Wrapp Up – Chris Van Patten

In this age of Snowdens and NSA spying, you might be spending more time thinking about your privacy online. Unfortunately, public wifi—which many of us rely on every day—can be a huge opportunity for hackers and spies to grab your data and use it for nefarious purposes. That’s where Cloak comes in. Cloak is a “VPN”—a “virtual private network”—that helps you keep your connection secure and hackers out. Cloak is a VPN service that helps you secure your Internet connection. Cloak starts at $1.99 per month—less than a cup of coffee at that café you loiter at. The base plan starts with 5 GB of bandwidth per month, and you probably won’t even come close to using it. VPNs have existed for ages, but at this price point subscribing is a no-brainer, especially when you factor in the beautiful and easy to use applications that Cloak has built. (The service is currently Mac and iOS-only.) In this episode, my good friend Peter Upfold is my guest on the show. Peter introduced me to Cloak through a post on his blog, and I was excited to have him come share the service with the Wrapp Up audience. Secure your Internet connection with Cloak – WU18 — Audio player [powerpress] Secure your Internet connection with Cloak – WU18 — Transcription Just a reminder, these transcriptions are prepared by Rev.com. I scan through them before publishing, but I don’t clean them up (too much). If things are hard to understand, listen to the show to see what we actually said! Chris: Hello everybody, good morning, afternoon or evening, good morning, good morning, afternoon, evening etc. I am Chris Van Patten and after that long intro this is The Wrapp Up, which is a podcast about apps and web services and digital tools that help entrepreneurs and marketers and digital folks, developers, users everywhere. This week we have a special guest, I’m super excited to welcome Peter Upfold, who is a long time friend and collaborator, a brilliant developer and system administrator and all sorts of things and he is based in the UK, welcome Peter. Peter: It’s great to be here, thanks for inviting me. Chris: We’ve known each other for a long time probably — Peter: Probably too long. Chris: Never too long, but it’s certainly been about ten years or very close to that. It’s funny how the time flies, but anyway, that aside, Peter has brought an app to share with us a web service and why don’t you tell us what that service is. Peter: Sure, what I’m going to bring to the table today is the service called Cloak. Cloak is the VPN service so for those of you who don’t know what that is; basically the idea is you’re on a untrusted connected maybe, you go to accomplish something and you’re sharing the air with everybody else around you and you don’t really want people to be watching what you’re doing, maybe you’re logging into a site which doesn’t let you transmit your password securely and you don’t want everybody around you to get that password or just to have access to anything they shouldn’t. The idea with a VPN is you connect securely to it, you send all your traffic to it and then it appears out on the Internet from that remote point, so everything on your network on the local network is completely encrypted and nobody can see into it. Chris: That’s cool. Peter: It’s a particularly — yeah, and it’s really nice though, it is Apple devices only so that they’re for a Mac client and they’ve got an IOS client as well so that there’s that so for some people it already isn’t interesting. It’s a really nice implementation I think. You’ve got the iOS side now; with the iOS side there are limitations in what you can do with iOS in terms of what apps you’re allowed to do so it has to work with iOS with built-in VPN functionality so it uses the Cisco IP sect protocol which isn’t quite as good as it does, as the way it does it on the Mac but it’s very good. You install the app, it will then extend you across to install a profile and then in the settings app on your iPad or iPhone or iPod Touch you will get the VPN setting will show up and you just flip that over to switch it on and from that moment on you get little VPN icon coming up in the status bar and all the traffic then is being secured. You can go to some around a person’s house, or you can get on in the coffee shop and you can work and you know that everything that you’re communicating is not visible to everybody on that local network. It goes securely across the Cloak and then appears out on the Internet from that point. Chris: Excellent. Peter: It’s nice that one. Chris: When I think VPN or Internet security and all this kind of stuff it seems… Your first instinct might be to think about it as very technical and difficult to use and requiring coding and knowing about ports and protocols and all this stuff, but what I love about Cloak, as an outsider, is that they seem to be doing a lot of work toward making the process very easy and demystifying a lot of that and really making it beautiful which I think maybe is part of the reason why they only support Apple products at the moment. Peter: Maybe, yes. Chris: It seems like a very easy to use way to get this started. A little bit of a sidetrack, so the idea that VPN is that you’re passing your traffic through this saying to the VPN essentially, “Fetch me this website” and then it fetches it and then it comes to you in a sort of a very simplistic way. In this age of Snowden and NSA and all this sort of stuff that’s been floating around, why should we trust Cloak or what makes using Cloak a better option than not? Peter: This kind of story, very complicated, very quickly; at the moment; I don’t know how much to say given this is going out but there’s nothing that a casual user that doesn’t really understand technology is going to be able to do to protect yourself from the possibility of somebody with that level of resource from being able to see what you’re doing and I don’t