Year: 2014
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JMAP
In a world where every new e-mail client must support Gmail or die, this is a breath of fresh air. JMAP, from FastMail, is an API that improves upon IMAP. It is open. And free. JMAP does everything. Instead of separate protocols with different syntax for sending email than for receiving it (and separate protocols…
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What Just Happened?
Fred Wilson uses 2014 as a lens to see not only what happened but what is happening: the “sharing economy” was outed as the “rental economy.” nobody is sharing anything. people are making money, plain and simple. technology has made renting things (even in real time) as simple as it made buying things a decade…
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Barley CMS Media Library
Over on the Barley blog we wrote: today we’re very excited to let you know that a brand-new media uploading and management experience is now available This was a lot of fun to work on. But it is even more fun to use. It will make my life a hundred times easier curating The Watercolor…
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More Aaron Draplin
Over the last few weeks Aaron Draplin’s video for Lynda.com made the rounds. However, over on the great Metafilter there is a post by filthy light thief chocked full of Draplin stuff.
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Tuesday Scrapple 2
See Scrapple 1. I’m begrudgingly using Evernote. It is working. But I wish the sync capabilities were equal to Simplenote’s. Tip: Close your inbox. Only open it when you’re reading and/or writing email. Do not leave it open in between. I would like to have a Russian dash cam installed in my car. My drive…
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14 days of committing
It has been 14 days since I said I’d be committing for 30 weekdays straight. I’ve committed code 12 out of those 14 days. (This weekend Eliza and I painted our living room so you’ll have to forgive me for not pulling out my computer.) What have I accomplished? What have I learned? These last…
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Playback any Google Doc’s keystrokes
James Somers: If you’ve ever typed anything into a Google Doc, you can now play it back as if it were a movie — like traveling through time to look over your own shoulder as you write. For a while now Google Docs, or Drive, or Docs Drive, or whatever they are calling it today,…
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The Internet’s First Family
Stephen Thomas goes long on Metafilter: So: Nominally, MetaFilter is a venue for people to talk about things other people have done, intelligently and with respect for each other (if not necessarily for the thing being discussed), and a small number of people are paid well to ensure this is what happens. All of this,…
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Flick Scrolling
Simon (simurai): Flick Scrolling in short: An idea of a new gesture that extends scrolling content on a touch-screen. Instead of letting momentum stop the scrolling, you can decide exactly where it should stop. Pretty cool. I’d really like this on my iPad.
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Stop caring about follower counts
Matt Gemmell on what has changed for him in 2014 — mainly, that he no longer worries about things like stats, follower counts, and numbers. He now writes for him. But he used to. I’d second-guess tweets and even articles, based on what I thought would appeal to my readers – who were mostly programmers.…
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Instagram hits 300M, gives 5 new filters, then deletes millions of accounts. All on purpose.
This is just me shooting from the hip here, but follow me through the last few days of Instagram news to see if, perhaps, they might have done all of this on purpose. On December 10th Instagram announces they hit 300M accounts and also said this: We’ve been deactivating spammy accounts from Instagram on an…
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The Case for Slow Programming
Jeffrey Ventrella: Any coder who claims that fast programming is the same as slow programming (except that it’s fast), doesn’t understand Design Process. For the same reason that many neuroscientists now believe that the fluid-like flow of neuronal firing throughout the brain has a temporal reverberation which has everything to do with thought and consciousness,…
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World War Pocket Notes
There are a lot of choices for pocket notebooks so which pocket notebook is the best value? /toby on blogspot: SOooo, that then leads us to… WHICH ONE do I buy? If you write often enough, you start to fill them up, and you have to buy more of them. So which one shakes out…
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Tuesday Scrapple 1
Inspired by local blogger and reporter Andy Palumbo’s scrapple posts — I’ve decided to try my hand at it. Today’s scrapple: There are about 3 people in the entire world that know exactly what they are doing and we’re all just copying off of them. Best thing I‘ve found in the last few weeks. http://php-osx.liip.ch…
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30 weekdays of commits
Similar to the 30 weekday blog challenge… I’m going to challenge myself, and you dear reader, to 30 weekdays of committing code to one of your projects. Any project. The projects I’m challenging myself to commit to, for 30 weekdays straight, are Barley CMS, Barley for WordPress, or Unmark. What does this mean? I will…
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Combo Feeds on Barley CMS
This was fun to work on. Since I did 30 weekdays of blogging I think now I’ll aim for 30 weekdays of committing code to Barley CMS.
