What is Sendy?

Sendy is a self hosted email newsletter application that lets you send trackable emails via Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). Complete with reports, subscriber and list management.

Sendy was born out of frustration of paying for expensive email campaign services. We send newsletters via Campaign Monitor for SUBERNOVA and MockVault. No doubt Campaign Monitor is a great email campaign service, the price goes up to hundreds of dollars just for one email campaign. As our subscriber base grows, the cost per campaign grows significantly high.

We really don’t ask for much, just a newsletter application that enables us to manage subscribers, send campaigns and view reports. What we managed to find were either too expensive or flat out ugly.

The best service we’ve found

The best service we’ve found is Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). It offers email sending at high deliverability rates and at an insanely low price. $1 (Amazon SES) versus $150 (Campaign Monitor) for 10,000 emails?? Sounds great! But they don’t offer the ability to send trackable newsletters and manage lists and subscribers.

Amazon SES is in need of an application that is built around it.

And so we built it. We even added client access features so that you can create logins for your clients to send newsletters on their own at a price you set.

You can have Sendy too at a one time introductory fee of $40 (we’ll be pricing it at $59 at some point).

We previously talked about our new app, MockVault. It’s now available immediately for signups!

What is MockVault?

MockVault lets you manage your designs and versions with ease at the backend and present them professionally to your clients at the frontend.

To get a design approved, it’s not all about the design, it’s how you sell it. When sending a design to your client over the web, different format yields different results. If you’ve been sending mockups in PDF, Powerpoint or even in multiple JPEGs, your designs may not look like how it should be when it’s coded. This results in unnecessary requests for changes, wasting you time.

For over 13 years, we’ve tried and tested several ways of presenting our designs to clients. Only one format deemed the most effective in terms of getting it approved. It’s by placing annotations over the mockups and displaying it like the actual website.

The reason why annotations raises approval rates is because it’s easy for them to understand what they’re looking at. Guiding your clients through is critical if you want them to see the design the way you see it.

It is difficult to guide your client through your design over the web. With MockVault, it’s easy.

Check out MockVault!

There’s no surprise that more people around the world, not just Times Square alone, doesn’t know what a browser is, don’t use the internet as much as we would like to think, are less savvy and would get lost if the site is designed to be more complicated than they would have liked.

It’s a good place to start thinking about these users who are going to use the next website you design. Watch the following video and be surprised:

Found at: UX Magazine

If you haven’t heard of SUBERNOVA, it’s an online project management application (designed and developed by us!) that makes you more productive by taking the stress out of remembering important details of your projects, lets you track time, send invoices and estimates, collaborate with team mates or clients and keeps your business smooth by keeping tabs on late payments, deadlines and more.

The same high gloss magazines but with interactive elements. What a brand new experience!

Adobe announced that AIR would run on Android, and Adobe has already announced its Packager for iPhone tool that will allow Flash apps (including AIR) to run on Apple mobile platforms.

That is exciting! Can’t wait to leverage our existing AS3 skills to build native mobile apps for iPhone and iPad.

Aside from mini notebooks, most notebooks are heavy and we all lived with that. Apple didn’t leave it at that, instead they came up with an innovative solution to solve that problem, by carving each new notebooks from a single piece of aluminum.

This not only reduces faults and breakdowns, but reduces the weight of the notebooks as they are not constructed from different pieces of metal.

The click button on the trackpad was also removed and trackpad widened leaving more room for multitouch gestures like swiping, pinching, rotating etc. The whole trackpad is a click button by the way (2 fingers for right click).

Here’s some pictures of the new slimmer Macbook Pro 15” to ogle at, enjoy.

Adobe’s Creative Suite, the tools of our trade, is getting a bump onto it’s brand new version, Creative Suite – CS4. But it feels like we’ve only used CS3 for a while!

At the blink of an eye, Adobe Creative Suite 4 will be unveiled next week, here’s the dates / timings for different zones:

Europe – 11:00 am CET (Sept 23)
North America – 9:00 am Eastern (Sept 23)
North America – 9:00 am Pacific (Sept 23)
Australia – 4:00pm AET (Sept 24)
Singapore/Hong Kong – 2:00 pm (Sept 24)
India – 11:30 am IST (Sept 24)

Adobe will be doing a special web broadcast to unveil the new Creative Suite 4 on the above dates. So head on there to register if you’re interested to be part of this special web event.

As gathered from various sources, the update of this new creative suite will be minor, nothing revolutionary. There will be various new features for all CS4 applications but let’s take a peek at the more popular Flash and Photoshop CS4:

Flash CS4

Flash CS4 will come with a completely new and “proper” timeline dubbed Motion Editor as well as a new object-based motion tween model – frameless flash animation. The new model includes no keyframes and is said to facilitate vast timeline animations to work with and make Flash much easier for beginners.

Well I’m not really sure about that,  I have read mixed reviews about the new model and some says that it could be a new learning curve that further fragments the Flash community.

As most people are still torn between AS2 and AS3, now we might have a hard time trying to play catch up with the new source file formats.

Photoshop CS4

Basically Photoshop CS4, codename Stonehenge, will allow 3D objects to be imported as wireframes. Wonder how this will benefit the majority of graphic and web designers.

A new feature I am more happy with is the new “Tabbed Panel” style of managing multiple documents in Photoshop as you can see from the above screenshot. This also applies to all new CS4 applications.

