Facebook is headquartered in Menlo Park, California at a site that used belong to Sun Microsystems. A large sign with Facebook's distinctive "like" symbol—a hand making the thumbs-up gesture—marks the entrance. When I arrived at the campus recently, a small knot of teenagers had congregated, snapping cell phone photos of one another in front of the sign.

Thanks to the film The Social Network, millions of people know the crazy story of Facebook's rise from dorm room project to second largest website in the world. But few know the equally intriguing story about the engine humming beneath the social network's hood: the sophisticated technical infrastructure that delivers an interactive Web experience to hundreds of millions of users every day.







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If you've seen one Web-based collaboration tool, you've seen 'em all, right? That was my thinking, until I started seriously looking at Trello a few weeks ago. Trello takes the drudgery out of collaboration software. It gives users a Web-based workspace that's as easy to use as a whiteboard and Post-It notes, but full-featured enough for distributed teams that need to work on complex projects.

Trello is developed by Fog Creek Software, a company best known for developer-oriented software like FogBugz, and for co-founder Joel Spolsky.

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The Idea Behind Trello: "Five Things"

When Trello was launched last year, Spolsky wrote that it came out of an idea at Fog Creek to help manage developers. "After ten years in management I still never knew what anyone was supposed to be working on. Once in a while I would walk around asking everyone what they were doing, and half the time, my reaction was 'why the hell are you working on THAT?' So one of the teams started working on finding better ways to keep track of who was working on what."

That led to the idea of Five Things. Every employee would have a list of exactly five things they were allowed to work on, two active jobs and three jobs that they'd tackle once the first two were finished. The number of things employees could be assigned was five, and no more. Four was too few, and six was right out.

Turns out, the Five Things idea didn't work so well, but it led to Trello. "We started dogfooding the product when it was only 700 lines of code, and even in that super-simple form, we found it incredibly useful. By the end of the summer, we realized we had a hit on our hands: an incredibly simple, easy-to-understand way for teams to collaborate online."

How Trello Works

Before we dig into the guts of Trello, let me explain why it's head and shoulders above any other online collaboration software I've tried. In a nutshell, Trello really is as easy as using a whiteboard and Post-It notes. It's great for visualizing tasks, and it's dead simple to use. A couple of clicks and keystrokes, and you've got an idea down or put an action item on your list. Moving cards around on the Trello boards is as simple as drag and drop. If the keyboard is more your thing, no self-respecting developer tool would be caught dead without extensive keyboard shortcuts, and Trello is no exception.


Now, let's back up to the basics of Trello. It provides users with boards, lists and cards. Each board starts with three lists, which can hold one or more cards. Boards can be used to organize any project - a software release, an editorial calendar, a user's to-do list or whatever you like.

The boards can be private, or belong to members of an organization, or you can make them public. If you'd like to get a quick idea of what a complex board might look like, the development board is a good one to start with.

Each list holds to-do items, suggestions, features or any other category you'd like to track. Cards track individual suggestions, features, etc. When you create a new board, Trello defaults to three lists: To Do, Doing, and Done. You can, of course, revise the names of the lists and add new ones. I'm not sure about the upper limit of lists per board - the Trello Development board has eight lists, which seems close to the upper limit that you'd want for a project whether or not the software will support more.

The individual cards hold (almost) as much, or as little, information as you'd like. At the most basic, you might give a card a title like "finish Trello article." Then move the card between the default lists to show what you're planning to do, what you're doing and what you have done. But cards will do much more for you, if you want.

Collaboration

Click on a card, and you can assign it to members of an organization, give it a due date, assign labels and leave comments. Cards also allow you to add checklists, so you could include a list of steps that need to be finished before a project is complete - or just use a card for your grocery list, if you like. Trello will also give a progress bar that shows how close a project is to completion based on the items that have been checked off.

As you'd expect, you can also leave comments on cards detailing your activities or leaving information for other members. Trello cards also allow for attachments up to 10MB, so you can leave documents, images, etc.