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Odd JavaScript issue
Update Fixed! With this tweet Jim Lind has saved my day. So, I’m working on issue #52 for Unmark and I’m having what is quickly becoming the oddest issue I’ve ever had in my professional career. As with most programming oddities, I’m willing to bet that when the issue is found it will be something…
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VSCO Cam for iPad
VSCO Cam is now available for iPad. Good catch by Shawn Blanc: With this update, your VSCO Cam Library now syncs across devices. You can tell if a photo is synced by the double-circle icon in an image’s top right corner. And, not only do the images themselves sync, so too do the edits you’ve…
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Why podcasts are suddenly “back”
Marco Arment: What’s apparent from most of the recent podcast stories is that most of their reporters have talked to very few sources and either don’t listen to podcasts themselves or have just started. Most podcast listeners and producers know that the truth is much less interesting: podcasts started out as a niche interest almost…
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Tools and Toys reviews the iPad Air 2
Josh Ginter for Tools and Toys: Overall, the thinness of the new iPad Air 2 makes it the best iPad to hold, use, and carry with you on a daily basis. The image of Steve Jobs using the original iPad on the couch during the famous 2010 keynote has come into full fruition with the…
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Amazon Echo, err, Alexa
Amazon has this new tube-thing you can talk to called Echo. You can ask it questions by simply talking out loud. Similar to Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, or Google’s OK Google features. I find the entire thing odd – though, perhaps as a first step beta thing it’ll be OK – but I found it…
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David Mark on Echo
David Mark writing for The Loop: I think Amazon will sell a ton of these. I’m going to pull a Dalrymple and say “Nope”.
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What’s Behind the Great Podcast Renaissance?
Kevin Roose for New York Magazine: According to Edison Research, 39 million people listened to a podcast in the last month, the highest number on record. See.
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Podcasting is the next big thing
Fred Wilson: As is often the case, a simple little thing turns out to be the big thing. That little thing is that almost every car that has been sold in the past five years has had bluetooth connectivity to the car audio system. These days your phone is connected wirelessly to your car the…
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Seven days of travel feet
Seven out of 365 days of #travelfeet have passed. It has been an interesting week. The small group of friends that have joined in the fun have added over 125 travelfeet photos. I’ll be interested to see if they continue or if some people drop off and others join, etc. Here are my first 7…
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Twitter is not a replacement for blogs
Marco Arment: Too much of my writing in the last few years has gone exclusively into Twitter. I need to find a better balance. And… By knocking down a few walls and moving some furniture around, blogging is preparing for a comeback, and we’ll all be better off for it. Related: this, this, and this.…
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Muir Icons: Volume II
Sebastian de With: Part of a continuing effort to make some nice replacement icons for applications for usage in the OS X Yosemite Dock. This time around, mostly requests from Twitter. In Volume I he covered the Creative Suite from Adobe. In Volume II he covers some of the apps I’m more likely to use.
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P. Morris, Beloved
Speaking of packaging albums in all-new and innovative ways… P. Morris releases an album that you can only listen to with someone else who also has their webcam on. Think Chatroulette. Brilliant. /via Andy Baio.
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Don’t blame Powerpoint
Powerpoint is pretty terrible. The reason why many of us think so is because it is misused by so many. You can’t blame the tool, says Wayne Barz: Many have wished for and striven for the death of the powerpoint presentation. I have always disagreed with this point of view. There is no doubt that…
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Finding friends on Twitter
Today I used Twitter’s Find Friends feature that connects to Gmail to get a list of your contacts and subsequently searches Twitter for them. I have just over 2,550 contacts in my address book. Many are duplicates, due to how Gmail handles adding these addresses to your contact list. But, a cursory glance at the…
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How Apple Pay works
Kirk Lennon: One of the objections I’ve seen to Apple Pay is “How is it faster/easier than just sliding my card?” The truth is, it isn’t always. It’s rarely going to take longer than sliding a card, but it’s not always going to be radically faster either. However, it is much, much more secure. Merchants…
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HTML 5 is now a W3C Recommendation
This was slated for 2022 at one point. I’m very happy to see things leveling off with this recommendation by the W3C. As Jeremy Keith said in his comments about this event on HTML5 Doctor: On the one hand, it doesn’t really matter whether HTML5 is W3C recommendation or not. After all, what really matters…
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No more Platinum albums?
