-Round, Unlimited” and our domain name was “snowyearround.com” – I can create a Yammer network for my domain name and add anyone in my organization to the network like “joe@snowyearround.com” and “katie@snowyearround.com” and even “slacker@snowyearround.com” to make sure he stays on task.

Cost? It’s free unless you want some of the advanced features such as the ability to add a logo and do some other higher level management tasks. The free version is more than ample to accomplish the tasks we need.

Side-note – for all you fellow geeks out there, this was a bit of a controversial choice for TechCrunch because Yammer shares a LOT of similarities with the already popular Twitter. Many were upset that they didn’t pick a company doing something truly “new” and “unique”… Personally, I just like it when people see a need and set out to fill it. Good job Yammer…

Do you find yourself working with team members beyond those in your immediate work environment (outside your office network) and need to edit/share/track multiple files? Are you finding the transfer of large files to be rather “inconvenient”?

Well, now there’s Dropbox – a super intuitive application that works across the three major platforms (Windows, Mac & Linux) that allows you to publish and track files easily. Visit the website and check out the video demo. This does what I always hoped iDisk/MobileMe would do…but really never did.

It’s a free service for 2.0GB. Beyond that, there’s a pricing model but for the life of me I couldn’t find a way to pay for more. I’m wondering if the “payment” option won’t kick in till I near the 2GB space limit. I did find a reference to a 50GB for $10/mo. model that appears to be in place for some early adopters.

If I were to rate this application/service…it’s an easy 10 out of 10.

While I realize that I already promote the product from Basecamp on my blog, I just wanted to post a quick post to re-iterate my absolute love of this online resource. It’s become a key element of my web/graphics design business and is a key part of my business model to keep my clients informed and up-to-date on any and all project management.

I can track timelines, conversations and it even integrates a great Instant Messenger system to further increase my ability to communicate clients.

As a robust system, Basecamp has quickly become the defacto planning system for many freelancers and with their release of their API’s, many auxiliary web tools can seamlessly connect and share key data with Basecamp. For example – I use Cashboard for all my invoices and time tracking. Cashboard has a built-in Basecamp module that allows me to import all my client contact information directly from Basecamp.

As a further application for those who work in non-profit organizations (churches, etc.) – this is a great resource for managing multiple projects all under “one roof”.

I work in an environment where our media department (church) is all Apple with the exception of one PC that now sits dormant in an empty cubicle. The rest of the office (with the exception of our wonderful new pastor) is PC-based. One issue that keeps rearing it’s ugly head in our design workflow is the issue of image compatibility and I must confess my absolute frustration with the Microsoft Windows inability to work with images. It seems like every time I create a new image that is requested by one of our assistants to put onto a simple Word document, the parameters have to be tweaked ad nauseam to make it even work.

To put it simply, out of the box, Windows machines are horrible at image rendering unless they follow some crazy Windows formatting requirements which seem to be so limited that it renders image usage useless except for those silly Windows clip art files that are dated and should not used at all (in my honest, designer opinion).

Sorry if I stepped on any toes on this rant but when our workflow comes to a screeching halt over silly things that should NOT be a problem, I get frustrated.

Buy Mac – “they work so you can work”.

As a web developer, I love cutting as many corners while guaranteeing the best product possible. When it comes to photo editing, however great and fast I may be at Photoshop (and I’ll humbly admit – I’m pretty quick)…it’s great to have a tool that makes the tedious but tasteful work – a snap.

I’ve been using Picturesque for awhile now and it’s been a great and easy way to keep give my web images a little extra “flair” in a short amount of time. It’s also great for a quick resizing…

Now, with the release of the 2.0 version, they’re definitely taking their success to the next level by offering even more photo editing tools while keeping the software itself simple and easy to use – a PLUS with this type of application that is meant to speed things up…not bog things down.

Need a reflection on your photo? Bang! Picturesque does its magic in seconds rather than the “minutes” it would take to do the same thing in Photoshop. Their new feature is entitled “Perspective” and is really nice.

Again – all these photo editing tricks are nothing new. I’ve been doing these in Photoshop for a long time. The beauty of this app is that for QUICK work with low-res images, this is a snap.

Company: Acqualia
Price: $34.95 (worth every cent if you are a web developer)

Check it out at www.acqualia.com