You might find more complete collaboration tools, but Trello seems to have struck the perfect balance between the amount of information that you can convey with the system and ease of use.


Trello also provides a full activity feed on the side of the interface, which shows what you (and other users in the same board) have done recently. You can also opt to have Trello send email notifications of activity "periodically" (about every hour) or "instantly" (every minute). You can also choose not to have notifications at all.

Finally, Trello also has really good filtering/search options so you can skim boards by keyword, member, label, etc. You can combine these, too - it's easy to search a board by label(s), member(s) and specific search strings.

Trello on Mobile and Add-Ons

The Trello experience works great on a desktop browser, but not so much on a less-than-5-inch screen. But as luck would have it, there's an app for that. At least, if you use iOS. The iOS app lets you do most of what you can do from the Web-based application. You can create cards, lists, etc. You can set due dates, add activity updates and so forth.

The Trello site works pretty well on the iPad in Mobile Safari, though it doesn't support drag and drop. You have to click the menu at the top of each card and select the "Move" option instead - not quite as slick, but still usable.

As far as I know, there's no Android app yet but it is in progress, according to the Trello team.

Work in Progress

It's worth noting that Trello is a work in progress in general. The team seems pretty busy adding features and responding to requests. Some very minor things don't work quite as you might hope. For example, you can archive lists, but you can't delete them outright.

You can print out cards, but as far as I can tell, not entire boards. You can also export cards as JSON, which might be nice for developers.

If there's a feature you think Trello should have, but doesn't, don't fret too much. Trello is in heavy development and Fog Creek has a really nice board for suggesting ideas and voting on existing ideas. I'm a little bit disappointed that Fog Creek isn't planning a paid or supported version of Trello in the near future. I'm pretty happy with Trello and plan to use it a great deal, so I'd like to be a paying customer rather than depend on a free product.

That said, Fog Creek has committed to keeping the current product free forever, though the company says it might add pay-only features in the future. It also has committed not to "make a for-pay feature that forces you to compromise on privacy, security or portability." So far, Fog Creek has had an excellent reputation with developers, so I'm willing to trust the company as it works toward a for-pay model.

If you're curious about how Fog Creek is putting all this awesome together, check out the tech stack behind Trello. It's an interesting collection of tech. And if you haven't tried Trello yet, what are you waiting for?

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Whenever I start my Toyota Prius, I note one number above all else. It's not the time, not the odometer, not even the gas left in the tank. My eyes go straight to the car's average miles per gallon since last fill-up. If I don't exit our vehicle with that number higher than what my wife left it, I have failed. Driving has become a game—and by playing it, I save money and conserve energy.

If only my competitive streak led to greater efficiencies in my far more significant uses of energy: the electricity and gas that light and heat our home. Instead, we live in the dark (figuratively speaking, of course). Our appliances offer no hint of how much electricity they use; my furnace and its associated ductwork operate at some unknown level of efficiency. Monthly bills provide no breakdown of where and when the energy went.






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A decade ago, Linux developer Red Hat faced a decision that would make or break the company: whether to stop producing the very product that gave Red Hat its name. The company was built on Red Hat Linux, but when Paul Cormier—now the head of Red Hat's technologies and products group—joined the company as vice president of engineering in 2001, he knew Red Hat's devotion to open source alone couldn't create a business model capable of standing up to the Microsofts and Oracles of the world. He pushed for drastic action.

To move from small player to big-time enterprise software competitor, Cormier argued that Red Hat had to ditch the freely downloadable Red Hat Linux. Instead, it should replace Red Hat Linux with a more robust enterprise software package that maintained the principles of free (as in freedom) software without actually being free (as in price) to customers.







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Evernote is a tool for keeping track of, well, everything. At least everything as far as digital information goes, or information that can be digitized. Evernote comprises a Web-based service and clients for Windows, Mac OS X, mobile devices, and extensions for Web browsers. It's a service I've been using for years, and over that time I've picked up a few tips and tricks for getting the most out of the tool.

