At CurdBee, we’ve always been concerned with openness, and a big part of that is making sure that your data is accessible to you at all times. From our import and export via CSV feature to our fully documented API, we’ve tried to make getting your data in and out of CurdBee as easy as possible.

Of course, while CurdBee did support CSV import from its early days, this was often a hassle and required a lot of post-import formatting, a task that became problematic if you had more than a few dozen records. Thus, with this in mind, and also remembering that a lot of our new users these days switch over to us from other popular online invoicing services like Freshbooks and Blinksale, we thought it was time to make data migration super easy, and with CurdBee Bridge, it is.

A much requested feature, CurdBee Bridge connects your CurdBee account with other online invoicing platforms via their native APIs and allows you to import your clients, items and invoices in a few simple clicks. Although you can currently only import data from Freshbooks and Blinksale, rest assured that we’ll be adding more platforms based on demand.

To make your life ever easier, we have compiled a support article covering all the steps involved in the process. Of course, if you still need any help in getting started with CurdBee Bridge, just visit our support section. A lot of you asked for this feature and we sincerely hope that a lot of you are happy right now!

Image thanks to Rethinking the Mobile Web by Bryan Rieger.

Apps and the web have always had an uneasy relationship. While the application remained supreme for years, the Web 2.0 pundits promised us a future where the web would rise and take its place and users would only need a browser to do everything.

We’re still waiting for that day, and not only have applications remained, but they are now more popular than ever, and not just on the desktop. What happened?

The smartphone happened.

iOS or Android, Angry Birds or the NY Times, pick your poison, because they’re here to stay. Billions of downloads, hundreds of thousands of native apps and thousands of ways to make fart noises. Our world has changed forever. With the personal computer now sharing space with many other devices, we’re constantly being asked to look beyond the browser and focus on developing applications for those platforms.

But we won’t (and yet we will), and here’s why.

Inclusiveness

While there certainly are applications that cannot easily be duplicated in the browser of today because of platform (3D games) and connectivity (offline reading) limitations, there area a lot of native apps that are actually just front ends for websites. In fact, most websites these days have an iOS app, an Android app, and if you’re lucky, a Blackberry app.

That’s great (if you’re happy developing for less than 10% of mobile users)!

Nokia, the manufacturer with the largest worldwide market share as of Q1 2010 runs Symbian on its high end phones, and Symbian is by most accounts a dead or dying platform in terms of native apps. But people buy these phones, and people use them. We could develop native apps for iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian and Windows Mobile, but that would still leave out non-smartphone users. So we’d need to put together a mobile site as well. But why as well? Why not just go with a mobile site?

Of course, not having smartphone specific apps means social media experts will like us less and we wont be able to provide brand ambassadors with compelling conversation hooks to enter into communities and fuel advocacy. We will however be able to focus heavily on creating a compelling mobile experience for all our users.

We’re going to strip the Bee down to its basics and then wrap it in different paper for different platforms, browsers and screen resolutions. We want to make sure that your favourite online invoicing experience is maintained across all your platforms. We’re going to use lots of jquery goodness, plenty of great UX design and yes, we’ll be generous with the sprinkles too. It’s going to be totally yummy.

Simplicity

Developing a gateway that caters to every major mobile OS and browser combination out there isn’t going to be easy, but there’s going to be one major advantage when we’re done.

It’ll be the same web application.

When we push an update you’ll get it with your next refresh. When we fix a bug it’ll disappear from everyone’s install at the same time. When we send you OMG plz Upgrade to PRO now thx! notifications, everyone will see them simultaneously.

At CurdBee we’ve always prided ourselves on evolving constantly and being responsive to our users’ needs, and having a mobile version that is just a variant of our real web app makes it a lot easier to make things happen fast. We’ve followed this model all along with CurdBee and there’s no reason we’d give it up during the development of CurdBee Mobile.

Finally, we don’t like the concept of app stores. Our development process is entirely user-centred and in the end what we want to do is spend less time making sure we pass app store guidelines and spend more time developing software that users love to use.

Ultimately, all this also means that the entire process is simpler for us and will allow us to focus on what we like doing best – making CurdBee more awesome.

Openness

The web is cool because not only can you find quick fixes for work problems you’re stuck with, but you can also spend an entire morning reading Twitter and looking at Lolcats. Indeed, choice is the essence of the web and having a solid mobile gateway to CurdBee means that you have choice, and then some.