think Cloak pretends to be designed to do that. I’ve talked a little bit about the recent news stories about this in a blog and one of the things that attracted me to it originally is they actually wrote a blog post; this is before all this stuff happened, explaining exactly what, exactly how it worked but also what it could do and what it couldn’t do. They were really honest about this is the capabilities of this product and this is what we can’t do. None of these VPN services are something that you should use if you’re trying to do something that’s, that you want to keep completely secret, but he odds aren’t about how, if you want to keep something completely secret it’s quite difficult to do anything electronic, ultimately. The point I’m making I suppose is what I’d like to say, were really honest about that about this does this but it doesn’t do this, it doesn’t protect you from this; and I like that. Chris: Yes, the transparency is really refreshing I would say in this sort of age of, you know we don’t really know how Facebook uses our data, we don’t really know how Twitter uses our data but they’re being very open and pro-active about saying that which I think is a good thing. Just to briefly touch on the pricing, I’ll sort of just walk through their pricing chart here so it’s a $1.99 per month for 5 gigabytes of data; $7.99 a month for 25 gigabytes of data or unlimited at $14.99 per month, so really affordable. I think my family has a cell phone plan that is limited to 6 gigabytes and we never even use it so I mean if you’re thinking oh, I probably use a lot, certainly for mobile you probably don’t use as much as you think and two bucks a month isn’t unreasonable at all. Peter: Yes. There’s another real cool thing that I want to mention. I’ve talked a little bit about how the IOS product works it uses that built-in, you just go to the settings app and you just flip on the VPN. On the Mac they’ve got a dedicated app but presently you’ve got a lot more freedom on the Mac with the app to do what it wants. It uses the open VPN protocol and the really cool thing about it is you can transfigure it to automatically switch on when it goes into a network it doesn’t know. You can teach it, these are my home networks, these are the networks that I trust and any time you connect to any other network it will actually shut off all of your outgoing connections, establish a secure connection to Cloak before then switching all the outgoing connections on again. You can go somewhere and you know that nothing is leaking out between the time you connect to the potentially untrustworthy network and the time that Cloak is connected and securing your traffic and that’s a really cool feature, or particularly on the Mac side that makes it potentially useful for that scenario. Chris: Very easy to save your gigabytes that way. Peter: Yeah, and you don’t have to worry about when to switch it on and switch it off because it’s going to do that detection of oh, you’re on a trusted network or not and automatically manage that and it will come up with a little notification up in the top right saying, “I’m protecting you now” and then when it switches off you’ll know about that as well. Chris: Excellent. The service is Cloak, you can find it at getcloak.com, it’s on Mac IOS, IOS6 or later and Mac 10.7 or later and there you have it. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Peter, and sharing Cloak with us. Peter: It’s been great, thank you. Chris: Where can people find you on the Internet? Peter: You can find me at Peter.upfold.org.uk and I’m also on Twitter @PeterUpfold. Chris: Excellent, we’ll put those links in the show notes as well as the link to Cloak. All right, thanks so much for joining us. This has been the Wrapp Up, we’ll talk to you next week. The post Secure your Internet connection with the Cloak VPN – WU18 appeared first on Chris Van Patten.

The late, lamented EverPix was a fantastic service for keeping a “cloud-based” backup of all your photos from all your devices. When it shut down, many users were left scrambling for alternatives. That’s where Loom, a freemium photo storage application, comes in. Loom is a freemium photo storage and archival application Loom works similarly to EverPix. You install client applications on your various devices (Mac laptop, iPhone, etc.) and it takes care of the rest, automatically uploading them to the Loom servers. It’s able to preserve your existing photo galleries and structure, so you can easily find photos. The cloud-based storage means you can access your photos from any device, so anything you upload from a desktop is accessible on a phone, for instance. Loom isn’t perfect; I’ve found the desktop app frequently hangs and loses connection to the Loom servers, and the web interface could use some more polish (the ability to more easily share photos, zoom in on them, etc.) but it’s otherwise the best in the bunch. It’s affordable too: $40 per year for 50 GB of space, which is probably enough for most people (250 GB is only $99 per year). As always, the audio and transcription of this episode are below. Keep your photos safe with Loom – WU17 — Audio player [powerpress] Keep your photos safe with Loom – WU17 — Transcription Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Wrapp Up, which is where we talk about apps and digital tools and things that will help you as an entrepreneur or a small business owner or just a tech savvy individual get the most out of the web. Today, I want to talk about an app called Loom, L-O-O-M. Loom is a basic premium application that lets you manage and sort of store your photos basically in the cloud as it were. Loom you get at loom.com. Again, L-O-O-M.com and it starts off basically as a little app that you download to your computer. You install this app, plug in your account details and everything and tell it where the photos are on your computer. For me as a Mac user I just