Over the past few months I’ve been working on a new little app. Yes a few months is a long time to spend on a ‘little’ app but I’ve been working on it by myself and only in my spare time, also my designing skills definitely aren’t on par with my development skills so designing stuff takes me ages.

Anyway, the main reason I created this app was because it is an app I really would like to use myself. In fact I’ve actually been using it as I’ve been developing it!

The new app is called bindrr. It lets you log in and store all of your favourite recipes in one place whether the recipe is from a website, book or anywhere else. All of the recipes you add are easily searchable and you can access them from any computer or mobile device with an internet connection (native, offline mobile applications will hopefully follow soon).

I’m looking for a few beta testers who enjoy cooking and would like to try out the app before anybody else. If you like the sound of bindrr, head over to the site and fill out the form! I’ll be sending out the beta invitations pretty soon.

I was half way though a new theme that looked totally different to this one but then decided to go for a really clean, minimal look to the site so that it’s easier to browse and read content which I hope is what most people come here for anyway.

The new theme uses the Thematic WordPress Framework as it’s base which meant I could get the site ready in super quick time!

Dropbox – Free

Not only is this (in my view) an essential iPhone app but it is an essential app to use on OSX, Windows, Linux, iPhone, Android and probably more. Dropbox allows you to sync a folder with the web so that you can access the files on any computer you have Dropbox installed on. It also does a load of other things such as allowing you to retrieve deleted files. Head over to the Dropbox site to see a full description of what the application does.

The Dropbox iPhone app lets you access all of the files in your Dropbox from anywhere. It’s also a great way of getting PDF files onto your iPhone which can sometimes be a pain.

Instapaper – Free / $4.99

I’m sure I’m not the only developer (and probably other professions) that has an RSS reader full of really interesting articles just waiting to be read that I never seem to get around to reading. This is where Instapaper gets useful. Once you have signed up you can add a ‘Read Later’ button to your browser, simply go to an article you want to keep for later and click this button. Instapaper will add the articles you choose and next time you open up the app whilst you have a wifi connection it will save nice easy to read versions of the article onto your phone that you can open and read whenever you get a free minute no matter where you are!

Reeder – $2.99

Pretty simple this one. Reeder is the best looking, easy to use, feature packed RSS reader I have found for the iPhone. It works in unison with my Google Reader account (which I use on my desktop). Plus you can save straight to Instapaper from it!

They are also working on a version for the Mac.

Wunderlist – Free

Wunderlist is a very good to do list application that has versions for Windows, Mac and iPhone. All of your items are synced via the web so you can have multiple instances running in unison.

They have been adding a lot of new features lately which worries me a bit because I hope they don’t go the way of a lot of other to do list apps by trying to do so much that it becomes a bit of a pain to use. So far though everything works very well and looks great so maybe I’m being a tad harsh there.

Instagram – Free

Instagram is a nifty little app that lets you take photo’s, add a cool filter to them and then share them with your friends on Twitter, Facebook and some other places.

Whilst not really helping with productivity like the other apps I’ve mentioned, I think Instagram deserves a mention for being so much fun.

Hopefully those apps will give you something new to try out and like I said before feel free to add your own in the comments, I’m sure there are hundreds of great apps that I’ve missed!

Now that my portfolio is out of the way I’m working on the new version of this site, unfortunately me being predominantly a developer means it takes me ages to design something that even resembles something good so you might have to make do with this theme for a little bit longer.

Any free time I’ve had has been spent either on my xbox or on Forrst. Forrst is a pretty awesome, invite only site for designers and developers to connect, show their work and get help. Anyway, I’ve got a spare invite so if someone thinks Forrst is something they’d like (and would use) leave a comment with a link to some of your work and I’ll send it over.

First for a re-haul is my portfolio site, because I wasn’t doing a totally new design, just a pretty major upgrade/re-design sort of job I decided to start with that one. The design for that is about 80% – 90% done so I’ll be starting to code it in the next few days, I’ll get some links up to that when there is something to see.

Second in line for a facelift is this site. I’ve decided I should really do a custom design for this site rather than use one from ThemeForest (aff link). I did toy with the idea of switching to Tumblr so that I could have a go at making a skin for Tumblr but I decided against it since it could pretty much destroy the traffic I get from search engines if I started moving links and pages around. In the end I decided I’m just going to go for a nice simple WordPress theme (made by me this time!).

After that I’m going to finish the project I’ve been working on for the last month so that I can launch it. I’d also like to make an Android / iPhone app and an API for it if I get the time.

Some other suff you might like

First off, Forrst. I got invited to Forrst by Kyle the creator and it’s one of the first social things that I’ve really got hooked on. I might look on Twitter or Facebook from time to time but I seem to be on Forrst multiple times every day. It’s invite only at the minute so if you’re a developer / designer get your name down and you’ll get an invite eventually!

Next up, I’ve been a CodeIgniter addict for a while now (in fact, that new project I was talking about is written in it!) but I only found out about the CodeIgniter Podcast recently. So far I’ve only listened to the first episode but I found it really informative and I’ll definitely be listening to the rest.

Today I came across a great little site that lets you get the links to the latest versions of the most popular javascript libraries quickly and easily.

You find your library on the page and click the ‘Copy’ button. Then all the code you need to include the library in your page is copied to your clipboard.

I really like simple, easy to use sites like this that do one thing and do it well rather than trying to do too much.

The Google Font API allows you to use any font from their font directory or you can use the font loader to load other fonts which they co-developed with TypeKit.

Using the Google Font API

There’s no point in re-inventing the wheel so I’ll just link to a great article and video guide by Jeffrey Way over at Nettuts. You can have a look at his article here.

Other Info

The great thing about the Google Fonts API is the fact that you can still use CSS3 effects on your text if you want to. As for page performance, obviously the initial download may slow your page down slightly but they do try to cache everything to minimise and extra loading times, just make sure you don’t try and load too many fonts!

Lately I’ve been messing around learning ASP.NET MVC which has been interesting, but I haven’t had time for much else. Luckily I’ve done a lot of PHP and classic ASP programming so the c# syntax wasn’t too new and I love CodeIgniter so the MVC part wasn’t scary either.

Now I’m working on trying to set up a database access layer in Visual Studio to connect to a Sybase database we have on the development server at work which isn’t so straight forward. Maybe I should start using Twitter so I can just tweet when I get stuck with things like this.

I’ve also been doing a lot of work on one of my clients sites and updating my portfolio site to make it look a bit better. I was thinking of re-doing this site so it’s a bit more simple but I’m worried about damaging my rankings in the search engines. I’ll have to give it some thought.

In the future I’m going to try and add more tutorial posts and less roundup posts because I think there’s waayyy too many of those on the internet now, my RSS reader is packed full of them.

Finally, I ordered the Smashing Magazine book (not an affiliate link) last week (a bit late, I know) but I’ll maybe get some photos and or a review up when it comes and I’ve had a chance to look at it.

Edit: Ok, I’ve decided I’m going to try using Twitter again, this time properly…hopefully! http://twitter.com/jmz360

I’ve been learning loads about CodeIgniter and Doctrine when I’ve had time aswell and I’d really like to write a few blog posts on that when I’m not as busy but it looks like I’m going to have loads of work on for the next month or two at least.

Hopefully when I get back to having time to post here I’ll come back with loads of great ideas for articles.