Team Viewer - Go Team! Go!

This little baby saved my life a about a dozen times today. Having remote access to another computer is a handy thing. Like when your offices are being repainted and you are working from home on your laptop but all of your files are at the office on your Mac Mini and there are just too many of them to reasonably copy the whole lot of them onto any kind of device to take with you -- that kind of handy.

But as anyone who as ever had to deal with this dilema knows - sometimes using a remote desktop or VPN client can be a nightmare! There can be issues trying to connect (or stay connected in most cases), getting around firewalls, and about a billion other things that slowly eat up your time and patience. Let's not forget that some of these clients can be a bit costly as well.

Enter Team Viewer, a remote desktop client that a friend turned me on too last week. It is super handy, super easy to use, and super free (for non-commercial users)! Win, win and WIN! By using an access ID and passcode, you can connect to any machine that is running Team Viewer. The only catch is that you need to make sure that it is running on the computer that you want to remote into. So there is a bit of forethought on your part to anticipate whether or not you will need it in advanced.

This awesome tool has a variety of uses, from enabling you to work from home, doing remote tech support for clients, or logging into your mom's computer to help her setup her iPod. If you love it and want to run it at your office, you can pay a one-time fee for a lifetime license which isn't a terrible deal.

So kudos to you Team Viewer! I will gladly spread the word about your awesomeness. And thanks for saving my ass today. =)

Litums? You don't even know us!

If you haven't seen or heard of litmus then you are missing out! Designed for Email Newsletters, it is a super nifty online app that shows you a screenshot of how your email will appear in every major email client! What is even BETTER is that you can add pages to your litmus account as well and see a screenshot of your page in every major browser (and version)!

How handy is that!? No longer will you need to login to a billion-and-a-half different email clients or open 20 browsers to check for cross-browser compatibility. And for you MAC users...this means no more having to run VMWare, Parallels or any other virtual PC client in order to test the dreaded IE! Hallelujah!!

Can you put a price tag on convenience like that? Yes you can, and it starts at $49 a month. Not terribly cheap if you are flying solo, but for a company...expense that shit. It is a valuable tool that will save your designers and developers many curse words and hours of testing agony. =)