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Many Chicago and local residents do not realize their home heating and air conditioning system operates approximately 3,000 hours per year. To put this “run time” in perspective, a car driven for the same 3,000 hours at 65 miles per hour would travel 195′000 miles. No one would consider such a journey without arranging for oil changes, lubrication, and routine tune-ups and tire rotation along the way to assure the efficiency, safety and reliability of the vehicle.

Your home air conditioning and heating system works many more hours than your car, and, like your car, needs routine tune-ups to operate in an efficient, safe, and reliable manner.

Around the Town’s unique precision tune-up includes a 12 point inspection that will restore your heating and air conditioning system to its very best condition.

Spring air conditioning maintenance Chicago – Around the Town HVAC

IT Outsourcing, and Talent Resources

Chicago Tech Staffing Agencies

Post your construction project, big or small.

Professionals will find it and bid on it. Every member can search construction pricing information. As our marketplace grows, everyone benefits.

Construction Bidding, Leads, Contractors & Projects – Shortlister

Chicago Air Conditioner, Furnace, & Boiler Service and Repair Company

24/7 Residential & Commercial Heating and Cooling HVAC Services throughout Chicago and the surrounding suburbs.

HVAC, Heating, Cooling, Repair, Furnace & Boiler Service
Around the Town HVAC

Air Conditioning Chicago

By Michael Hawley

“There can often be disagreements among the members of a project team on which design direction we should choose.”

In the design process we follow at my company, Mad*Pow Media Solutions, once we have defined the conceptual direction and content strategy for a given design and refined our design approach through user research and iterative usability testing, we start applying visual design. Generally, we take a key screen whose structure and functionality we have finalized—for example, a layout for a home page or a dashboard page—and explore three alternatives for visual style. These three alternative visual designs, or comps, include the same content, but reflect different choices for color palette and imagery.

The idea is to present business owners and stakeholders with different visual design options from which they can choose. Sometimes there is a clear favorite among stakeholders or an option that makes the most sense from a brand perspective. However, there can often be disagreements among the members of a project team on which design direction we should choose. If we’ve done our job right, there are rationales for our various design decisions in the different comps, but even so, there may be disagreement about which rationale is most appropriate for the situation.

Rapid Desirability Testing: A Case Study :: UXmatters

by Jason Kincaid on Mar 7, 2010

In the wake of Apple’s sudden decision to remove nearly all “sexy” applications from the App Store, we’ve been hearing that the company is also clamping down on so-called “cookie-cutter” applications — iPhone apps that are built from templates using one of the many app-building services available. This would be yet another major change for the App Store, as it already features thousands of such applications. And, perhaps more important, quite a few companies have sprung up to facilitate building iPhone applications. I’ve reached out to Apple to ask if they’d like to clarify their stance, but given their lack of transparency in the past, I’m not betting on getting anything definitive. To try to get to the bottom of the current situation, I spoke with multiple developers (some of whom wished to remain anonymous) to find out what Apple was telling them.

Between the developers I spoke to, the consensus was this: Apple doesn’t appear to be opposed to ‘app generators’ and templates per se, but in the last month or so it has started cracking down on basic applications that are little more than RSS feeds or glorified business cards. In short, Apple doesn’t want people using native applications for things that a basic web app could accomplish. For some of these services that’s bad news, because that’s exactly the sort of application they produce; any new applications they submit are going to get rejected. But all hope isn’t lost for them, provided they can make their apps more useful.

Apple’s New Stance On ‘Cookie Cutter’ Apps

Last April, I did a post about Google Local business. This weekend, I picked up my daughter from her hair appointment. The salon was beautiful and the folks working there were fantastic. The owner asked me what I did for a living and I told him I helped companies with their online marketing.

We were standing at a computer and he shared with me that his point of sales provider also did his website. I asked him to search on Google for “Hair Stylist, Greenwood, IN“. Up popped up a nice map with all of his competition… but no entry for his salon. I walked him through publishing his business on Google Local business and it took all of 10 minutes.

Local SEO starts with Google Local Business

Since we came out of the caves, every new technology has been greeted with alarm and disdain.

When we invented fire, people moaned that we’d forget the art of making salads. When we invented the wheel, people moaned that we’d forget how to walk. And when we invented the internet, people moaned that we’d forget how to think.

The difference is, the internet moaners might be right. The 2008 report Information Behavior of the Researcher of the Future, commissioned by the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee, found clear evidence of the negative effects of internet use.

Is the internet making us stupid? | News | TechRadar UK

Keeping up with the new jQuery plugin releases and developments sometimes feels like a full-time job! Every other day something new and better crops up that catches the eye and you think yourself “Wow, that looks good, I could use that!“.

For this post I have collected 25 of the best newly (or, pretty close to new) released jQuery plugins, and every time I do a post like this the plugins seem to get better and better and push development boundaries further and further away.

I hope you find these plugins useful.

25 Amazing and Fresh jQuery Plugins – Speckyboy Design Magazine

Meetings are rubbish—and other anti-business-as-usual musings from a maverick tech entrepreneur

By Jennifer Tanaka Author Jason Fried

Jason Fried seems like a nice enough fellow, but then he starts arguing with you. Well, not exactly arguing with you but gently poking holes in your working assumptions. For example, you might expect that someone who majored in finance would have done so in order to run a future company. “I just thought I’d be good at it, so I could graduate from college,” the 35-year-old says breezily. “My parents were paying, so they made me finish.”

Fried, who grew up in Deerfield and moved back to Chicago after college, did end up starting his own company—37signals, which makes web-based productivity software for small businesses. Founded by Fried in 1999 with two partners (Ernest Kim, who now works for Nike, and Carlos Segura, the well-regarded Chicago graphic designer), the West Loop–based venture has since become a real maven among tech companies. In 2004, after a few years as a web-design company, 37signals released a software product called Basecamp, an online project management program that it had created to use internally. A couple of years later, Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, contacted 37signals and soon after signed on as its sole minority investor. Today, the 16-person company has more than three million customers across its suite of six products.

37signals cofounder Jason Fried offers advice in new book, “Rework” – Chicago magazine – March 2010 – Chicago