A student at Visible School of Memphis, Tennessee wrote to us about how he—and many other students there—are using a Mac program called Fluid, which creates desktop "apps" for websites. Fluid is a "site-specific browser" that serves up one particular website; it's a great way to dedicate a spot for a web app like Populi on the Mac desktop or Dock and launch it separate from your browser. We use Fluid around here, too—it's nimble, lightweight, and stays out of the way. We like it. Anyway, the student wanted to see if we had a desktop icon he could use. Fluid defaults to use a website's 15 x 15-pixel favicon (you know, this thing) for the desktop icon, but when you blow up an icon that small, it looks pretty poor. Adam Sentz took a few seconds and provided him with this 512 x 512 icon, which you're free to download yourself to use with Fluid.*
Dennis Hixson, Vice-President of Pacific Life Bible College of Surrey, British Columbia, is easily our most-caffeinated customer. To show his appreciation for our development and support teams, he sent us three pounds of Intelligentsia Coffee from the roasting lab in Los Angeles, California. UPS dropped off a pound of Intelligentsia's invincible Black Cat espresso blend and about two pounds of a really beautiful, jammy Guatemalan bean. We love coffee around here—some love it as fuel, some love it as a culinary experience—and we're really grateful to Dennis for gifting us some of the best.
Our trickle of features continues. We released a Student Loan Clearinghouse report; it accompanies various IPEDS series in our preset reports in Academics. We added the ability to charge Bookstore tax and shipping charges to student accounts. Populi Accounting now accommodates foreign currencies. And Payment Plans have been slightly re-tooled to make them easier to use.
All the while we're still working on some bigger-ticket items, interface updates, and numerous other projects.
*Fluid, of course, is Mac-only. Google Chrome lets you do something similar for Windows PCs by creating "Application Shortcuts" for individual websites—check the Chrome documentation for full particulars.