point it to my iPhoto Library, as a Windows user you might have a different option there. Basically, when you do that, you tell it to go and Loom will instantly start uploading all of your pictures to the Loom service, the Loom web site. It keeps them all organized. If you have an existing album structure sort of laid out in iPhoto or what have you it will keep all of that and just transfer it over to their web site so you can still easily browse those photos in the way that you originally organized them. Loom also has an iOS app. On a previous episode I mentioned that Dropbox has this sort of automated, built in uploading feature from your iPhone so it will automatically take your photos on your phone, iPhone or Android and upload them to Dropbox. Loom does the same thing so you can pop in Loom on your iPhone or download it on Android and it will find all your pictures and automatically upload them to the Loom service, which is awesome. You don’t have to worry about photos anymore. It sort of does all that for you. It gives you the opportunity to delete everything off your phone. I had a problem with my iPhone. I only had the small 16 gigabyte version and a couple of weeks ago I found oh my goodness I have gigs upon gigs upon gigs of photos so after installing Loom and making sure that those were all uploaded to the service I just went through and deleted everything. I still have access to those photos because I just have to open the Loom app and I can browse to the right library, is this the right spot in my index there and download that again so I can use the photos if I want to share them or put them to Instagram or what have you. Loom is fantastic. It starts off at free for five gigabytes, a lot like Dropbox there. They also have bigger plans. There is a 50 gigabyte plan, which runs around $50 a year and then there’s the 100 gigabyte plan which is about $100 a year. You’re paying pretty close to $1 a gig per year, which is pretty reasonable given that it’s handling all of this automatic stuff for you. Loom also has the ability to go to their web site to view their photos. You can go to Loom.com and check out your photos and everything and again it keeps it all in your libraries and your albums for you. Then it lets you share those photos so you can check off a group of photos or a gallery of photos and get links to those photos. You can share easily for friends. They don’t need to have a Loom account to try it out, in order to view those photos, but it is strictly viewing photos. There’s no way to comment or share or like photos. It’s just simply viewing the photo, which to some people might be a bit of a disadvantage, but to me I love that because I would rather have my comments and liking everything happen over on Flickr. So I started to keep everything in Loom, every photo that I take whether it’s terrible or great or whatever and then I separate out later. Like this is a particularly good photo, let’s put it up on Flickr. That’s where people sort of find it through search engines and things like that. A few small problems that I have with Loom, very small. One is that their Mac app tends to be a little picky. So, the first time I opened it it said great starting to upload this many photos to upload left and then didn’t do anything, stopped uploading pictures and still don’t know why, but every so often when I turn on my computer Loom starts saying oh hey we’re uploading things even though it’s really not. The app is a little picky. Also, there’s an animation in the menu bar, which is their logo sort of turning around and doing things. It kind of drives me crazy. As of this writing I’m still uploading my original batch of photos from my computer. It’s been going for a couple of days now and it’s just taking a long time. I don’t like that. Also, the Loom web service, I like that when you share photos you can’t comment or like or anything like I mentioned before but you can’t zoom in to the photos either so if you’re on a small screen as I am on a Macbook Air you can see the whole photo, but it’s sort of shrunk down and there’s no way to zoom in unless you know how to grab the original source file and whatever. That’s frustrating and I think the other frustrating thing, which I know they’ve talked about fixing is that on the iOS app so you put all your photos into Loom and delete them off your phone, great, but if you want to download a photo to share it or send it in a message or something like that you can do that, but once you download the photo back to your photo album on your iPhone it uploads another copy to the Loom cloud as it were. That’s frustrating because then you end up with copies of photos and the copies don’t count towards your storage space on Loom. It’s able to tell oh this is the same photo that you have there, we’ll just count it as one, but it just sort of gets things disorganized. I would love them to have a way to just copy a photo and copy it to your clipboard like if you copy an image from Safari you can paste it into a text or whatever or e-mail. To have that option I think would be useful. Otherwise, those are small quibbles and they’re really getting better about fixing all those things. They seem like a really responsive team and really well-tuned to their users. I highly recommend checking out Loom. It is Loom.com, L-O-O-M.C-O-M. As always there will be links in the show notes that you can check out and find Loom very easily through there. Again, there’s always a transcription. There’s always this audio file if you want to send it along to friends. Be sure to stay tuned to Wrappup.com, W-R-A-P-P-U-P.com or chrisvanpatten.com which is going to take you basically to the same place and share it with friends, tell them you like it, follow us on Twitter @thewrappup, two Ps again. I hope you enjoy and we’ll talk to you soon. Bye, bye. The post Keep your photos safe with Loom – WU17 appeared first on Chris Van Patten.

