Without further ado let us proudly introduce PMProPlus, a project management and time tracking web application, straight from the Paper Canopy factory.

We’ve been using PMProPlus around here to manage all of our time tracking and project management needs for the past  year now. The time tracking has been our most used piece, but the extranet is a life-saver when it comes to posting large files for the client, especially if there is more than one version floating around!

Take a look and let us know what you think. There’s a 30 day free trial, and enough tiers so that price shouldn’t be an option to give it a try! And definitely head back here to tell us about some of your favorite features and what you think.

The easy thing to do would be just to ask the designer. And most of the time I do, and it works out great. But I’ve found that there’s this gap between a designer and the producer where the designer doesn’t necessarily know what the producer can actually build (and what’s not impossible to do) and the producer doesn’t know what to suggest because he doesn’t know what the designer really wants, and around and around we go.

So here we are, trying to bridge that gap a bit. It’s a little instruction on what can be done, and where to go for inspiration for people who  may not necessarily know what’s interactively possible.

Let me introduce you to jQuery.

jQuery is a JavaScript library. And JavaScript is what powers most if not all of the client side interaction on a web page. So: jQuery is a library of JavaScript code that lets you do interactive things quickly and esaily.

A JavaScript library is nice because different browsers (*cough* IE *cough*) do things differently and sometimes with weird effect. For example if you want to get the current year in javascript Firefox returns 2010, but IE returns 110. So you have to add 1900 to the number in IE. So you do browser tests, and add code just to find out the year. Yeah, then try to get the next or previous day or month or if it’s the last day of the month or if it’s the last day of the year… Snowballs quickly eh?

jQuery is nice because it’s base code with all that weirdness done for you. You just ask jQuery for the year and it does all the aggravating cross browser stuff automatically. As a disclosure, there are plenty of other JavaScript libraries out there. Yahoo! has one, Moo Tools, and plenty others. jQuery is just my flavor of choice.

That’s a simple example, but when you get into more complicated stuff like navigating the Document Object Model (divs, classes, ids, HTML elements) it starts getting super frustrating to deal with all the browsers. jQuery does all that for you.

To build on that, jQuery has tons and tons of code that does really complicated stuff so all you have to do is call the function. They break them up into modules called Plugins.

For example, making a calendar pop up when you click in a text box is a plugin.

You just download the plugin code, include it on your page, and call one line of JavaScript to make that text box open up a calendar when it’s clicked.

Usually plugins come with some css, some javascript, and a bit of documentation to tell you how to use it. But the takeaway is they do really powerful things, are extremely easy to use, and take infinitely less time to get going than writing the whole thing from scratch.

Some plugins are pretty awesome and graduate into core functionality. One example is jQueryUI. A collection of pretty useful plugins for User Interaction: http://jqueryui.com/demos/

Some examples: Drag and drop, resize, sorting unordered lists, carousel slideshows

That’s basically how it works. Now it’s just a matter of finding plugins that do cool stuff and sending on the link to your production guys to ask “can we make it work like this?”

Here are some good resources to get you started:

• jQuery User Interaction plugin: http://jqueryui.com/demos/
• other jQuery plugins (some interactive, some not) http://plugins.jquery.com/
• Ajax Rain – This includes a lot of other javascript libraries outside of jQuery, but for the most part cool things get spread out pretty wide: http://www.ajaxrain.com/tag?tag=jquery

So it’s always fun to see how big corporations or people use this stuff. Like Oprah with Skype, or the military with Google Earth.

One cool discovery I made was how Oracle was using Delicious. Basically they linked all their documentation and help files that they had on the web through Delicious bookmarks. The benefits seem pretty obvious: Tagging, descriptions, organization of their site. Seems like a great way to organize a lot of links and data, but extend the organization beyond a simple site map by using Delicious’s system for bookmarks.

All that to say I’m trying to follow in their footsteps.

I noticed that I had started to amass a good amount of WordPress links. Links to plugins, themes, official documentation, and articles that have turned out to be pretty useful. But only about half were uploaded to my Delicious account.

So I spent a bit of time organizing my links, and set up a “corporate” Delicious account. Right now it’s mostly WordPress, but I’m sure I’ll be updating with links to notable documentation on this site as well as other arenas.

So for the time being, take a look at my WordPress tagged links, I’m sure there are a few things you might find useful in there.

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

It’s a good read, and I found a lot of good points especially from the maker’s side of things.

Mostly he talks from the angle of meetings, but for me this goes for any type of interruption. Conference calls, emails, IMs, tweets, text messages, letter, anything.

Anyway, it’s a good reference, especially if you’ve called me and I’ve seemed a bit distracted on the phone ;)