By now you've probably heard that Nintendo has announced its official name for the next-generation console, which everyone had been referring to by the most excellent moniker "Revolution," but which we must now refer to by a euphemism for... well, let's not go there.

I'm as excited as the next video game veteran about all the possibilities afforded by a true 3D controller, but this name is going to take some getting used to, to put it lightly. So what do you think the Revo... er, Wii should have been called, if it had to be called something other than "Revolution"?

Without further ado, we're absolutely thrilled to announce that Blinksale 2.0 has launched. From here on out, we're dropping its "2.0" development moniker. It's now all simply Blinksale again. And let me tell you, Blinksale rocks.

We believe we've taken the easiest way to send invoices online and have made it even easier. At the same time, we've packed in some really wonderful features we've been itching to add for some time. Now you can easily sort your invoices by date, by status (open, past due, closed, or draft), or by tag. You can use recurring templates to send out automatically scheduled invoices to repeat clients (this is going to be really great if you provide hosting services to your clients). And with the Blinksale API, you can extend Blinksale into your own solutions.

Before you rush right on over to sign up (if you haven't already), there are a couple special features I'd like to highlight specifically. Both of these are subtle features and are likely to be under-appreciated at first. The first is your Invoice History:

We've wanted to add the ability to "track" an invoice since we first launched Blinksale last Summer. When it was sent, when it was paid, follow-up, etc. From experience, one of the primary reasons—if not THE primary reason—invoices go past due is because of a communication breakdown. You may send the invoice to the wrong person, the invoice may get misplaced by the client or delayed in the mail, or you might simply forget to follow up on a past due invoice. Following up on invoices is a hassle. Again, we speak from experience. We've sent hundreds.

With Blinksale's Invoice History, you can now view an invoice, see when it was sent, if and when you sent a reminder, what was said, what the client's response was, when the invoice was paid, and whether or not you sent them a thank-you note to follow up. Think of it like blog comments for your invoice. Your invoice's history and all of its related correspondence is saved for both you—and your client's—records. I think you're going to like this.

The second feature I'd like to talk about briefly is Purchases.

Here's how it works: While Blinksale was originally built as an accounts receivable application, over the last several months we've realized how many Blinksale subscribers send invoices to each other. And we thought, "Wouldn't it be nice if you could save your *incoming* invoices in your Blinksale account, along with your outgoing invoices." Not only can you track your sales, but you can track your purchases as well from other Blinksale vendors.

Where this gets really exciting is through the use of the API. Say you've built the latest, greatest web application. You need to send your customers a receipt for their monthly service. Simply tie in the Blinksale API, off goes the invoice (or receipt) to the customer, and it's automatically added to their Blinksale account for their records.

Imagine receiving all of your online receipts through Blinksale. Tagged. What did my small-business spend in 2006 on "web-services"? You're only a click away from knowing now. A handful of online retailers have already expressed their plans to integrate Blinksale into their services or shopping carts, so I believe its only a matter of time before we see this idea beginning to grow into reality.

I should note that while we have technically released the API today, it will be a few days before we get detailed documentation up for it. We certainly appreciate your patience in waiting for this. We know many of you have been patient for a long time.

All of these features are available on ALL Blinksale plans. Even Free accounts get in on all the fun. The only restriction is the number of invoices you can send per month. Three invoices per month with no other restrictions is a great way to get your small business started.

In closing this post, I need to give a lot of praise to the Blinksale team: Scott Raymond, John Critz, John Marstall, Brian Brasher, and Rich Nichols. Each has played an extraordinary role in bringing Blinksale to you today. Last fall when we began to scope out what Blinksale was to become, I honestly didn't know if we could pull it off while retaining our autonomy during this stage of development. But here we are, and I'm incredibly grateful and blessed to be a part of this venture.

Most of all, I'd like to thank the thousands of Blinksale subscribers. You're truly the ones who have made Blinksale a success, and will continue to make Blinksale a success. Thanks for being the early adopters, and for letting us know how we can continue to improve the service. Even now, we know Blinksale has plenty of room for improvement, but we're pretty darn smitten with where we are today. We look forward to moving forward with you.

So what are you waiting for? Go check it out for yourself.

Final note: If you have Blinksale technical support questions or bug finds, please do not post them here. They'll get lost. Please send them instead to support [at] blinksale [dot] com. We'll be able to get back with you much faster that way. Thanks in advance.

Back in January when we were hammering out what features would make the cut for Blinksale 2.0, we began to joke about the crazy, over-the-top, web 2.0 "hype" features we could add to Blinksale to stir the buzz. Of course, this discussion was entirely in jest as topics veered from social-invoicing to Google Map API integration (so clients could find your office directly from your invoice). I'm sure there's a place for these ideas somewhere, but they were simply good for a laugh around here.