Hugh McIntyre for Forbes: In 2014, not a single artist’s album has gone platinum. Not one has managed to cross that million sales mark. Streaming/internet radio is eating digital downloads for lunch. And I think this trend is going to continue until things hit some sort of basement. But then, and I honestly believe this,…
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Rockets are hard
Yesterday Orbital Sciences had a bad day. One of their rockets exploded during a mission to deliver goods to the International Space Station. Rockets are hard. Elon Musk in Wired in 2012: The results are pretty crazy. One of our competitors, Orbital Sciences, has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket…
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Slow reading email
Matt Haughey writing on this #tildeclub space: One long-standing pet peeve with Gmail (and all similar email apps) is that they don’t offer a “slow” reading option. Email is a fast, efficient, intensive sort of activity, so the UI is as practical as possible, but if I ever need to write more than four paragraphs,…
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Om on the blogging challenge so far
Om Malik: The blogging challenge, however has brought a rigor and discipline that was missing for most of the year. Almost three weeks into the challenge, I feel like a slugger in the middle of slump who is finally starting to recover his swing — connecting, but still missing the power. The desire to blog…
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Some podcasts from Bijan Sabet
I should have tagged Bijan in my list of podcasts but he posted a few suggestions anyway. His are both photography related: I’m really enjoying Marco’s latest creation, Overcast and as a result I’m listening to more podcasts these days. I too am enjoying Overcast.
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Travelfeet 1
#travelfeet 1: After being in business for two years, we now have Plain business cards. We get asked all the time for business cards and we simply kept putting it off. Probably due to our relative distaste for business card culture. Oh, and all new plainmade.com coming very soon.
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YouTube Pop-up Bookmarklet
This is a bookmarklet that I wish I had written. But Michael Wheeler has beat me to it: For those who find themselves wanting to pop a YouTube video out into its own window, this is the tool for you. Using the bookmarklet below, you can pop a YouTube video out into a resizable window…
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365 days of travelfeet
I took a few weeks off of Instagram. Then, I thought, if I were to come back I’d like to have some reason to post. Something with a few constraints (beyond the square crop) and something regular. So, I’ll be posting #travelfeet for 365 days straight. I hope. I’m going to try. My niece and…
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Don’t Call It Wordsmithing
Ken Ziegler: As copywriters, we have a duty to our profession to remind our peers that there is no such person as a wordsmith in practically any office where copywriters operate with self-respect, dignity, and the freedom to express themselves in words without fear of being slandered by the most terrible of all imaginable portmanteaus.…
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The golden age for independent content
Matthew Haughey waxing nostalgic on the incredibly retro tilde.club: That made me think back to posting 4–5 times a day on my own blog, and RSS (and The Time Before Google Reader Was Killed), and even back before that. I tried to think of the ultimate time for the indie web, when I was experiencing…
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Trouble at the Koolaid Point
Kathy Sierra: I now believe the most dangerous time for a woman with online visibility is the point at which others are seen to be listening, “following”, “liking”, “favoriting”, retweeting. In other words, the point at which her readers have (in the troll’s mind) “drunk the Koolaid”. Apparently, that just can’t be allowed. Such a…
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What is Tilde Club?
In case you went all o_0 when you saw #tildeclub in my last post. Here is the story of its origin.
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Which type of glass to use for which type of beer?
Digg has a roundup of beer glass types and which brews to drink with them. Notice, 8 out of 10 glasses are recommended for IPA. IPA tastes great in anything.
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WordCamp San Francisco 2014
Ma.tt: On Sunday at 11AM I will deliver my State of the Word address, our annual look at where we’ve been and the road ahead, and even if you can’t make it you can livestream the SoTW and the entire weekend for just $10 from the comfort of your own home. I wish getting to…
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Blogging is back
I’m loving loving loving this. Andy Baio: So I think I‘ll try doing the same thing here. In the early days of Waxy.org, before I launched the linkblog, I used to blog short posts constantly. Multiple times a day. Twitter and Waxy Links cannibalized all the smaller posts, and as my reach grew, I started…
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Five ways to learn more about wine
Wine Library: Without fail, one of the greatest ‘hands-on’ approaches to learning about wine, spirits (or brews for that matter), is to coordinate a guided tour while enjoying the spoils that come with “vacation”. Actual vineyard growers, winemakers, and owners will more quickly and pointedly debunk myths and elucidate the most important facts about your…
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Galaxy NGC 7331
Mike Hankey: Here’s the first astrophoto I’ve published since the spring. This is a spiral galaxy called NGC 7331 and its located approximately 40 million light-years away from Earth. This galaxy is similar in size and structure to our own galaxy and is sometimes called the Milky Way’s twin. The fuzzy dots surrounding the picture…