I found a simple, easy, and free way to put polls on blog posts a couple years ago, but then forgot about it. Here’s where Useful Stuff gets to help me remember for the next time I need it.

Wanda and I designed the 2011 Coastal Living Idea House at East Beach in Norfolk, Virginia. We had high hopes that this would be the first SmartDwelling to be constructed and designed in all the things that make a house a SmartDwelling, such as outdoor rooms, armoires for closets, dining booths for dining rooms, etc. But the project got started several months late because of circumstances Coastal Living couldn’t foresee, and so most of the smart stuff got cut out of the house as the developer and decorator defaulted back to the “normal way” of doing things.

We were deeply disappointed because that house, which could have been revolutionary, ended up being merely pretty. Not a bad thing, but just a shadow of what it could have been. Coastal Living sensed our disappointment and accepted our offer to do an extraordinary thing: issue a dual set of drawings that included both the house as designed and as built, and with a page that explains the differences.

The thought of what could have been was so unpleasant that it took me until last year to get the as-built drawings done. But that still left one problem: the sheet explaining the differences. I had promised to blog about those differences on the Mouzon Design blog, but the unpleasant memories always led me to do other things when I would have had time to do the posts.

This year, I’m starting a content calendar (more on that on another day) where I’ll do an Original Green post Monday, Lean on Tuesday, Studio Sky on Wednesday, Mouzon Design on Thursday, Useful Stuff (this blog) or We Do This Because… on Friday and New Media for Designers + Builders over the weekend. It’s great to have your content calendar stacked weeks in advance, so the most obvious series of posts for Mouzon Design was the Idea House series that would then be used to make the missing sheet of drawings. So that’s what I’m doing now.

A couple years ago, I did the first of the Idea House posts… it compared drywall closets to armoires. To me, an armoire is clearly superior (if each stores the same amount of clothes) but am I crazy, or do others agree? So I decided to put a poll on the post to find out. That’s where I found easypolls.net… and then forgot about it.

Finding it again wasn’t that hard because they have their name in small print at the bottom of the poll. But when I got there and signed in, it didn’t look the same as I remembered, and I didn’t see any way of matching the look of the previous poll. But after working with it awhile, here’s what I discovered:

Click the My Polls tab. Click on the title of one of the polls that’s formatted the way you want it. At the bottom of the window, click the Save As New button. This creates a new poll formatted like the old one. Just enter your question and answers and you’re good, right?

Not so fast… in the intervening two years, stuff has apparently changed with the formatting of the polls. As you’ll see in the post I did yesterday on open decks versus garden rooms (if you visit it soon), the shadow around the poll box is messed up. I only noticed after posting yesterday because the posted poll doesn’t look exactly like the previewed version on easypolls.net, but I’m going to tinker with it before posting next week so that it’s right.

Here’s how: Under the My Polls tab, click on a poll to edit it. Click the Look and Feel sub tab, then click Customize Poll Design. That gets you into the control panel where you can (hopefully) modify what you need.

Wish me luck!

Just had one of those moments when you say “I wonder if it’ll do this” and sure enough, it did! Create an action within OmniFocus, then drag an email on top of the action. It creates a link under the action… click on the link and it opens the email. It’s a wonderful way of organizing stuff to do, I think. I’ll report back once I’ve worked with this a while.

Right now, I’m going to create actions for prospects I need to keep in touch with, as it’s almost impossible to remember them all if you don’t respond that day. And in my case, much of my work is done in all-day chunks, so I can’t keep up with my email all during the day like many people do. So this could be a big deal for me.

One more thing… it’s not drag-and-drop, but you can also click the Attachment button on an action and paste a URL into the sub-window as well. Good way of attaching a link to an action.

Can’t believe I didn’t post this the first time I discovered it! I had to go back and discover it all over again… so this time, I’m posting so I don’t have to find it all over again. If you don’t like the standard narrow width of Facebook Comments on your website, you can change that. Go to the Comments Plugin where you’ll provide the URL on which the comment is located, the number of posts you want to show, and the width.

I use 4 pixels less than the column width because Facebook Comments are a little screwy and cut off a bit of the right side if you ask for full width. When you click Get Code, you’ll find two things: the JavaScript SDK (which is longer) and the shorter HTML code below. Sandvox lets me do something called Site Code Injection, where I can put the script in only once and it copies it to all pages, which saves a ton of time.

The HTML code goes into a Raw HTML object, which you’ll put wherever you want the comments on the page. Remember that you need to change the URL in the code for each different page you’re putting it on. The easy way to do this is to go to the page in the browser and just copy the URL from the top of your browser window.

I made a most disconcerting discovery Friday… you can’t link to an Activity update on LinkedIn! As a result, I have no way of linking to over a dozen book reviews people have posted on LinkedIn. You can Like, Comment, or Share an Activity, but none of these take you to a page with its own URL. With Facebook, it’s easy… just click on the date and it’ll take you to the post’s page, which you can link to. But not on LinkedIn. Does anyone know a way around this?

