The blog “Cocoa Is My Girlfriend” includes a shout-out to Jordan Languille who did the graphics for Rickshaw and web imagery for Infurious recently.

“You can see Jordan’s portfolio at his site. I’m quite pleased with the results and highly recommend his work. This is not a paid endorsement. I just like to see good work rewarded, so send him your business. You won’t be disappointed.”

Jordan can be found on teh Internets at OneToadDesign.

Okay, tonight I sent out a document to a few friends. 1.6 MB sent out to my email server. Whoosh. Some of my friends have very limited mailboxes from their ISP. Some only 30 MB, some as high as 50 MB. Very few are unlimited. I used to be worried about emailing out attachments because no-one likes waiting for attachments to download.

But the message I sent didn’t just go to my email server. The email was sent, but the attachment was sent to my file server. This meant the document didn’t actually leave my network. In it’s place, there was a URL to my file server. The 1.6 MB didn’t go anywhere near my mail server and it only left the file server when the recipients clicked on the URL. As the file server was on my LAN, the transfer was quick and seamless.

For me, my file server is public so the files were sent out of my network eventually. If you’re part of an internal team and would never send attachments externally, then this would mean you could more easily secure your files as they never leave the network!

Anyway. I’m now addicted to Rickshaw.

Rickshaw began life as an idea to help some of Mac-Sys’s customers who were in need of a method of sending large attachments. Sadly the local broadband and email providers put hard limits on the amount you can send in a single email. This made life very difficult for some. The original name of the app was going to be “UnfURL” which, as you can tell, is incredibly unwieldy and would only really reach out to geeks like me. And what the heck would the icon be like?

Yes, this is a solution built to resolve a problem. How to send email attachments without clogging up email servers.

I’ve been quiet for a while on the blog, so I thought I’d post a quick update on what I’ve been doing.

Work on Rickshaw has been progressing very well. It’s approaching the Release Candidate stage now, where we go through and deliberately try to break it, try installing it in strange set ups and so forth, in order to make sure it is as robust as possible. I’ve found bugs in Connection Kit which have held me back, and I’ve contributed a couple of patches to it (I’m working on a third, to ensure that .Mac uploads work correctly).

We’re working with Jordan Langille from One Toad Design for Rickshaw’s icon design, and looking at a long-term partnership with Jordan for other projects.

Rickshaw is working fine - I even use it to distribute copies of the latest version to the rest of the Infurious team - and I’m happy with the quality of the main engine. All the rest of the work has been putting the wrappings around that engine. In fact, that puts me in mind for another blog post …

It’s nearing release and here’s some promo materials for it!

Can ya tell what it is yet?

Here’s a quick preview of the product I’m currently working on. It’s called Rickshaw and it’s designed for people who like the convenience of sending (large) attachments via e-mail. Using Rickshaw your attachments are stripped from the mail as it is sent and uploaded to your designated server. The attachment is replaced with a URL that allows the recipient to just download what you sent at their leisure.

This product is primarily aimed at people who have to work with large files and need to send them to multiple recipients - avoiding issues with mailbox quotas, mail server file size limits or file type restrictions and so on. More details about how to use the product will follow, but here’s a quick video showing it in action.

Enjoy! (also available as a QuickTime movie)