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Learn the Shortcuts

If you're using Evernote on the desktop, you'll want to start by learning the keyboard shortcuts. With Evernote, you can assign a couple of shortcuts to create a new note without leaving whatever application you happen to be using. For example, on Mac OS X, the Cmd-Ctrl-N shortcut (Ctrl-Alt-N on Windows) will create a new note from any application.

If you have something in the clipboard you want to create a note from, you can use Cmd-Ctrl-V to start a new note with whatever's in the system clipboard. That's Ctrl-Alt-V if you're using Windows.

Want to search for something that's in Evernote? A quick Cmd-Ctrl-E will bring Evernote to the foreground and let you search immediately. If you're on Windows, that's Shift-Win-F.

The Evernote Web site has a full list of Windows shortcuts and Mac shortcuts.

Use Evernote as an Address Book and Contact Manager

I've yet to find a contact manager/address book that I actually like, whether it's Web-based or native desktop software.

For people I keep in close touch with (co-workers, family, friends) I use my phone's address book and sync with my computer. But there's a lot of people I touch base with less frequently (sources, PR people, potential clients) that I'd rather not clutter my address book with.

To fill the gap, I've managed to use Evernote pretty successfully for keeping track of contact information and conversations. I use a Contacts folder and tag messages with keywords that will help me remember context later on. For example, in booking interviews for the upcoming Strata conference I tag correspondence and notes with "stata" and "big data" plus company names or general product categories (like "Hadoop").

You can also use Evernote to keep track of business cards. Scan in business cards and save them to Evernote, and once they're synced Evernote will use character recognition on the cards. This means you'll usually be able to find someone's contact information via their business card without needing to re-type it.

I have hopes that Evernote will become even better suited for contact management once they've refined the Hello App that was introduced in December of last year.

Put Notes in the Favorites Bar

Have something you refer to often, like a sales sheet or maybe the Markdown syntax? Create a note and it to the Evernote Favorites Bar.

If you're using the desktop client on Windows or Mac, you should have a Favorites Bar that's sort of like the bookmark bar in Chrome or Firefox. It comes pre-populated with several defaults, like all files that are created from Web clips or all notes that have file attachments.

You can create new favorites by dragging a note, folder or tag to the Favorites Bar. Simple, no? One caveat, though – this feature is only in Windows or Mac OS X 10.7 or later. For some reason, the Favorites Bar doesn't appear in earlier versions of Mac OS X.

Local Folders

In some cases you may want to use Evernote, without uploading your data to Evernote. This might be because you have huge files that would put you over quota, or because you have sensitive files that shouldn't be stored elsewhere. Whatever the reason, you can create a local folder for Evernote that won't be synced.

When creating a new folder, the default is for a synced folder. But if you choose "Local Notebook" instead of "Synchronized Notebook," your new folder won't be counted against your quota. Of course, it also won't be available via Evernote's Web service or synced with your other clients if you're using Evernote on mobile devices or other computers.

Note that you can't change the notebook type after you've created it, but you can easily copy notes between folders. So there's not much lost in creating a notebook as a local one instead of synced if you have any doubts about wanting to sync it with Evernote's servers.

Next page: Shared Folders and More

Shared Folders

Another feature of Evernote that doesn't get much attention, but should, is the shared notebook feature. With Evernote, you can create notebooks that are shared with one user or the entire world (or somewhere in between).

How you create shared folders depends on which platform you're using. The Evernote Blog has links to each platform that supports sharing. You'll need a premium account if you want to share notes and allow others to modify them.

If you're collaborating with someone else on a project, you can give them access to create, edit, modify and delete notes in a notebook. If you're just passing on information (like sharing class notes), you can just open up the folder for viewing only.

The users don't need to have an Evernote account if you're not planning to give them access to edit the notebook. If you set the permissions to view-only, and don't require an Evernote login, anyone with the link can view your notebook. This is a handy feature if you want to use Evernote that way, or a potential security problem if you don't mean to use it that way – so make sure you're careful when setting up the permissions.

Evernote Links

Since I do most of my writing for the Web, I'm using to providing links to other content. When I started using Evernote, I wished that I was able to do the same thing by linking from one note to another. Lucky for me, Evernote added this feature last year.