I held a book launch party at a most unconventional venue last night, thanks to Karja Hansen. But the right people showed up. Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Andrés Duany. Maricé Chael. Victor Dover. And several others, whose names I must learn. The meet-up got to the very essence of what it means to produce a book today, even with skaters swirling all around.

OmniFocus is the best organizational tool I’ve ever used, but I haven’t been using it to its best advantage until now. OmniFocus shows me everything that’s on today’s calendar (importing automatically from whatever calendar app I use… Calendar on the Mac, in my case). It also pulls together all soon-to-be due, currently due, and overdue items from all my project folders, plus my Today folder, which are the things I really need to get done today. It’s nifty that it’ll pull all this stuff together, filtering everything else out… but for me, it’s still too much.

I have the “curse of optimism,” thinking I’ll accomplish more than I often do. So the overdue stuff piles up in each project file. When that happens, it’s discouraging to even open OmniFocus… and so I’ll go days, weeks, or longer without using it. Obviously, not good.

Here’s how I’m changing: My Today folder contained both the repeating reminders of things I want to do each day, each week, etc. and also one-time things to get done today. This morning, I split it in two:

Daily Good is now my folder that contains my daily checklist, uncluttered with anything except those things I remind myself to do each day.

Today’s Opportunities is the folder that contains the non-repeating tasks I really need to finish today. And because it’s not cluttered with daily reminders, it looks like a much more manageable list.

There’s one more thing. I just finished Eat That Frog! (highly recommended) and one of the many good ideas in the book is that you should plan your day the evening before, not the morning of. And so tonight, if there’s anything left in Today’s Opportunities, I’ll leave it on there. And then knowing what tomorrow looks like much better than I would have a week ago or a month ago or a quarter ago (which is when most overly-optimistic scheduling tends to get made) I can put things in the folder for tomorrow that I really am likely to be able to complete.

Doing so is really easy: I’ll look over my projects and pick out the most urgent action items. Then, I merely tap on the action item to bring up its detail, tap on the project, and it brings up my project list. Because Daily Good is first and Today’s Opportunities is second, there’s no need to scroll. I just tap Today’s Opportunities and it moves the action item there. Cool, eh?

I should have posted this a few months ago, just so I could remember it… here’s how I created the letterpress text for New Media for Designers + Builders and the companion website:

Almost all of my text is set on a button bar styled like an iPhone button (before they got flattened by Jony Ive). The text is always the same color, but the offset up and down takes its color from the button it’s set on, so that the text has the appearance of being carved into the button. Here’s how it works (I’m using the CS6 version of Illustrator, and based my workflow on the one described here):

Make sure the document is set to RGB color.

Create the text. I use Futura Std Bold 18 point. Type your text. With the text selected, remove all fill and stroke. Click out of the text, then select it with the selection arrow so that you have the text box, but the now-invisible text is not highlighted. From the Appearance panel, select Add New Fill. Press the swatch thumbnail of the new fill in the Appearance panel. I use a text color setting of HSB 53, 34, 100.

With the new fill selected in the Appearance panel, go to the drop-down fx menu at the bottom of the panel, and under Illustrator Effects, select Inner Glow. This will pull up the Inner Glow dialog. Select Mode: Normal, and set the color to HSB 53, 79, 69, Opacity: 90%, Blur: 1.44 point, Edge.

With the text still selected, create a new fill like you did before. It will cover up the one with the inner glow, so drag it below the one with the inner glow in the Appearance panel. With the newest fill selected in the Appearance panel, go to the drop-down fx menu at the bottom of the panel, and under Illustrator Effects, select Distort & Transform>Transform. Set Move>Vertical: 1.0008 point. You may have to play with this a bit to get it to come out right when you open the file in Photoshop. Ideally, you should be showing one pixel of shadow above the text and one pixel of highlight below to make the text look as if it is being pressed into the background, but some colors just don’t come out right unless you increase or decrease this number, for reasons I can’t figure out. In any case, because this first one moved down, it will be your highlight color.

Click on the underlying background element… in my case, the button bar. If it’s a solid color, just double-click the Fill swatch to pull up the Color Picker and get the Hue in the HSB section. If the underlying background element is filled with a gradient (like my button bar) then you’ll need to click on the Gradient panel on the right to pull up the gradient settings. Get the Hue there. This hue setting will be the same for both the highlight and the shadow, so write it down.

Now, click the text you’re styling, click the Appearance panel, click the new fill you created a moment ago, and set the Hue to the number you just wrote down, and Saturation: 40, Brightness: 100.

