September 2006


Motivating Others: Leadership

In most any professional environment you will encounter those who are feeling the repercussions of long hours and impending deadlines. The pre-burnout conditions can manifest themselves in any of the following behaviors.

  • Little or no demonstrated interest in the business at hand.
  • Few outside interests or hobbies.
  • Statements of apathy.
  • Limited or no goals for professional or personal growth.
  • Complaints about required workloads.

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19 AJAX Start Page Services

One of the workflows that I usually follow is catching up on news and information related to my work and interests in the morning. I do not go to different sites to get those materials, instead I go to my start page at Netvibes and Bloglines to capture new info. With this, I only need to go to a designated place to look for new information. Michigan at Listible has a list of start pages service which are AJAX based to ensure high usability:

The list is provided by Listible. It is a new service where you can include any of their list into your web site. All you need to do is cut and paste a line of javascript into your web page (and even into your blogging software like WordPress!).

Wink – [Homepage]

Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users. Here is a sample Flash tutorial created by Wink. Click the green arrow button to start viewing it. ——–>
(More tutorials created by Wink users and companies can be found at the User Forums.)

This is a good example of how you can create tutorials in Wink, by capturing screenshots, mouse movements and specifying your own explanations with them. And all this in a standard Windows-based UI with drag-and-drop editing makes it very easy to create high quality tutorials/documentation.

It is estimated that Macromedia Flash Player is installed in more than 90% of the PCs. Using Wink you can create content viewable across the web in all these users’ desktops. Similar applications sell for hundreds of dollars, while Wink is free with unrivaled features. So spread the word about Wink to your friends.