As a digital nomad and web entrepreneur, I have a lot of files floating around that I need continuous access to. Bank statements, invoices, legal documents, and more. Whenever possible, I try to be completely paperless, and Dropbox, the free online file storage app, makes it possible. Dropbox, the free, fast online file storage and syncing platform By this point, Dropbox is admittedly ubiquitous, and I am sure my readers and listeners are well aware of how great it is. (And it is great.) But I still think it’s worth talking about apps that may already be an integral part of our process. Below, as always, you’ll find episode audio and a transcription. It’s a quick episode this week, so there’s no excuse for not listening! Keep your files safe and accessible with Dropbox — Audio player [powerpress] Keep your files safe and accessible with Dropbox — Transcription Hey, everyone out there in Internetland. Welcome to Wrapp Up, my podcast about apps and tools and digital solutions to all of your problems as an entrepreneur, business owner, or if you’re just sort of an Internet aficionado and you want to know what the next big thing is. That’s what we’re here for. But today, I’m not going to talk about the next big thing. In fact, what I’m going to talk about is something that is fairly old by Internet standards. It’s one of those apps that I use every day and take for granted. I think many of us do. We don’t really take the time to talk about how awesome this service is. That service is Dropbox. Dropbox is a free application that you install on your computer. You throw files into this folder and it uploads them to the Internet instantly. Again, it starts off at free and it’s fantastic. What makes Dropbox different than similar, sort of upload services? Basically, it’s how it works. This idea of a simple folder. You just put your stuff in and Dropbox uploads it automatically. If you have Dropbox in multiple places, you can actually have it installed on multiple computers and when you upload a file to one computer, it’s going to get downloaded to the other computer instantly, right? It’s keeping everything in sync. Because it does that through a simple folder on your computer’s operating system, it’s very easy to understand. There aren’t any complex apps you have to open and sort of upload, title your files, generate a link, and all that kind of stuff. It’s incredibly transparent. It’s Seamless. It happens in the background. It’s just so easy to use. Dropbox is one of those apps where … I’ve seen similar apps in the space for a long time. There’s MediaFire, SendSpace, YouSendIt, and all these different services, Box.com. There are a lot of options out there but Dropbox seems to be the one that is easiest to understand, which is why I think I’ve seen it the most, or being used the most by non-technical users, right? If you’re a website designer like myself and you need photos and if you need videos sent to you to put on a website, a lot of the times those are too big for emails, for whatever reason. You can say, “Well, just throw it into Dropbox.” Nine times out of 10, that makes sense and they’re able to do that very easily without a lot of headaches; there aren’t going to be a walkthrough, how the service works over the phone or something like that. Dropbox gives you, I believe around 5 GB of space to start with. What I love is that they have this fantastic referral program and just lots of opportunities to get more storage space. Whether it’s using a referral link like mine, which is cvp.me/dropbox and that will give both of us, you and me, a little bit of extra space. They have that referral program which is sort of one of the original growth hacking referral programs that you’ll see referred to a lot. In addition to that, they have other opportunities. There’s the Space Race, which is a bunch of colleges competed online who could sign up the most new Dropbox users. Every time you pass the certain miles, Dropbox would add a bunch of free space to your account. I still have a free Dropbox account. I haven’t upgraded yet. I have 16.6 GB. That’s a huge, a tremendous jump from where I was before. They’ll give you space if you upload your photos into them. Just a little bit more on that, they have IOS app. Obviously you kind of have to these days. You can browse your files on it, as you would and open a few things and preview things and move things around. They also have a photo upload feature, so it will automatically upload photos to your Dropbox account so you can access them anywhere. I don’t use this feature as much. In the future episode, I’m going to talk about why that is and what I’ve replaced it with. If you just have very simple needs, that’s like a great way to go. Check out Dropbox. Again, it’s free. You can get paid accounts. I think it’s $50 and $100 a year will get you even more space or something like that. Check them out. Again, it is Dropbox.com or if you’re feeling good, cvp.me/dropbox. This has been the Wrapp Up. Today, we talked about Dropbox and who knows what we’ll talk about next week. The best way to find out is to join us and also follow on Twitter. You can follow me directly @ChrisVanPatten. We also have @TheWrappUp. Occasionally, we post information and links and things over there. We’re trying to get better about it. So alright; until next time. I have been Chris Van Patten. You can find more episodes at WrappUp.com and I will talk to you soon. Bye-bye. The post Keep your files safe and accessible with Dropbox – WU16 appeared first on Chris Van Patten.

In the past eight or nine months, Van Patten Media has grown from a one or two (and occasionally three) person operation to a group of around ten freelancers working hard to build awesome websites and web products. I attribute that largely to Elance, the online resource for anyone looking to hire freelancers and contractors. Elance, a marketplace for global talent. Build your online/virtual team with Elance. Through Elance, I’ve found the editor of this programme (Wrapp Up), my personal assistant, writers, my bookkeeper, and more. Elance is a tremendous service for any entrepreneur looking to get serious about building a team, which is an essential step in the growth of a business. I’m a big believer in the power of teams, and Elance is a great way to get started. I’ve already shared my tips for hiring a virtual assistant. In a future post, I’ll talk more about the essentials of building a team and how you can start easily with services like Elance. I’m also planning a series of posts guiding you through Elance, so you can get started right away. Below are the rough transcription, provided by Rev.com and an audio player so you can listen to this week’s episode. Enjoy! Grow your virtual/online team with Elance — Audio player [powerpress] Grow your virtual/online team with Elance — Transcription Hello everyone and this is as always Wrapp Up where we talk about great apps and web services that can help you in your business, in your life and just generally. Today I want to talk about an app that I have been aware of for a long time, but I haven’t used it until recently, just until around March or so of this year. It has transformed my business and it has transformed my life. I depend on this service every day. That service is Elance. Elance is essentially a marketplace for freelancers and people who want to hire freelancers. For myself running Van Patten Media, which is my web site design business, I’m frequently in the need for writers and designers and developers for various projects and Elance is a great place to find those people. You basically post a job description and they can provide a sample or a template for you to use or you can create your own. You put that template up, you put that description up. People will find it and reply to it with a cover letter and recommendations and their resume and examples of their work and that sort of thing and the rate for the project. With Elance I recommend avoiding their templates at all costs, basically because if you put those templates in a lot of the freelancers on the service, not across the board but there are some out there who will, search for specific keywords in the Elance provided job description templates and then they’ll sort of go based on those and post their own sort of robotic, automated reply. Those freelancers, and not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with them, but I think it’s better to put the time into crafting something unique because your much more likely to get unique responses from freelancers and get really a sense of how they operate and talk and that sort of thing. I’ve used it for hiring developers. I found my personal assistant through there. I found the great audio editor who edits this show and not a real job Steve and I’m happy to put you in touch if you think these are well edited, which they are. Elance sort of does all the work for you, keeping track of time it’s got that built in, paying you plug in your Paypal account and you really don’t have to think about it again. They can automatically pull out payment and things like that. They keep track of the hours with a great tool, which is optional. It’s called workview. So you can basically go in and check and see is the time that I’m being billed actually being used because they’ll grab screenshots every so often while the freelancer has their timer active. It’s just a really safe, a great platform for building your virtual community of workers and that sort of thing. I highly recommend Elance. Check it out. I’ve got a link in the show notes here to Elance, but it is Elance.com or if you’re feeling generous my referral code is cvp.me/elance and that will hook you up right there and you can get started right away. That’s Elance. I’ll probably be doing a deeper dive into some top Elance tips that I have after using it for so long here on the blog, but this should give you some time to check it out, see what you think and check out chrisvanpatten.com as always for more great Wrapp Up episodes and tips and tricks. So, all right. As always I am Chris Van Patten. Again, you can find me at chrisvanpatten.com and I will talk to you next week. Bye, bye. The post Grow your virtual/online team with Elance – WU15 appeared first on Chris Van Patten.