With the text still selected, create a new fill like before (this is the third time you’ve done this).  With the new fill selected in the Appearance panel, go to the drop-down fx menu at the bottom, and under Illustrator Effects, select Distort & Transform>Transform. This time, set Move:Vertical: -1.0008. This moves this fill up, making it your shadow. Double-click the fill you’ve just created and set the Hue to the number you wrote down, and Saturation: 80, Brightness: 30.

Congrats… you’re done! And the text is fully editable. Enjoy!

I looked down at my left wrist on my last flight and my UP band was missing! I looked around frantically, but couldn’t find it. When had I seen it last? I synced before boarding, but distinctly remember putting it back on, like I always do. How had I lost it? Where was it?
I had resigned myself to buying another one, and was looking dejectedly down at the floor when I spotted it lying in the aisle of the plane, just ahead of me. But how did it come off?
I got the answer after we landed. My Briggs & Riley gear bag is in for repair… they have a lifetime warranty. So I’ve been using my Level8 backpack in the interim, as it’s designed specifically to carry a MacBook Pro. I noticed while putting the backpack on that its strap almost raked the UP off again. But wait… The Level8 has a strap at the top that fits neatly around the handle of my suitcase. So now I stack backpack on suitcase and don’t risk raking the UP again.

I’m thinking through the naming of components in SketchUp cabinet drawings because I want those same names to be what is used in the working drawings that are produced from them. It also helps because if you have two different cabinets that use the same components that occur in one SketchUp model, if you change one of the components, it changes that component everywhere. Let’s say, for example, that you have a 36" wide base cabinet and you need another one that’s 27" wide. If you duplicate the first cabinet and then start shrinking stuff down, it shrinks it in both cabinets. Not good.

So you therefore need a system of naming that allows you to select the components that will change, Edit>Component>Make Unique, and then change some part of the name in a systematic way. Generally, what I’m doing is giving each element a plain-English name with a suffix that indicates the size of box that it’s a part of. For example:

vanity leg front 28 is designed for a 28" tall vanity, not counting the countertop. You don’t need to add dimensions for vanity width or depth because the leg has nothing to do with those dimensions… the only important dimension is the height of the leg.

vanity frame front 18.5 is designed for a vanity whose box is 18 ½" wide. The frame is narrower because of the legs, but that’s immaterial… you simply need to know which box the frame belongs to.

drawer 4x4x14 is a bit different. The 4x4 refers to the fact that the drawer front fits in a 4" x 4" opening. Because I allow 1/16" tolerance all around, the actual drawer front is 3 7/8" square. The 14" is the depth of vanity that the drawer fits into.

This may sound really obscure, but maybe it’ll be useful to someone else somewhere. I want my websites to left-justify, otherwise some elements like the main body float in the available browser window, whereas others like the site menu stay left-justified. I finally figured it out several months ago for the Studio Sky site, but didn’t blog about it. This time, I went painstakingly through the main.css files of both the Studio Sky site and the Mouzon Design site, trying item after item until I finally hit upon it.

The tricky thing was that the code was in the Sidebar & Callouts section of the code. It’s a segment called #page-content, and you have to set hard margins. I’m using 16 pixels left and right, and 0 pixels top and bottom. Problem solved. Solution remembered… this time!

I just made a favicon for a website… it’s the little icon that shows up just before the URL in your browser. I downloaded the Windows ICO plug-in for Photoshop and installed it in Photoshop’s Plug-Ins folder, but when I tried to Save As, it wasn’t one of the file format options… and as a matter of fact, most other options weren’t there, either. It turns out that the original artwork was in an Illustrator file, where the default colors are CMYK, not RGB… and most formats apparently don’t use CMYK. But once I changed the format to RGB, then all of the options reappeared.

Never thought I’d say it, but I’m really liking HoursTracker, the iPhone app I’m now using to track time. I haven’t kept timesheets in over a decade for two reasons: First, it was kinda depressing to watch my average hours per week climb from 80 to 90 to 100 back in the 1990s. Second, when you’re averaging over 100 hours per week, that means you’re working a lot of late nights and it’s tough to sit down when you’re brain-dead sometime after midnight and remember what you did all day. But if you don’t, it becomes almost impossible to get it right if you’re trying to remember it at the end of the week, or the end of the pay period.

So for a long time, I simply didn’t do hourly work. I either quoted fixed fees or worked on a day rate, where people brought me in for a full day of work. Now, however, I’ve partnered up with two great friends and some of the work we’re doing needs to be done on an hourly basis. So I’ve reluctantly started keeping time again.

I did some research, and it seems that HoursTracker is a favorite of several reviewers, so I got the paid version ($4.99) to avoid the ads in the free version. HoursTracker’s idea is simple: create some jobs, then clock into one of them when you begin work on it, and clock out when you finish. Export reports via email.

