Continuing along with the Two Weeks of Creativity, here are yesterday’s entries. The theme yesterday was “Big & Small,” chosen by Brad and reviled by him shortly thereafter. Nonetheless, we trucked through it and both got our exercise done.

Day Two - Big & Small

Both of my sources for this theme’s entry are from Flickr. We have small plant by baarah, and Sequoia Wonder, Big Trees State Park, California by moonjazz.

Brad’s entry was significantly different than mine, and I like how his turned out. He also did more creative work in Photoshop as far as image compositing and editing goes.

Brad - Day Two - Big & Small

Let me take this moment to deviate from the topic at hand and say that I am thoroughly confused by WordPress’ image library tools. I just want to upload an image, provide a thumbnail of a dynamic size (so, have WordPress generate a custom thumbnail size), and have a click-through to the full-size image if I so choose. This has to be possible – I have a feeling I’m just missing something. Since this is the first I’ve really used it in a long time – we’re talking years – I think that’s a safe bet.

I was talking with my buddy Brad on Sunday after I took my girlfriend to the bus station for her two week trip back to Canada. I told him how I was bummed out that we were going to be apart again, although I was happy it was only two weeks this time instead of five. Time will likely fly by (and it already seems to be a bit!) since I’ll be so busy with work and getting settled into our new place, but Brad decided it could use a little bit of a fun boost, and so Two Weeks of Creativity was born.

Yesterday was the first day of the creative exercise, meant to both help pass the time and give ourselves a creative “break” from work and the other necessities of day-to-day life. Yesterday’s theme was “Flowers”, and my entry is below, which is followed by Brad’s.

Day One - Flowers

I found the picture of the lily from an AKVIS tutorial and modified it to expand the background.

Brad - Day One - Flowers

I got a good three hours of work in when it was time to go mini golf with the team I found out I was on that morning. So I mini golfed with the folks of EPIC, ate a hot dog and chips, and headed back to my office with the rest of the team. Once we got back, my manager said we can take the rest of the day of, with a big grin the whole time. We were laughing along when he then told us he was serious. J told him I’d think about it, since I’m paid hourly he told me that didn’t matter – I could take the rest of the day off, paid! He told us we’ve been busting our butts working on the big project I was brought in to help with.

See? Work hard now and reap the benefits later – and also important, having the satisfaction of knowing you gave it your all because you’re passionate about what you do. The fact that I was rewarded for doing a good job in the first ace is just icing on the cake.

Earlier this week I wrote about Mozilla’s response to my answers to their web developer survey and how they were building strong ties and customer loyalty through communication. On top of taking the time to respond, the information they provided was very helpful. Below are excerpts from the e-mail I received from Alix Franquet in response to my feedback, as well as some comments about the items discussed.

You mentioned you had trouble finding versions of Firefox to test, so I wanted to point you to a couple of places that might help:

It’s true. One of the biggest frustrations I had with trying to help test pre-release versions of Mozilla products was actually finding them. Alix’s response addresses this concern.

- The Mozilla developer news blog will also have the latest release announcements and point to the download page and release notes: https://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/

This looks like a good place to start for anyone wanting to stay updated on the latest releases of Mozilla products, as well as a good source of information for developers and testers.

- The nightly builds of Firefox are available at: http://nightly.mozilla.org/

This is for those wanting to help test the latest bleeding edge version of Firefox.

- When a beta is released, it’s available at http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/all-beta.html – since there’s no beta right now you are redirected to the latest release (Fx 3.6) but this will change once we have a Fx 3.7 beta 1 out.

If you’re feeling a little less adventurous, but still want to test early releases, you can take the current beta version of Firefox for a spin. This will allow you to preview some of the new features and improvements, but in an environment that’s more stable and predictable than the nightly releases.

- Thunderbird’s early releases are available here: http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/early_releases/

The go-to place for Thunderbird’s early releases, including everything from alpha versions to release candidates. What I like about this page is that it provides a one-stop shop for all of your Thunderbird testing needs. Want an alpha release? They’ve got it. Only interested in beta versions? They’re there too. You don’t have to hunt down each release at a different location.

- If you’re interested in joining our test community, you should check out http://quality.mozilla.org/ – we’re always looking for new people to be involved! You will get announcement for new releases and test days.

And finally, this is where to go for anyone interested in joining the test community. There you can do everything from test products to submit your own code. Or, for the less hands-on but equally important tasks, help find and reproduce bugs or analyze crash data and user feedback.

Thank you so much for your feedback, we’re going to work on making it easier to find the different versions.

Alix ends her response by saying they’re planning to make finding this information even easier in the future. I think that’s absolutely critical to garnering user feedback and important test data. If users can more easily find the test versions they’re looking for, it’ll be all the easier for Mozilla to receive the feedback that’s crucial to improving their products.

Last November, the Mozilla Developer Network put out a survey targeted toward Web developers and raised a call to action. Although it doesn’t seem they ever posted the final set of results (they did some preliminary results at the link above), they had over 5,000 developers respond from 119 countries. Pretty cool.

What I find even cooler, though, is that they took the time to respond to individual responses. In my feedback, I told them I always seemed to have trouble finding alpha/beta versions of Firefox and Thunderbird to test. What I received last month was a friendly response from Alix Franquet with a helpful list of places to go to find early releases of Mozilla products.

Also in my response to the survey I mentioned how I was having serious memory usage issues with Firefox 3.5 – and I wasn’t alone. It’s also not the first time I’ve run into this problem, either. I think 3.5 peaked out at ~1.7 GB  of RAM – insane. Alix asked if 3.6 was better, but at the time I still hadn’t upgraded because Google Gears and, more importantly, Ubiquity weren’t supported. Having upgraded now, I can happily say 3.6 is much better at managing memory. Right now it’s idling at 280 MB, or 17% of what 3.5 would so often near.

More important than getting the information I commented on (after all, I usually found the product version I was looking for after a while of searching) is the fact that the company – a big one, at that – took the time to respond to an individual user’s concerns. Even when I had issues over two years ago with Firefox’s memory usage, a Mozilla rep reached out then, too. It really goes a long way to building a foundation of trust and loyalty in a customer when they know their needs are being addressed.