This week on Wrapp Up I’m joined by my pal Lucas Cherkewski, a talented young designer/developer from Canada. Lucas shares Draft, a platform for writing, editing, and collaborating on words. Better writing and collaborating with Draft, a free online writing tool Draft is minimalist and easy to use, and lets you write articles (using the Markdown writing format), share them with your peers, and solicit their feedback in a safe, non-destructible way. Draft stores revisions of your work as you go, so you can easily revert to earlier versions. Draft also has built in writing reports, transcription support, and the ability to “ask a pro” for editing help/advice for a nominal fee. Draft is built by Nathan Kontny. Collaborative writing and editing is better with Draft — Audio player [powerpress] Collaborative writing and editing is better with Draft — Transcription Chris: Hello everybody and welcome to Wrapp Up, which is my podcast about apps and digital tools and gadgets and all sorts of cool stuff like that. I’m your host Chris Van Patten and today we’ve got something special following in the footsteps of a couple of weeks ago when I had Dennis Gable on the podcast I’m bringing on another guest. This is my friend Lucas Cherkewski. Hi Lucas. Lucas: Hey Chris. How’s it going? Chris: Good. Thanks. So Lucas and I met right around a year ago actually at WordCamp Toronto, the developer conference up there and I have to admit I was sicker than a dog that day. I remember meeting Lucas, but I don’t remember anything other than that. I don’t remember our conversation or anything like that. The whole thing was a daze but since then we’ve followed each other on Twitter and have worked together a couple of times and I’m excited to have you on the show. Lucas: Well, thanks for having me. Chris: So, why don’t you get started and tell me what app you’ve brought to share. Lucas: So, the app I’m talking about today is Draft made by Nathan Kontny. It’s a really great writing tool for focused writing and then ‘managed collaboration’ is kind of how Nathan bills it. Chris: So Draft is at Draftin.com. Right? Lucas: Dot com, yes. Draftin.com and it’s @gooddraft on Twitter. Chris: Okay. So, Draft it’s a writing app at the simplest, but how does it compare to using Google Docs to prepare writing and things like that? Why would you choose Draft over something else? Lucas: Yeah. Google Docs is a great tool when you have to collaborate on a document in real time with other people, but the real value in Draft is when you’re writing something you can share it with someone and they can propose edits to you and then you can work through the edits and choose individual edits you like. That’s kind of its main feature. It’s version control for writing is how Nathan calls it. Beyond that, it’s really easy to use and understand and the design is really simple. Chris: Yes, it’s almost like a minimalistic approach to writing online and what I love about it is that it supports Markdown. Lucas: Yes. Chris: Markdown is a text writing format. I don’t remember … I think I’ve talked about it on a podcast before, but basically it’s a really simple way to format text. It’s not what you see is what you get right off the bat. You can preview and see how it’s going to look but it focuses less on that kind of stuff, fancy bells and whistles, and it’s more about giving you an opportunity to just focus on the writing. Lucas: Yes, and one of the cool things with Draft is that you can then take that Markdown and you can export it to a what you see is what you get format. So you can export it to a WordPress blog as a draft or to an html file or a pdf file if you’d like. Chris: So, are there any particularly special or unique features about Draft? You mentioned that the editing isn’t with Google Docs where everyone can sort of go in and start changing, but it proposes changes. What else similar to that or [inaudible 0:03:20]? What other things set Draft apart? Lucas: Well there’s a little bit more about version control. You can save drafts for specific points in time with a file and you can go back and compare your writing and kind of like a [inaudible 0:03:36] view if you’re a programmer. The cool thing about that is it’s easy to understand by nonprogrammers too. If you want to edit a file you just send a link to someone and they can edit it without a Draft account. Then beyond that, I think my favorite feature is called Hemingway mode. It’s inspired by a quote attributed to Hemingway called, “Write drunk. Edit sober.” Where draft disables the ability to delete what you write and so you just keep writing, keep writing, keep writing until you’ve hit a word count or something and then the next day you come back and you edit it. You fix any mistakes you made while you were just hammering out words. Chris: That’s excellent. It’s a great way … What I love about Draft as a whole is again it’s not focused on the bells and whistles and adding every feature under the sun, but it’s really about getting you to write and getting you to write better and getting you to write more. So, I think it’s an excellent tool for writers out there. Lucas: For sure. Chris: How much does it cost? Lucas: Yeah, so Draft is a free product and it’s ad free as it is, but then to support it it’s a $3.99 monthly subscription or a $39.99 yearly. It’s very inexpensive for the value you get out of it. Chris: Does that support …. If you pay that much, not that it is much, but if you’re paying do you get anything extra or is it just sort of this makes you feel good for supporting a great app? Lucas: Yes, it’s more the latter. Nathan kind of explains it. He says that the idea behind the first option is he has to offer premium features and kind of delineate. He doesn’t believe in that. So, it’s all about just supporting the product itself. Chris: Fair enough. All right. So check it out, draftin.com. Again it’s free, and you can support it as well if you like not much a month and if you’re an avid writer who gets a lot of use out of it it will make you feel better to do that I would think. Lucas: Yeah. Chris: So, awesome. That is Draft. Thanks Lucas for coming on the show and sharing. Lucas: Well, thanks for having me. Chris: Do you have anything you want to promote or pitch or tell our audience about? Lucas: You can follow me on Twitter at LCHSguy. Other than that I think we’re good. Chris: Awesome. All right, thanks so much everyone for tuning in. This, as always, has been the Wrapp Up and I hope that you will join us next week. Bye, bye. The post Collaborative writing and editing is better with Draft – WU14 appeared first on Chris Van Patten.

