I think I speak for most small to medium size businesses when I say the bain of our life is often paperwork. We have so much on day to day that finding time to sit down and create invoices, reminder letters etc is something that can all to easily get on top of us.

Recently I discovered Blinksale, a simple, easy to use online invoicing service. I decided to try it out and it really is very good.

Simple

The interface is incredibly simple. You logon to your account and you are presented with some tabs for adding users, customers and invoices. You create an invoice template, set it to recur however often you like (in our case annually) and attach your customers to it. 

Blinksale takes care of emailing the invoice to them, and provides a nice dashboard for reminding you when invoices are overdue, and allows you to automate reminder emails.

Low Cost

There is a charge for Blinksale, based on how many invoices you send out per month. The lowest option allows 3 invoices per month and is a great way to try out the system before signing up to one of their paid programmes. 

Their categories are well laid out, so you would need a fair few clients to move you up the scale, and makes it very easy to justify paying the small amount they ask, based on the client base you have amassed.

Time is Money

Over the past few months we have saved hours upon hours of time by using Blinksale. where we would manually prepare invoices Blinksale takes care of it. It is great to get notification of invoices going out and payments coming in, similar to having a personal secretary!

Just Do It!

I can heartily recommend Blinksale as an invoicing solution. There are other solutions out there with more features and it is important to find the correct product for you. What I will say is these days it is vital to automate as much as possible, giving you time to do what you do best. Try it out and see how you get on.

I downloaded Google Chrome at 8pm this evening and eagerly fired up my PC (I use a Mac usually). After running the installer Chrome went through the process of importing my browse history, bookmarks and passwords.

My first impression was good. The browser looks clean, tidy and is a nice change. I fired up a couple of web sites and I must say it is faster than Internet Explorer or Firefox. Very impressed!

On the negative side, I have no idea why they hide the “Home” button (you can enable it from the options menu) and I really don’t understand how they handle bookmarks. I have always seen nothing wrong with a “bookmarks” menu along the top. I don’t like how IE handles bookmarks and I like Chrome’s method even less. It seems you have to drag them to a bar and there is no neat heirarchical method of accessing them. If you have hundreds of bookmarks like I do, this is not a nice interface to use.

I created a few tabs and dragged a few off the browser. I seemed to “lose” a few of them into the ether, the rest of the time they split off nicely. I need to look into this a little more and see if I can find out what happened. We need to keep in mind this is a Beta product, I suppose.

All in all I think there are positives to take from this. It is impressively fast and looks nice. I am still unsure about the “frequently visited sites” default home page, I think I will be back to iGoogle in a day or so, but I appluad them at least trying it out.

If they would just put an old fashioned menu in place instead of “tool” buttons a la Internet Explorer I would be happier, but I guess I need to get used to it. it will also be interesting to see what comes along in the way of plugins for this.

I will post again ina few days, when I have had chance to use it more… I won’t be using it 100% of the time, as they don’t have a Mac version out yet. It will be a good opportunity to compare and contrast.

As I said previously, Chrome can be downloaded HERE.

Google announced this week that it intends to make its (Beta) entry into the browser market today (the official launch is 11am PDT, so likely to be this evening). It certainly kept that well under wraps!

Their product, I must say, looks rather slick and functional, like most of the Google product family. There are a few “under the hood” differences to the other browsers on the market which, at the very least makes this release quite interesting.

The first major difference is the ring-fencing of the individual tabs. Instead of having a central browser window and tabs within it, each tab is given it’s own process. This should benefit the user on several levels.

Firstly, if one tab crashes the rest of the browser should be ok, and secondly the other browsers have suffered from memory leakage, where over time the browser takes up more system memory even though tabs have been closed. This “should” avoid that happening.

The interest I have with it is how “standard” it is in terms of rendering. The last thing we need is another browser with quirks! If it conforms to standards then it can only be good for the community.

I am also interested in how quickly it will be taken up by consumers. Google is a massive brand name for lauhching a product like this, and is a trusted name to the general public (unlike Firefox, who lots of people had never heard of when it was launched).

So, I eagerly await this evening, to download and test out one of the most exciting (to me) product launches of 2008.

In the mean time, take a look at the Official Google Chome Comic. It explains it all very well.

5:30pm, still no download… I guess it will appear later, apparently HERE (currently redirecting to google home page)

I have installed IE8 and given it the once over. Surprisingly (for me) my initial thoughts are quite positive.

Once I had battled through the install process and IE had confirmed I didn’t have any nasty gremlins lurking on my machine I eventually got presented with the typical “you need to reboot now” screen. Quite why Microsoft products seem incapable of installing something without a reboot is beyond me, but reboot I did.

I loaded IE8 and up came a barrage of screens trying to take over everything I used and rebrand it Microsoft…. it wanted Live.com to be my default search provider, IE to be my default browser, live maps to be default for location based things, and Encarta to be my default reference… all a bit much I think, but I guess that’s a different issue.

Being from a web design background I am fully aware of the compatibility issues between IE and well, everything else! As some of you may know, one of the major issues revolves around white space, especially in the vertical plane. I loaded up a few sites side by side in IE and Firefox and they looked surprisingly similar. I then pressed the “compatibility mode” button, new to IE8 and low and behold, in popped the dreaded IE white space. Another press and it was back to normal. Wow, are Microsoft actually getting there with this product? I don’t wish to tempt fate but I must say I am slightly impressed. Whether they succeed in their quest for CSS 2.1 compliance is another matter, but they certainly seem to be off to a good start.

I can’t say I ever see myself using a Microsoft browser as my default choice, but I applaud any effort to prevent us designers from having to design around the quirks of Internet Explorer.

I would be interested to hear what others have to say about this new release, good and bad.