Sneak Peak at the new Photoshop CS4

Also, Photoshop CS4 will feature a Flash services panel, natural canvas rotation and content aware image resizing. More features includes some of these new features:

• Enhanced masking feature
  Layer Mask Density option allows you to fade away the effect of a layer mask gradually revealing the parts that are hidden.
• Real-time filters with no color depth restrictions
  Allows filters to use graphics card power in image processing instead of the CPU, which means all operations will be much faster.
• Liquid resize feature
  Allows you to shrink or enlarge a photo disproportionally without stretching it.
• Enhanced Quick Selection tool
  The Refine Edge dialog now has a new feature to deals much better with complex surfaces such as fur ensuring a more defined line between subject and background.
• Improved Dodge and Burn tools
  Improved algorithm in these tools lets results look less destructive and more natural.
• Polished interface
  Photoshop interface brightness will be adjustable like in Adobe Bridge with buttons and dialog boxes look will be improved.
• Extended and enhanced color profile management.
  Multichannel, Device-Link and Abstract color profiles to be added.
• Other Photoshop CS4 new features and improvements:
  New technology for creating amazing panoramas.
  Rotatable canvas in 360 degree space
  Better HDR support
  Faster load time
  Enhanced vanishing point
  Better Black & White conversion
  Better RAW image processing

Screen Sharing

We can finally collaborate with each other in real time via a new feature that will allow users to initiate a screen-sharing session from the File Menu, thanks to Adobe’s conferencing business and Connect software. This will also apply to all CS4 applications. Graphic Designers who love to collaborate with each other will be happy with this new feature I suppose. Beginners who needs help desperately from their more experienced peers can also benefit from this new feature.

We’ll only know how good the new features are when this rolls out next week. Stay tuned.

Fantasy Interactive, once creators of everything rich media and Flash, who delivered the very famous Road Runner and MTV.com entirely in Flash, have shifted their technological direction and focus towards delivering more sites with HTML and AJAX.

Check out their brand new website in HTML which was freshly launched on the 1st May 08.

What’s brewing behind the scene is the much anticipated Propod (still under development), the next generation media blog which claims to let users easily integrate all their videos, audio, photos and writing seamlessly in one place. Propod is much similar to Wordpress, but the only difference is that it is developed using the Flash platform. Very interesting and I can’t wait to put my hands on it since most / if not all blogging platforms are in HTML/AJAX.

To take a sneak peek at Propod, visit Fantasy Interactive’s rich media blog @ Think Swedish to see Propod in action.

Hot off the stoves, Apple had just released it’s new line of iMacs, processor speed now at a whopping 3.06GHz!! Released in the U.S. and might probably take a few days or weeks to ship to Singapore, makes us just want to buy it!

Here’s the specs to make you drool (source from AppleInsider):

The new 20-inch 2.4 GHz iMac, for a suggested retail price of $1,199 (US), includes:

• 20-inch widescreen LCD display
• 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with a 1066 MHz front-side bus
• 1GB of 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM expandable to 4GB
• 250GB Serial ATA hard drive running at 7200 rpm
• a slot-load 8x SuperDrive® with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT with 128MB GDDR3 memory
• built-in iSight video camera
• built-in AirPort Extreme 802.11n wireless networking & Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
• mini-DVI out (adapters for DVI, VGA and Composite/S-Video sold separately)
• built-in stereo speakers and microphone; and
• the Apple Keyboard, Mighty Mouse and infrared Apple Remote.

The new 20-inch 2.66 GHz iMac, for a suggested retail price of $1,499 (US), includes:

• 20-inch widescreen LCD display
• 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with a 1066 MHz front-side bus
• 2GB of 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM expandable to 4GB
• 320GB Serial ATA hard drive running at 7200 rpm
• a slot-load 8x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB GDDR3 memory
• built-in iSight video camera
• built-in AirPort Extreme 802.11n wireless networking & Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
• mini-DVI out (adapters for DVI, VGA and Composite/S-Video sold separately)
• built-in stereo speakers and microphone; and
• the Apple Keyboard, Mighty Mouse and infrared Apple Remote.

The new 24-inch 2.8 GHz iMac, for a suggested retail price of $1,799 (US), includes:

• 24-inch widescreen LCD display
• 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with a 1066 MHz front-side bus
• 2GB of 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM expandable to 4GB
• 320GB Serial ATA hard drive running at 7200 rpm
• a slot-load 8x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO with 256MB GDDR3 memory
• built-in iSight video camera
• built-in AirPort Extreme 802.11n wireless networking & Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
• mini-DVI out (adapters for DVI, VGA and Composite/S-Video sold separately)
• built-in stereo speakers and microphone; and
• the Apple Keyboard, Mighty Mouse and infrared Apple Remote.

The new 24-inch 3.06 GHz iMac, for a suggested retail price of $2,199 (US), includes:

• 24-inch widescreen LCD display
• 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with a 1066 MHz front-side bus
• 2GB of 800 MHz DDR2 SDRAM expandable to 4GB
• 500GB Serial ATA hard drive running at 7200 rpm
• a slot-load 8x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS with 512MB GDDR3 memory
• built-in iSight video camera
• built-in AirPort Extreme 802.11n wireless networking & Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
• mini-DVI out (adapters for DVI, VGA and Composite/S-Video sold separately)
• built-in stereo speakers and microphone; and
• the Apple Keyboard, Mighty Mouse and infrared Apple Remote.