Entrepreneurs and small business owners, like myself, frequently need to manage email lists and send out marketing or promotional emails to clients and potential customers. There are dozens of email marketing tools out there, but my favourite is MailChimp. There’s a lot to love about MailChimp, a free and easy email marketing tool MailChimp lets you easily manage and send beautifully designed, well performing marketing emails. You can generate emails automatically from RSS feeds, A/B test different emails, auto-schedule emails, and much, much more. MailChimp powers (almost) all the email tools on this site and most of my side projects and client websites. Plans are cheap (they start at free!) and the service is one of my favourites. In the episode, I also briefly touch on Mandrill, a companion to MailChimp that’s focused on sending out transactional emails. It’s a cool app in its own right, and integrates tightly with MailChimp which is especially awesome. If you’re already an avid MailChimp user, Mandrill is likely a much better choice than Amazon SES, Postmark, Sendgrid, and the like. Awesome email lists with MailChimp and Mandrill — Audio player [powerpress] Awesome email lists with MailChimp and Mandrill — Transcription Hello there sport racers, this is Chris Van Patten, and this is as always the Wrapp Up, where we talk apps, and services, and digital tools of all kinds that I like using. Just a quick technical note, this week I’m using my MacBook Air build-in microphone just as a little test to see how this works. If the sound is different, or not as good, or better, please let me know what you think. Jumping right in this week I want to talk about MailChimp. MailChimp is a freemium application for building email lists and sending out messages to that list. I love MailChimp. I’ve been using them for quite literally years now for my cell phone, for clients, and also to different projects, and I can’t recommend them highly enough. If you’re familiar with Constant Contact or Aweber or any of these other applications MailChimp is basically the same thing. It lets you store an email list and then send emails, marketing emails specifically out to them. MailChimp is great for a number of reasons. One is that it starts out as free. Unlike most of its competitors MailChimp actually has a free plan so you don’t have to pay to try it out. Now if you are on the free plan they’re going to put a little banner in the bottom of your email. It’s called MonkeyRewards, and actually that’s a good thing for you even though you’re seeing a banner because that’s actually the referral link so you’re going to get credit off of that if somebody clicks through. Another reason MailChimp is great is the design. MailChimp has an incredibly modern so called flat design. Where some of the other competitors have really clunky difficult to use interfaces MailChimp is absolutely simple. It’s drag and drop. If you want you can also customize the HTML and get into that detail, but you don’t have to. You can pick from a template, really easily and it will come out looking great. MailChimp also stands apart because they’re very good about security and abuse. They take spam and things like that very seriously. MailChimp emails as a result get delivered noticeably at a better rate than some other providers because they don’t take spam lightly. They banish that and completely remove it from the network. I also love MailChimp because they integrate with everything, so you can integrate MailChimp with your Word Press website, you can go on apps from your phone that integrate with MailChimp, you can do all kinds of things, you can access the social networks, you can see which fans are tracking and reading your emails and that sort of thing. It’s incredibly powerful. They have all sorts of these great integrations. They’re also very modern. You can actually access MailChimp through an API, which isn’t too surprising, but their API is very complete unless you do all kinds of stuff from subscribing users, to sending out emails literally through their API, you have all kinds of awesome options. Their interface, I have mentioned before creating emails is very easy, but their interface itself for reading reports or changing things on your account is also fantastic and everything is super clear. They’re only showing information that you absolutely need so you don’t get bogged down in tons and tons of options and tons of details, although they do have that kind of flexibility if you seek it out. The other thing I also love for their side app called Mandrel. And Mandrill is just a service for sending out email via API specifically focusing on transactional email, sending out your new passwords, all kinds of stuff like that, notification emails, whatever you can think of they can send that through Mandrill. Mandrill integrates back into MailChimp, which is great, so you can see that somebody has an account with your service and you can link that account through Mandrill into your MailChimp and you can see the stats the same way you would in MailChimp, and the possibilities there are endless. You can also integrate Google Analytics. You can do A/B testing with your emails. They also create lots of little side apps that you can use to integrate into email. I like Gather, which lets you test your subscribers about events and things like that. They just have all kinds of awesome, awesome features. I highly recommend checking out MailChimp. The pricing is fantastic. Again, it starts at free, and then you pay via subscriber beyond that. You can also get credits. You can send out a certain number of emails at a price point. It’s really fantastic and you should definitely give MailChimp a look . The link to check out MailChimp is MailChimp.com, but you can also find you can sign up at cvp.me/mailchimp, which is an affiliate link but it’s cool to use that and to support Wrapp Up, which I’m sure you love so, so much. Right, this has been the Wrapp Up. I have been Chris Van Patten and I will talk to you next week. Bye-bye. (Note: all links above are referral links. Except this one: check out MailChimp. Just in case you’re anti-referral or whatever.) The post Awesome email lists with MailChimp and Mandrill – WU13 appeared first on Chris Van Patten.

