ColoursAlive

If you’re interested in Brand Building, Customer Relationship Management and things like that, Custommerce is getting together the 5th Chapter of this wonderful conference.

Custommerce India Chapter 5 is built around the ‘back to basics’ theme. Managing hype cycles, customer experience statistics, cutting edge technology, customer service differentiators, brand building, people and process investments, customer relationship management … name it and we’ve done it all. And yet, the customer still remains one unhappy person. To stay ahead in the race, we may have missed paying attention to the basics. In our eagerness to please customers by adopting best/next generation practices, we have destroyed our inherent ability to do the basic things.

They have a rather interesting line-up of speakers and agenda… Geet Sethi, V K Madhav Mohan, Sunny Rao, M. Mahadevan, C. K. Venkataraman, & Shiva Subramaniam. To top it off, they’re having it in the Leela Kempinski, Kovalam Beach, Kerala.

I’ve been using iTunes 8 (Look at what’s new)for a couple of days now, both on my Mac and my PC… and I’ve found that the selection of music that it brings up is rather diverse playlist.

Now, my playlists have a number of songs that I play really often, and others that I play rarely, if at all… When I select a song that I like and press the Genius button, iTunes brings up a playlist that seems to based on the kind of song that was selected, similar in terms of genre of music, or artist, but varied in terms of BPM (Beats Per Minute), my rating of the song, and the number of times the songs have been played. I’ve beeing using this feature for a while now, and its only created playlists that have been interesting. So far, its never mixed up genres, or moods (and I have a varied set of music ranging from Classical to Pop to Classic Rock to Metal).

Genius does list out my music and upload it to Apple’s servers, but presumably this is in order to match the music together and to provide me with suggestions in the accompanying Genius bar on the side. However, when I log in to the Indian iTunes Store (which does not sell music), the bar helpfully suggests that it close itself, because there are no suggestions from my country’s store. I just wish that they start selling music on the Indian store, instead of just iPhone Apps.

Good going, Apple.

Download iTunes Here

Are you a Visual Communication student or professional?

Here’s a brand-new resource to learn about the visual communication course, profession, and professionals. Whether you’re a viscom student or professional, you’ll find information about the various streams of activity like Advertising, Television and Movies, Animation and 3D, Design and Photography. You’ll also find individual forums for Visual Communication and Visual Communication Jobs.

Sign up and start off in the discussions at forums.viscomonline.net. You can also put up tutorials on any of these topics, display your photography or your videos, and do more…

I’m an Apple fan. I have been for quite a while now… I’ve moved all my work from a PC desktop to a mac book pro so that I can get things done one the go, and things work great.

Recently though, 37Signals brought into question, the forthrightness of one of Apple’s ads.

Here’s a short video that compares Real-Life 3G performance and Apple’s advertising material.

Yes, I do get that “twice as fast” is in reference to non-3G wireless networks, but its still misleading.

For all the bugs its given this world. For all the workarounds that have wasted our time. For all the jackass tricks that we have to work out to get our sites working for IE6 users. For the stupidity of not upgrading the browser to standards compliance over time … and in general, for making the internet look downright ugly and purposeless…

And as a result, I’ve vowed never to stoop low enough to put in any extra code just to make IE6 work like it should have in the first place. That’s for my own sites… If my clients want bugs fixed in IE6, well, that’s a different story. They cant turn their clients away…

Now you know why I truly, truly, hate Internet Explorer 6.

(Sigh)

Here are some truly brilliant browsers, if you ever feel like using them (please do, they’re all free, much quicker and safer than Internet Explorer 6) :

• Firefox – My favourite for the security add-ons
• Opera – Brilliant option 2
• Safari -  From Apple
• Flock
• Camino

Use any of them… Just dont use Internet Explorer.

Now Google Calendar can sync with iCal. They’ve added iCal’s CalDAV support. So you can now sync upwards from iCal to gCal; that is, you can add an event in iCal and have it shown. Find out how to synchronise Google Calendar with iCal at their Getting Started page.

There are some issues though… According to Google:

• Event reminders/alarms don’t currently sync between Google Calendar and iCal. Event reminders will only function according to the calendar settings of the application in which they were originally created.
• When an event is created or modified in iCal, Google Calendar email and SMS notifications are not distributed at this time.
• This feature (iCal File > New To do) will either be unavailable for selection or you’ll receive an error when selected.
• It’s not possible to browse room availability or reserve conference rooms from within iCal. This feature is not supported by CalDAV.
• For a small percentage of Google Calendars, a certain iCal bug will prevent your events from appearing inside the iCal application. We’ve notified Apple of the issue, and hope that they’ll fix it soon.

Well, now that does not help our notification issues… but atleast you can see what your schedule is going to be like. Hopefully Google and iCal will get these two apps working well together. I for one will be really happy when they do.

WordPress is now on version 2.6. Here’s a short video.

It should help you decide whether you want to upgrade or not. Coloursalive.net is currently upgraded!

The entire ColoursAlive team working on the Covenant India Website were pleasantly surprised at the cheering that it received when unveiled at Covenant India’s Corporate Office in Chennai.

Covenant India is a HR Consulting firm that has grown exponentially over the last 5 years, from being a team of 3 in 2003 to a team of 115 in 2008. The entire organisation is perpetually pervaded with a spirit of bonhomie and coupled with enthusiasm towards their work.

ColoursAlive salutes their spirit, and enthusiasm and wishes that they don’t lose that ‘family’ attitude even when they’re a company of 1000.

I’ve mentioned a number of reasons to use a browser like firefox on my photography blog, but now with the release of Firefox 3 to the public, there are more reasons to consider.

A world Record! Be a part of it… at the time of writing, there had already been 3.6million downloads across the globe.

Go for it! Get the best browser on the net!

I’ve been looking around for some solutions… I’m working on a website that needs to have a file sent to an email address via a web form. One of the quickest solutions that I’ve found so far is “Design By Elle“, on the page titled “PHP mailer form with file attachment“.

Now, the page loads slowly, so do be patient, but it does load, and the PHP form is quite simple to use.

Other links to pages on which this script is based on:

• Scott Lucht’s phMailer
• Advanced email in PHP by Kevin Yank on Site Point
• PHP: Sending Email (Text/HTML/Attachments) on webcheatsheet.com

Now, I’ve not checked out these three links, but maybe you’ll find them useful.