If you want to link to a note, just right click on a note in the desktop client and click Copy Note Link. Just paste it into another note, or you can even use the link in another application. For instance, You can add a link to a note to a calendar entry in iCal.

Highlight Web Clips

I make pretty heavy use of Evernote's Web clipping features, but I don't always want to save an entire page. Sometimes I just want a quote or a few paragraphs from a page.

If you're using the Chrome or Firefox Evernote extension, you can limit what you take from a Web page by just highlighting the portion you want to save. Just create a highlight, and then click the Clip Selection button. You'll just get the good parts without all the rest.

Make Full Use of Mobile

If you have a mobile device with Evernote, make sure that you're getting the most out of it. You can do much more than just read notes you've created on the desktop. (Though that's handy too, especially with travel documents.)

I use the heck out of Evernote on my iPhone by taking pictures of handwritten notes, creating quick audio notes/reminders, and so on.

Tweet to Evernote

For really short notes, you can shoot Evernote a Tweet. Yes, you can hook up your Evernote account to accept messages via Twitter.

If this seems a bit silly, it comes in very handy if you don't have a smart phone. If you've connected Twitter with your mobile number, you can send a text to 40404 with "m myEN" and your message, and it will be converted to a note. It might not be too useful for longer prose, but if there's something you absolutely need to take note of right now – this is a good way to do it.

Email to Evernote

Let's say you get an important email that you will need to reference often. Rather than printing it out or digging through your email every time you need it, you can forward your email to Evernote instead.

Evernote assigns each user an email address (like username.54321@m.evernote.com) for receiving email to be turned into notes. I use this often for email interviews, travel documents, receipts, and other material that tends to get buried in email quickly.

Evernote converts the subject line of your email to the note title, and the body of the email is used for the body of the note. If you have attachments, those are converted to attachments on the note except HTML or plain text. If you forward something with an HTML or plain text attachment, they'll be included in the body of the note.

You can automatically send mail to a folder and/or tag it. For tags, use # and @ in the subject for notebooks. For example, to file something in the "Research" notebook you'd use @Research. To tag it "ipv6" use "#ipv6" and so forth. You'll want to put the tags and folder after the subject/note title. For example, I'd forward a receipt with a subject like this: "February Server Payment @Receipts #paid #hosting." That would file the note in the Receipts folder with the tags "hosting" and "paid." However, the folders and tags need to exist before you send the email – Evernote won't create tags or folders for you if they don't exist.


Other Tips?

Have other suggestions for how to get the most out of Evernote? I'd love to hear tips and tricks from other users. If you have a favorite tip or use for Evernote, please leave a note in the comments.

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Welcome to 2012! If you're a consumer, you're likely getting ready for another year full of new products, drama, and intrigue from the tech world. If you're a journalist, you're cowering in fear of the upcoming CES trade show. And if you're a Mac or iOS developer—well, as always, you're wishing for bigger and better things out of Apple and its community.

While the iOS and Mac App Stores exploded in popularity in 2011, there's still plenty of room for improvement on the developer side. When we spoke with a number of iOS and Mac developers about their wish list for 2012, they didn't hesitate to let us know about changes they would like to see.






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Google's Android 4, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), debuts later this month on the much-anticipated Galaxy Nexus smartphone. This major new version of Android includes a redesigned user interface that promises a uniform experience across tablet and smartphone form factors, and it delivers new features and a wide range of improvements across the core application stack.

We already gave you a look at the Galaxy Nexus earlier this month in a hands-on review of the hardware. Now it's time to take a close look at the operating system and the ICS user experience.






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Hydraulic fracturing (more commonly referred to as “fracking”) involves the injection of fluid at high pressure into a well, opening or widening fractures in the rock below that free up the flow of natural gas. Domestic natural gas production has been booming as a result, but opponents claim the technique contaminates drinking water, causing serious health effects.