This week on Wrapp Up, my pal Dennis Gaebel joins me to share his Wrapp Up pick, Frank DeLoupe. Frank DeLoupe, an awesome colour picker for Mac OS X users Frank DeLoupe (Frank, for short) is really nifty: it lets you easily pick out colours from anywhere on your screen, and instantly copy the colour code (hex, rgb, hsl, etc) to your clipboard. It can also link up with Photoshop so any colour you select is instantly copied to your clipboard. Neat stuff. Frank is around $0.99 cents on the app store (0.89€, to be specific). It’s a no brainer. Learn more about Frank by listening to the audio or reading the transcript of this week’s show. Cool colour picking with Frank DeLoupe — Audio player [powerpress] Cool colour picking with Frank DeLoupe — Transcription Chris: Hello everybody out there in internet land. I am Chris Van Patten, as the nice lady said and as always, this is Wrapp Up, just a podcast about the apps and web services and tools that I love to use. This week, we’re doing something a little bit different, I hope will be a regular feature in the future and that is asking somebody else about favourite app of theirs, something that is part of their work flow that they love and they used and they want to talk about. Our first guest in this new Wrapp Up format is my pal, Dennis Gaebel. Dennis and I met in Buffalo and hung out doing front-end meet-ups. Dennis is a front-end developer and designer. He is going to share with us an app today. Welcome to the show Dennis. Dennis: Thanks for having me Chris. Chris: Of course. Dennis: Always a pleasure to talk to you, I must say. Chris: Yes, for sure. We haven’t been in the same room recently. No, that’s not true. We were together at WordPress and hung out a little bit. Dennis: Okay. Chris: At WordCamp Buffalo. Dennis: Good old WordCamp Buffalo. Chris: Yes. All right, so why don’t you tell us what app you chose and why you love it? Dennis: Okay, so today I’m choosing the app called Frank DeLoupe by Jumpzero. It’s at jumpzero.com/frank. It is a color picker. It’s really really simple for what it does. It just picks colors. I can use a quick key command for myself. I have it set up differently between my desktop and my laptop. I think on my laptop, it is set up for something like option F for Frank. What it does is it pops up just like a magnifying glass. I can zoom in pixel for pixel on the colors that I’m after. Sometimes I like to grab a color from the web. If I’m in a service for instance like Code Pen and just want some quick colors from maybe like the browser Chrome. Who knows? I just get silly like that sometimes. Or I’ll just start mocking the colors from the code editor that I’m in. I’ll take Frank and I will zoom in on a portion of that, grab that color. The neat thing with Frank is that it gives me some different outputs for those color values. I can do… I can do RGB. I can do RGBA. If you have Photoshop open, it connects instantly with Photoshop. Let’s say, for instance, you were to pick a color from some site that you’re on that you really like. You grab that color. It’ll instantly plug that into Photoshop. Pretty neat. Chris: That’s very nifty. What platforms is Frank DeLoupe available for? Dennis: Looking at the site we’re in now, I believe it’s only OS X so Windows folks… Chris: Mac users only. Dennis: Yeah, Mac users only. Chris: Those Windows folks always losing out on the cool stuff. Dennis: They always are. Chris: But yeah, this is great. I encountered this problem all the time or have a color that I need to pick and more often not, I am the kind of person who will grab a quick screenshot and then open it in Photoshop. If I don’t have Photoshop open, I’m waiting a couple minutes for that to load so I can actually use the eye dropper to pick the color, but this is cool. Because it’s system-wide. Dennis: Yup, exactly. It’s also got some other neat features like I don’t use it too much but it’s got a color wheel that you can pop up. You can probably, I guess, and just kind of pull around the dot that’s within that wheel and go to your color that you’re looking for, kind of get a visual reference and then take Frank and immediately plug into the actual block that’s giving out that color, pick it up and then be on your way with it. Chris: It’s fantastic. So that is Frank DeLoupe. That is at jumpzero.com/frank. Anything else you want to share Dennis? Pimp any projects? Dennis: Pimp any projects, well right now I’m working on Time Plate as usual which is probably I guess consider my open source baby. That is a typographic starter kit. People can read more about it on Smashing Magazine. There’s also the effeckt project. I only help out here and there a little bit. It’s a performer animations library that’s getting a lot of attention on GitHub, encourage people to come over to the repo. It’s effeckt.css. Look up in the search bar in GitHub. Chris: That’s effect with a K, right? Dennis: Yeah, sorry that’s E-F-F-E-C-K-T. Chris: Got it. Dennis: You can blame Paul Irish for naming that. Chris: Always blame Paul Irish. Dennis: Magnum PI. Chris: All right, fantastic. Thanks so much for coming on the show Dennis. Dennis: Chris, it’s a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Chris: Until next time, this has been the Wrapp Up. The post Cool colour picking with Frank DeLoupe – WU12 appeared first on Chris Van Patten.