Then I joked about how we could add "Invoice Tagging" to Blinksale. And about how you could tag invoices with terms like "hosting" or "advertising" or "web-design" or "reimbursement". Or how you could even tag an invoice with a sales-person's name. And then you could simply filter your invoices by tag to see the sales associated with that tag. We joked about tag clouds where the text size was determined by dollar amount billed, not simply number of invoices.

And we laughed and laughed, and commented about how everyone would think that Blinksale had jumped the shark, totally biting into the hype-machine. We laughed hard. Tears in fact.

Then the laughing slowly came to a halt.

And the debate began. Will people think we're insane? Are we contributing to software bloat? Will the community give us grief for adding such fluff to the Blink? Or, is tagging possibly the most amazing "less software" approach to letting Blinksale subscribers organize and track their sales in almost any way imaginable.

We don't have any desire to go head-to-head with a traditional "double-entry" financial software package like Quickbooks, where sales items must belong to rigid "accounts" that must all be tied together. There's a place for this, for sure. It's called Quickbooks (or MYOB, if that's your thing). But it's not Blinksale. We have no desire to build a category system, and we really don't even have a desire to build an inventory system (boring). But with tags, we can let Blinksale subscribers sort, track, and organize their invoices however they want to. It's like the Burger King way.

If I want to know how much in icon sales Brian brought in last year, I simply filter "brian+icons" with 2005 as my date range. Easy as pie. Or, if I'd like to know how much we did in t-shirt sales, I can filter the tag "threads". We think it's going to be a very valuable, even though a bit hype-ish, addition to Blinksale.

At SXSW, during the Tagging 2.0 panel, Prentiss Riddle of Pluck said that "tags are great but I wouldn't want to manage money with them." We love the folks at Pluck (a client of ours), but we have to part ways with Prentiss on this one. There may be more to tags in a business sense than we all originally thought. As a side note, Prentiss' thoughts on tagging as a whole were really great, and you would benefit to check out his notes from the panel.

So there you have it: Invoice tagging. Coming in days to Blinksale 2.0. Please keep the buzz to a minimum. We don't want things to get out of hand. ;-) And no, this is not the super unnamed feature some have been talking about. There is still more fun yet to be had.

We sent out an email yesterday to our friends and current Blinksale subscribers to alert them of the pending Blinksale 2.0 upgrade. For the uninitiated, Blinksale is the easiest way to send invoices online. This is what we have to say about the upcoming launch:

After several months of planning, design, and development Blinksale 2.0 will be released to the general public in less than two weeks. You read right: Less than two weeks.

Blinksale 2.0 is no small upgrade, and we believe you'll be thrilled with the improvements. Here are just a handful of the new features in store:

• - Recurring auto-billing (great for web hosts!)
• - Invoice filtering (by date-range, client, tag, etc.)
• - Invoice tracking (when sent, to whom, etc.)
• - Invoice printing
• - Improved support for international tax regulations
• - Full PayPal IPN support
• - Blinksale API

There are, in fact, a few other large features being added to Blinksale, but we're not going to talk about them now. You'll just have to wait and see when the upgrade is rolled out. That said, we believe Blinksale 2.0 might just change your entire mindset about online billing.

While the server upgrade for Blinksale 2.0 should go smoothly, we anticipate that their may be some minimal server downtime (a couple hours at most). We appreciate your patience as we make the change. The upgrade will be well worth the wait.

With the rollout of Blinksale 2.0, we will also be raising our monthly subscription rates. Our new base rate will start at $12 per month. However, we have happy news for you: All existing Blinksale subscribers will receive their current monthly rate for a period of 24 billing months starting in May 2006. That's right, all current Blinksale subscribers will still be billed at their current rate for 2 more years.

This is a simple way we can say thank you for being an early Blinksale subscriber. We're grateful for your support. In addition, anyone who subscribes to Blinksale before the upgrade will also receive the current pricing (starting at $6 a month) for a period of two years. If you've been holding out to try Blinksale, now is the time to sign up for your paid account. Remember, if you don't like Blinksale (hard to imagine), you can cancel your service at any time.

This offer is only valid for Silver, Gold, or Platinum accounts created BEFORE Blinksale 2.0 is released. If you upgrade or downgrade your account AFTER Blinksale 2.0 is released, you will be subject to the new pricing. You can sign up for your Blinksale today!

Finally, a word to our subscribers using custom CSS invoice templates: With the launch of Blinksale 2.0, we will be updating the HTML email template used in our invoice layouts. This will break your custom CSS design. The new template is similar to the previous template however, and you should be able to fix your CSS without too much hassle. After the launch, we do recommend changing to a standard Blinksale-designed template in the interim until you can update your CSS to be compatible with our new HTML invoice template.

I realize many of you may have questions about the new service, and feel free to send them on. We'll do our best to get back with you, but understand that some questions will simply have to be answered after the launch. We're busy finalizing the release, and we still have a few secrets to keep.