No app specific bugs or crashes, and many, many options to access your content with. Whether you use a Webkit browser or prefer Opera’s outsourced rendering, whether you’re invoicing from your iPad or logging in from your old Nokia handset, the CurdBee experience will remain (more or less) the same.

When it comes to accessing your account, we want you to have as many options as possible.

So in essence, yes we are developing applications for iOS and Android and Blackberry and Symbian and Windows Mobile. We’re just developing web applications for those platforms (it turns out we’re in good company), and we’re developing them for everyone. We are a web app, we’re going to be a mobile web app soon and yes, we’re pretty excited.

What CurdBee Mobile will look like on your friendly neighbourhood iPhone.

Of course, with our API, we’re sure that there will soon be platform specific solutions that turn up, and as always, we will always help and encourage users who want to get more out of CurdBee. As for us though, it’s the wonderful, wonderful web all the way. Stay tuned for more CurdBee Mobile news in the weeks ahead. Until then, tweet, mail or leave a comment below and let us know what you think!

The Vesess team has been pretty occupied with various kinds of projects for the last few months and has managed to bring them to successful and satisfying ends. Even though we didn’t publish a lot of these project descriptions due to other commitments, we finally got around to updating our work section today!

In this update, we have featured 5 new sites that we recently completed. This latest batch of work covers every nook and cranny of the web, ranging from e-commerce sites to social media portals.

1) SkillTesting – A service that aims at taking the pain out of hiring programmers, allowing employers to create, send out and grade employee technical aptitude tests on the fly.

2) erecruit – As an outfit that specialises in Staffing and Recruitment Software Solutions, erecruit required an online facelift and that’s exactly what Vesess provided.

3) Yourville – A site which aims to bring expatriates in Costa Rica closer through social media and content sharing.

4) The Small BizNest – Vesess created an effective online presence for SME services provider, The Small BizNest.

5) pedalr – An e-commerce platform for bicycle lovers, developed from the ground up with community and simplicity in mind.

We hope you enjoy this portfolio update! Checkout our work section for more info.

The new release of WordPress 3.0-RC3 is bringing some cool improvements to the most popular blogging platform. This includes UI changes, addition of a new default theme – Twenty Ten, and most of all – custom post types and custom taxonomies.

Here is a complete set of major improvements.

• Choose your Username and Password
• New Default Theme!
• Custom Post Types
• Multi-site Capabilities and WPMU Codebase Merge
• Custom Taxonomies
• Easy Menu Management
• Custom Author Templates

Remember the old age (not far behind… just few years ago) where you had to type a whole bunch of codes just to add a new row to your HTML table ? I’ve almost forgotten that era with the convenience added through some of these libraries.

The Javascript Libraries That Shape The New Web

Bad news for web designers and developers.

According to the most recent data from California-based Web metrics company Net Applications, 27.2% of all Internet users are still running IE6, making it the most popular version of IE. By comparison, IE7 accounted for 23.1% of all browsers in action last month, while the newest edition, IE8, had a usage share of 12.5%.

Friends don’t let friends use IE6

Earlier this week, Google posted on how to make PHP performance better as step of their campaign to “make the web faster”, but has given some noteworthy tips (such as avoiding SQL querying within a loop) as well as some insignificant ideas.

This may have been ignored if it was published in some other source, but since it’s endorsed by Google, PHP community has taken a special interest and rebuffed some of these so called tips.

A Note on Google’s So-called Best Practices

Make the Web Faster – Google groups

PHP performance tips from Google

The new WordPress version 2.8 “Baker” represents a nice fit and finish release for WordPress with improvements would seem to be the ability to,

• New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
• Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
• Browse the theme directory and install themes from the admin
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
• Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
• Support timezones and automatic daylight savings time adjustment
• Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
• Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation

2.8 Release Jazzes Themes and Widgets

There’s a popular misconception when it comes to Rails development that it can’t scale. However, in reality you could perfectly scale any Rails app, if you apply the correct techniques. Identifying these best practices have been tricky, since it involved lot of trials and errors.

Today Greg Pollack, of RailsEnvy fame, has done a great favor to Rails community by releasing free 13 part screencast series (currently 5 episodes are out) on Scaling Rails. So next time when someone tells “Rails can’t scale” you know the answer.

Michael Ivey blogs his workflow of using Git, could be useful for any
team using Git. -
http://gweezlebur.com/2009/01/19/my-git-workflow.html