A while back (in the second episode, in fact) I covered the productivity/todo list app TeuxDeux, a delightful tool that helps you manage your todo lists, with a focus on only essential features. I still love TeuxDeux, but as my team and business has grown since then, I needed to upgrade to something with more power. Enter Asana. Asana, a free and powerful productivity tool for individuals and teams Asana is a delightful, downright sexy (gasp!) solution for teams and individuals looking to level up their task management. It’s all in the “cloud”, and you can access your tasks from anywhere—phones, desktops, and tablets. Asana lets me track tasks that need completing, assign them to team members, discuss the tasks, and more. You can set deadlines, add tags, subtasks, and so much more. As always, the audio and transcription are below. Asana: Productivity is sexy again — Audio player [powerpress] Asana: Productivity is sexy again — Transcription Hello and welcome to yet another episode of Wrapp Up. This week I want to talk about productivity apps, the one that I’ve chosen to use specifically. So if you’re a listener of Not a Real Job, which is my other podcast with my pal Joel Kelly, if you’re not you should be. If you are, you might remember on a recent episode, episode 12, which is free on the Not a real Job website – you can google that – we talked a little bit about our productivity apps and what we use to manage our to-do list. One thing that I mentioned was I was having a hard time finding an app that I could use with my team so I could keep track of projects that my team was working on for me or different tasks that they were handling and things like that. However, I found one, quickly after I started googling around and asking for recommendations in that podcast episode and found Asana. I’ve used Asana before, maybe a year or two ago, right around the time that it first opened up to the public. And it was okay, but I didn’t really get it. And the reason then is because I was mainly working on things by myself. But now with the team Asana makes so much sense. Basically it is a shared to-do list that you can do with anyone, whether they have their own task list or anything like that, they can integrate very easily into the Asana workflow. So members of my team, even though they might be tracking their own tasks separately, this is a way for us to all to go, dive in head first, and manage things together, basically the concept of teams, which are different groups of people working on certain projects. For example, I have a Van Patten media team and within that team I can have a bunch of projects. So I’ve got projects for client work, things like our server workflow that we’re working on, things like that. They each have their own project and I can invite my team members in per a project or the whole team to see everything that the company is working on. I go with that later approach. I just let everyone see everything. So we’re on the same page. If there was an instance where I had a one-time contractor come in, I can easily just say they can only see this project. So you create these projects and then you go and you just add bullet point to-do items. It’s super easy. They’ve got tons of keyboard shortcuts and it’s all very natural. You type your to-do list, you hit Enter, and it starts a new one. Backspace is going delete that to-do item. So it’s awesome. And then you can also do even more with these to-do items. You can add in a due date. You can put tags in there. Each to-do item can actually have sub to-do items. You can have maybe a big task like “Finish the design for the media page” and then within that that’s going to be a separate task, a subtask, “Work on the photo section,” “Work on the video section,” or whatever the case might be. You can do file attachments and you can comment on these items, you can provide a description, so you’re basically building many discussion areas and many multimedia areas around specific tasks in your to-do list. That’s so cool. Already I’ve only been using it for a couple of days now relatively speaking but I already find that I have a much better sense of what’s going on in my company. You can assign tasks to people. So I can say a certain task “I want this to be handled by my assistant.” Great, I can go in there, type her name in the box and it’s super easy. She gets a notification. I get a notification because I’m following that task. So it will show up in my to-do list inbox every time she adds a comment, or marks it finished, or uploads a file there. That will show up very easily. It’s also great because it integrates with email, so if you’re already a big email user and you do you everything in your inbox Asana can send you notifications and you can reply to to-do items directly from your inbox. It’s so great. You can manage your own stuff for your personal projects, your company’s projects. It’s just super fantastic and it’s easy. They’ve got a bunch of iPhone apps out there using their API. I like Tappsana, T-A-P-P-S-A-N-A, but there are a lot of choices out there. So that is Asana, give it a look. Asana.com. A-S-A-N-A.com. Now I still use to-do teuxdeux.com for some of my own personal things, but I am finding that I’m switching into Asana more and more when I have these personal projects that I want to work on. It’s just nice to keep things a little more organized. So I recommend checking out Asana. It’s super fast. It’s 3 up to 15 users. Really it can’t be beaten. All right, I’ve been Chris Van Patten. This has been Wrapp Up. 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