Update: A few folks have asked about our Blinksale Free account. Our free account will remain virtually unchanged. A few new features are being added, but the account limitations will remain more or less the same. If you current have a Blinksale Free account and choose not to upgrade, your account will retain its same Free status. However, if you choose to upgrade after the 2.0 launch, you will be subject to the new monthly rates.

Curious about the current state of Vista's slated features (it's hard to keep up with, really), I aimed Safari at Microsoft's Vista pages and came up with this hilarious little game of hide-and-seek. I have to commend Microsoft for giving me a hearty Monday chuckle -- the effect is the same on the "everyone" and "your home" pages, too, but with different people playing privacy fence -- but I have a feeling that was not their intention.

You'd think users of "alternate" operating systems like myself would be an important audience for Microsoft as they promote their upcoming software (especially now that Mac users can throw Windows on their Intel machines via Boot Camp), but apparently the product isn't quite fit for such eyes. Or perhaps someone just forgot to check their work across standards-compliant modern browsers.

Here at Firewheel, we create a boatload of icons, and one of the most common questions we get asked about icon design is, "Why do you deliver your icons individually sized in PNG or GIF files, when a single vector file like SVG or EPS can be made any size we desire?"

While the answer is a technical one, it's not too difficult to understand. But before we get started, we should brush up on the general differences between bitmap and vector file formats.

A bitmap image file (such as GIF, PNG, TIFF, etc.) is comprised of pixel-based image information. Pixels, for the uninitiated, are the tiny little squares of light that make up your computer screen. The word pixel itself is an abbreviated form of the words "picture element." The little square pixels of light are extremely easy to see with the naked eye on an LCD flat panel monitor if you have one. A 24x24 pixel icon representing a red square would be comprised of 576 individual red pixels, each represented by little bits of numeric data in an image file. A larger image requires more pixels, leading to more numeric information, and thus a larger file size.

A vector image file (such as EPS, SVG, etc.) is comprised of geometric, mathematical-based information. A vector image file containing a red square scaled to 24x24 pixels would simply contain numeric information regarding the mathematical location of the square's four corners, information about the color the square is filled with, and information defining the size of the square as 24x24 pixels on screen. Basically our red square vector file only needs about six little bits of information as opposed to our 576 bits of information required for our bitmap red square.

In reality, the explanation is a bit more complicated than this, but you get the gist: Changing the size of a vector image file from 24x24 to 48x48 simply requires the editing of one bit of data (the size). The math does the rest. However, changing the size of a bitmap image file from 24x24 requires the addition of 1728 more pixels, resulting in a larger file size.

Thus a single vector file may used to represent it's image at multiple sizes, whereas a bitmap image may only accurately represent its single pre-determined pixel size..

So if a vector file format can scale and shrink to represent any size it so desires, why does Firewheel Design insist on drawing new artwork for each icon size we deliver to a client? It's simple, really: Relativity.

Let's look at the printer icons above. The top row consists of four individually drawn bitmap icons, each of the same subject, each delivered at a different size. The bottom row consists of a single vector icon, originally sized at 24x24 pixels, then scaled mathematically to the other sizes shown.

Notice a difference? I thought you would. In the top row, each icon is crisp and the 1-pixel lines are sharply defined. In the bottom row, only the master vector file (originally created at 24x24) is crisp. The other three sizes are blurry.

"Why is this?" you ask. "I thought vector files could scale big and small and far and wide, and still retain their image quality." Well, technically they do. But there's a weakness in using vector files, and this weakness becomes more apparent at small sizes. Especially sizes under 48x48 pixels. The weakness is that computer monitors are still inherently pixel-based (that is to say, bitmap-based) displays.

When you take a vector image, originally sized at 24x24 and scale it down to 16x16, the relative proportions do not match. There's no way you can evenly distribute 24 pixels of information into 16 pixels of space (remember, there's no such thing as half a pixel). So the image blurs.

There's also no way you can evenly scale 24 pixels of information upwards into 32 pixels of space. Again, the image blurs.

Furthermore, if you take that same vector image, originally sized at 24x24 and scale it up to 48x48, you're now doubling the proportions. You no longer have crisp 1-pixel lines. You have chunky 2-pixel lines. Scale it up larger (say to 96x96) and those lines become even thicker.

Now this is fine if you want Fisher Price icons, but not desirable if you're looking for crisp and clean. And this is why we design each icon size to scale, instead of relying on a single vector file. It takes more time, and may cost a little more money, but we believe the results are worth it.

There are a few caveats: First, if you're working with larger icon sizes (say, above 48x48) you're not going to notice the difference as much, and you may find the results acceptable. Second, your mileage will vary as you create different styles of artwork. The less-detailed your linework is, the less you will need to worry about this.

Now you know our process, our obsession with pixel-perfection, and why it takes a bit more work when you need more than one icon size. Vector artwork is wonderful, but it should not be relied upon as a silver bullet. For small icons, bitmap is the way to go.