Yes. You. You rock.

Thank you so much to everyone who participated, voted, and annoyed their friends to help us during our Mission Small Business voting period. I’m happy (ecstatic) to report that we made our 250 votes with over a week to spare, and ended up going over by several votes by the time the contest ended. We’re now on to the next round, where our application is judged and 12 grants are awarded.

Should we win one of the grants, we want to expand, hiring several more employees in the very near future. So good work, by taking 30 seconds of your day to support us, you’re creating local jobs! We’ll also be able to discount more work for local non-profits and provide modern solutions to help them help others. But the long term effects are even better – adding more employees means we can also start concentrating on our own products. By investing in ourselves, we’ll be able to grow even more, adding more and more jobs. It also makes us more resilient and stronger as a company.

Again, thank you all so much for supporting us, and we hope we can return the favor real soon.

Around here, we love us some Coda. We’ve been using it since at least 2008, so it’s kind of ingrained in the way we work. Pretty early on, we realized we were copying – pasting every other line in the CSS editor, which was time consuming and carpal tunnel syndrome inducing. One of the greatest things about Coda, though, is that you can extend it with plugins – so I set out to write a small plugin that saved us a man-year in highlight-copy-pasting. Now that Coda is debuting it’s second version tomorrow, we’re re-packaging and giving it to the world.

How it works

I write my css like this:

So every time I move to the next element, I have to either copy-paste the line above it, or re-type it. Enter “Tabber”. Now, with Tabber installed and keyboard shortcut set up, I hit my hotkeys when I’m at the end of the last line, and BOOM:

It automagically creates a new line with my previous CSS elements, adds the curly braces, and sticks my cursor where I would fill in my next element.

“ZOMG HOW CAN I OBTAIN THIS SORCERY FOR MY OWN PROFIT AND GAIN?!?” you might be asking yourself. Oh snap – right here.

Plugin for brand spanking new Coda 2

Plugin for legacy Coda 1

LIMITATIONS – PLEASE READ

This version above is very fast, but only works with single line CSS. Below is a Coda 2 only version that works with multi-line CSS. It’s a tad slower, as it pulls in your entire document. It also has a weird quirk where after it adds the new line, sometimes it scrolls the document all the way to the bottom of the screen, though the cursor is in the correct position. Hitting any key will snap the screen back to the correct area of the document. This seems to be a bug in Coda, and we have contacted Panic to see if this can be corrected.

Download the multi-line CSS version (beta)

How to install and use

Download the plugin and install. To setup the keyboard shortcut, go to Apple -> System Preferences -> Keyboard, Keyboard Shortcuts. Create a new Application Shortcut for Coda, and type Tabber, then just pick your own shortcut! I use Shift+Command+Enter, but feel free to come up with something more clever.

Love it? Hate it? Let us know.

This will make sense in a second

Each day has it’s own adventures, only some are more exciting than others.  Karma’s daily adventure fell on the more boring side of things today, but an adventure nonetheless.

“Where should we go to lunch?” became limited to the fine restaurants in downtown Louisville close to the DMV office, as requested by Chris.  The day before this, Chris mistakenly wound up with two titles to the same vehicle, a problem that needed to be tended to quickly.

Kayla and I looked at each other with an equal amount of dread when walking into the DMV, to which Chris responded (and I’m fairly sure this quote is 100% accurate), “Don’t worry guys, I’ve never spent more than five minutes at this office.”

A shaky guarantee like that inevitably jinxed us beyond control.  His number was called fairly soon, and then he promptly broke the DMV.  As it turns out, resolving this issue was on par with my cat trying to solve a rubik’s cube (see above).  They didn’t understand what it was, batted it around for awhile, and then fell asleep on it.  The computer couldn’t figure out the problem, the printer broke down, files were missing, lines were backing up, and children were weeping.

Customer service is a beautiful thing when it’s there, and when it’s missing, everything else falls apart.  If any of you savvy Mac users have ever had an issue, you probably know the sweet side of it.  The genius bar in the Apple Store is there to figure out what the problem is, and if all else fails, give you a new whatever.

Great customer service requires a couple of different things.  First things first, you have to have know your product or service inside and out.  If customers come to you with questions or issues, you have to be able to distinguish and solve the actual problem.  If applications on my Mac are running slow and I take it to the make Apple Store, the genius bar will likely find that the issue of speed is the symptom of something else.  Nothing is more frustrating to a customer than being put back on hold once they finally connect to a customer service rep because they have to ask their boss what to do.  We all have the responsibility of being knowledgeable individuals in our field.

Secondly, you have to make it easy for customers.  There’s a whole world of technology, and the DMV is still using smoke signals to communicate with the public and other offices.  Are you utilizing as many tools as possible to connect with consumers?  Are you making customers lives easier, or forcing them through a maze of automated telephone messages?  Another look at our friends Apple, and we see the ideal system.  Online arrangements are in place to be as helpful as possible, friendly customer service reps are reachable via telephone, and a reservation system for Apple Stores was set up to keep customers from drawing a number and waiting for hours (like you know who).  Think about how you can beef up your customer service using customer-friendly technology.

So what technology could the DMV implement to bring it into the 21st century? An online help center.  After some quick research, I found loads of forms that you can print off and fill out before you leave house, which would save everyone precious time.  However, that’s only if you can figure out which forms you will and won’t need.  This could all be solved with a simple chat feature where drivers could connect to DMV workers to ask questions, and get information. Or, even  simpler, a form system which lets you answer specific questions, like New Registration -> Boat -> From Out of State, and gives you all the forms you need to have with you.

What else?  Kids at Disney World can figure out which lines to get in thanks to those helpful average wait time displays before you enter.  Wouldn’t it be nice to get online before you leave the house to check how many folks are already in line waiting? Maybe from a mobile site, or a text message. And wouldn’t be amazing if you could reserve an appointment for yourself online?  All of these capabilities are widely used by others, saving both you and consumers time and frustrations.

Let’s wrap this up, and get to the point.  You are going to have customers bring problems to you.  How you handle their problem has the ability to create a life-long loyal consumer, or send them running to your competitor.

Also don’t go in the DMV after Chris.