Be Good Not Bad : Web Design :: Brian Warren : Denver, Colorado

Excerpted and slightly modified from an actual email I sent a few weeks ago.

Dear Panic,

Can I just say thanks? I’ve been using Transmit back since OS9 or so, and each year I use it more and more. You guys entered a market that had plenty of competition and just nailed the FTP client. I’m impressed. I imagine I’d be quite a bit grumpier without Transmit around.

Top 5 reason I like Transmit:

• The tabs functionality in the latest version has been so amazing. So much power in a tiny little window. So many layers.
• Docksend. I use it only occasionally, but its handy and very well thought out.
• I’m supporting the little guy with my money. Granted, one couldn’t find any huge megacorps out there making good ftp clients, so not much of a choice there. Even if there was, it wouldn’t matter.
• Killer value. $30 bucks for saving tons of time and making the mundane task of uploading files easy and simple.
• You guys sell cool t-shirts. Granted, if you look at my order history, you wont …
  
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Photo: Mark Bixby

When we at Method Arts found out about a crazy situation in New Mexico, we saw it as an opportunity. The situation, in a nutshell, is that in 2000 the state contracted a huge company to build a website for their unemployment benefits program. Seven years and $11M later, nothing much has happened. We saw this as an opportunity to get together and try our hand at building something that works, in just one day.

A day?

Sure, that’s crazy. But why not? I mean, things have changed. It’s much easier to throw together a team of smart, agile people and make something. And that’s what we did.

First of all, cramming everything into a day really isn’t a proper way to go through the development process on a website, and of course we didn’t finish it. As an exercise, though, it can be really great and lots of fun. I wont get into everything we did, because Mark blogged about it on the Method Arts site. He talks about what we did, why we did …

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Two and a half years ago we bought our first house. It’s a very nice little bungalo in an old part of Englewood, Colorado, built in 1912. We’ve really enjoyed living in our own house. After living at a bed and breakfast, having only a single room in the house to ourselves, it was a liberating feeling to spread out a bit.

Now we are moving again. We are buying a house in Edgewater, another cool old area just barely west of denver. Edgewater is just one square mile in size and has a lot of small town feel to it, despite being surrounded by the sprawl of the Denver metro area. Our new house isn’t huge but it is quite a bit bigger than our current one. It will allow us to grow a bit and also keep a good office for me. A nice big garage is out back allowing for a more permanent homebrewing area.

As we’ve discovered, it’s a terrible time to be selling a house, and as you would imagine, a fantastic …

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