Rigorous studies on fracking have been sparse, and the impassioned debate has raged on. A new investigation by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at a site in Wyoming is one of the first to look thoroughly at the potential link between fracking operations and groundwater contamination. The agency's report was released yesterday—and it provides a clear link between fracking and water supply problems.







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From iOS and Android to BlackBerry and Windows Phone, the app store model has become the main way mobile device users find, download, and update their software. And with employees increasingly begging for access to corporate resources from smartphones and tablets, IT departments are starting to wonder whether they should jump into the app store business themselves.

"The public app store is kind of the wild, wild West," Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond tells Ars. Private app stores, hosted for the employees of a single business, are receiving “a lot of interest from the clients I talk to. Folks realize that self-provisioning is the long-term trend."







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Twitter is preparing to launch several impressive new features, including a new streaming API that will give desktop client applications real-time access to the user's message timeline. The new streaming API was announced last week at Twitter's Chirp conference, where it was made available to conference attendees on-site for some preliminary experimentation. Twitter opened it up to the broader third-party developer community on Monday so that programmers can begin testing it to offer informed feedback.

This tutorial will show you how to consume and process data from Twitter's new streaming API. The code examples, which are written in the Python programming language, demonstrate how to establish a long-lived HTTP connection with PyCurl, buffer the incoming data, and process it to perform the basic message display functions of a Twitter client application. We will also take a close look at how the new streaming API differs from the existing polling-based REST API.





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[Opinion] 

Windows Phone 7 (no "Series" any more, which is a shame because—other than Merc fanbois—who wouldn't want a 7 Series?) was always going to struggle.

Apple is, of course, the company getting all the love; the iPhone has been phenomenally successful. Android has finally started getting the handsets it deserves and now shows itself to be a capable, attractive, desirable platform. Windows Mobile, however, is widely hated, and is frankly dying where it sits. Windows Phone 7 is a necessary abandonment of Microsoft's cell phone legacy, but it also means that the new platform has to start from scratch. No pre-existing users, little pre-existing software, and two major competitors who are delivering a strongly competitive alternative.





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The iPad isn't a big iPod touch—an iPod touch is a miniature iPad that restricts the full multitouch experience in exchange for offering greater portability. With the iPad, in contrast, you get multitouch the way it was meant to be done.

That's one of our many take-aways after having submerged ourselves in iPad land since launch. The larger screen doesn't just offer more space to work with—it opens up a different and more immersive user experience. Because of this different experience, though, the closed nature of the platform can get under some users' skin in ways the iPhone and iPod touch do not.

Still, the iPad is likely to just be a starting point for Apple and for multitouch computing in general. There are obvious downsides to the device—we'll tell you what those are—but it's clear that it does sit in its own category that floats somewhere between a smartphone and a laptop, and it serves different purposes than either its smaller or bigger siblings. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

A large chunk of the Ars staff contributed to this review, either in the form of writing full sections or by offering feedback and insights based on their own experiences. Because the 3G + WiFi version is not yet on the market, we all tested a WiFi-only iPad. We think it's worth noting up front that the WiFi-only version is probably best if you only plan to use it at home or at Starbucks—you'll definitely miss not having an Internet connection while out and about, and the (non-contract) 3G data plans are not bad at all, so long as you can stomach the extra $130 you'll have to fork over for the privilege.

It's also the case that there are some parts of the iPad "experience" that we didn't get to cover here, but we think the next several pages will convey more about what using the iPad is like than you ever thought you wanted to know. So let's get on with it!





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So you've shot some great footage with your camera, and you have
experience editing with one or two of the popular professional tools like Premiere,
Vegas and Final Cut. And you've probably dabbled in some audio editing tools like
Audition, Forge or Soundtrack. But you're really just experimenting, and you're not sure
what all the filters and options are for. You can spend hours fiddling and
not be any closer to making the footage look better or the audio sound better.
This article walks through the post-production process in a home studio
setting, and it shows you how to effectively use the tools you have on-hand.

Note: This should be read after Cheap shots: How to shoot pro-quality video on a budget, as it makes reference to ideas and concepts
covered in that article.






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