The beauty of it is that you can clock in or out with three clicks: 1) launch HoursTracker, 2) tap on the job, and 3) tap Clock In Now. There are options, of course, like starting or stopping the clock at a time other than now, editing comments, etc. But the basic operation is really simple. Give it a try!

I’ve started doing most of my design development in SketchUp. But for construction documents, PowerCADD is a much better tool, so it’s necessary to move the design at the beginning of construction documents.

I draw using SketchUp’s Architectural Design Style, but that style includes extension lines, which have no place in construction documents, in my opinion. So to export, I switch to Engineering Style, which is all white and very plain… so I get just the lines I’m looking for.

Next, I select Camera>Parallel Projection and then cycle through the views I need, which may include several of the following:

⌘-1: top

⌘-2: bottom

⌘-3: front

⌘-4: back

⌘-5: left

⌘-6: right

⌘-7: isometric

To get that view from SketchUp to PowerCADD, I Export>2-D Graphic… and select AutoCAD 2010 as the format. Be sure to click Options… and be certain the Full Scale checkbox is selected, otherwise it’ll do some strange things with the scale of the drawing.

Next, open the dwg file in PowerCADD, copy all the drawing elements, and Paste Special (At Mouse and At Scale options selected) into the main drawing you’re working on. Change the lineweights to your standards (my basic drawing lineweight is .13mm) and you’re set.

Apple has a great program called “Joint Venture.”  Although it might initially sound pricey at $500/year, it has MORE than paid for itself in the now three years that I’ve been a member.  I joined after my hard drive crashed on a flight to visit a client.  I went straight to the Apple store where they explained that if I joined the program they would give me a loaner to use while they sent mine for repair and made arrangements for me to pick up my computer and return the loaner at a store in DC when I returned.  I didn’t miss a beat.  The JV guy at the Louisville store couldn’t have made this easier.  I’ve taken advantage of the loaner when I’ve had repairs made on 3 or 4 other occasions.  Great for someone like me with no spare computer lying around.

A JV member goes to the top of any wait list—say, genius appointments in the store, but, better still, JV members can make appointments for a phone call from a genius on line.  I made one today, scheduled it for 45 minutes later, they called me at the appointed hour and in about 10 minutes they’d solved the problem and I was back to work—no trip to the store required.  Great for someone like me with no IT department.

I’m also a member of the Apple Business Team which means I call the store when I’m on my way and they are waiting for me when I get there to offer whatever help or advice I need on software, hardware, whatever.  It’s great to bypass the pandemonium that is most Apple stores and simply get the help you need.

As a Business and JV member, they also proactively contact me from time to time to let me know of benefits that are available that I’m not using.  Recently they did a great hour of training for me and Will on Aperture.

If you use a Mac, I highly recommend both Joint Venture ($500/year) and joining the Business Team (free).  There are other benefits to both.  Minimizing down time has been enough for me.

Mike Watkins

Dropbox says that there’s no good way to have two (or more) Dropbox accounts installed on one user of one computer. But there is. I created a Dropbox-StudioSky folder for my company and a Dropbox-Mouzon folder for my personal use in the Home folder of my MacBook Pro. I then went to the Dropbox menu bar icon and pulled down on the gear in the lower right corner of the resulting dialog box. I then clicked Preferences… then chose the Account tab. In the Account dialog box, I clicked Unlink This Computer…

This means that Dropbox was still running, but didn’t know which account to use… so in a moment, it came up with the beginning dialog box that asks whether to open a new account or use an existing account. You have to key in your email and password, and give it your computer’s name (Steve’s Retina MacBook Pro, in my case). Here are the next steps:

• Tell Dropbox to “Continue with full setup.”

• Choose Advanced, which will let you tell it where your Dropbox folder is.

• Choose “I want to choose where to put my Dropbox,” and click the Change button.

• Dropbox will bring up a navigation dialog and ask you to “Choose a new place to put your Dropbox. A folder named "Dropbox” will be created inside the folder you select.“ So I chose Dropbox-StudioSky. There’s a Dropbox folder there already… I’m doing this for the second time to make sure I’m telling you all the steps correctly. Nonetheless, I clicked Select without going into the existing Dropbox folder… I’m just in the enclosing Dropbox-StudioSky folder instead.

• Dropbox says "There is already a folder called Dropbox in /Users/stevemouzon/Dropbox-StudioSky. Do you want to merge all the existing files in that folder into your Dropbox or choose another location for your Dropbox?” So I clicked Merge, and then Continue.

• When you’re doing the Advanced setup setup, Dropbox also lets you choose whether to sync all of the folders in your Dropbox or do something called Selective Sync where you can sync only some of them. I chose to sync all of them, so I left the radio button on the default option and clicked Install.

• It then asks you if you want Dropbox on your smartphone, so you can give it your phone number if you like. It follows that with a couple welcome screens (you can skip the tour if you like). When you click Finish, you’re all set up!