Author: Colin Devroe
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Why I wouldn’t bet against Microsoft
If you follow me on Twitter you can probably tell that for the past 48 hours my brain is swirling around Microsoft’s Build conference and keynote. In a lot of ways my brain is swirling in the same way that it did in 2002 when I saw Steve Jobs debut the 17” iMac. This was…
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Microsoft’s Build Keynote
I just finished watching Microsoft’s Build Keynote from yesterday. If you haven’t seen it, and understand developer jargon, I recommend you watch it. My takeaways: Windows is about to get a lot more applications Office is now as big a platform for MSFT as Windows is Visual Studio Code is very good (I’ve been using…
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Quit it with the loading screens
Web people,
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Draplin on Clinton
Aaron Draplin on the reaction of Hillary Clinton’s logo: Knee-jerk reactions. Cheap comparisons. Lazy remixes. Predictable reactions. So it goes. Unfortunately this is how it goes. A woman runs for President of the United States and the biggest news to come out of it is her choice of logo. I think people just like to…
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Zeldman on Medium
Jeffery Zeldman on whether or not Medium is a death knell of the open web: You may think I exaggerate, but I’ve heard more than one respected colleague opine that publishing in Medium invalidates everything we independent content producers care about and represent; that it destroys all our good works with but one stroke of…
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The full-stack employee
Chris Messina, inventor of #hashtags, on Medium: The conventional seams between disciplines are fraying, and the set of skills necessary to succeed are broader and more nebulous than they’ve been before. He waxes on about how the lines between nearly every single area inside a company are blurring more and more. His piece reminded me…
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The pull towards design
For the past several years our industry, the tech industry, has been pulling designers that work within it down the stack — so to speak — towards engineering. They’ve drilled into their heads that they need to learn to code or, at the very least, to be able to create functional prototypes of their designs so…
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Two needs for deep linking
What are Deep Links? Scott Rosenberg recently wrote a piece on Backchannel on Medium about Deep Links. He wrote: Deep linking means to bore a wormhole-tunnel that hops you directly from a specific spot in one app to a spot in another, no side trip to a browser or a home screen needed. You get…
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GIF Artist Kevin Weir
iGNANT interviews GIF Artist Kevin Weir. You can find more of his stuff here.
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DuckDuckGo
Marco Arment on DuckDuckGo: In my experience so far, DuckDuckGo’s search is good enough the vast majority of the time. Sometimes, its results are even better than Google’s, and they’re rarely much worse. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine on all of my devices for several months. I’ve had some speed issues with…
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A whale of a distraction
Photographer Eric Smith in Going Viral on Medium: When I reviewed the pictures two weeks ago I was astounded by the juxtaposition of the young man immersed in his phone while this creature is feet away. Over the course of six shots showing the whale emerging and vanishing, he never looked up, even while the three…
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Beautiful Maps
Beautiful Maps by Dennys Hess. I love maps. /via Coudal.
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Beethoven
Noah Read on music: When I became a teenager this music fell by the wayside as my tastes followed those of most teenagers trying to be cool while not popular. Some of what I liked then has stood the test of time, but much of it has proven itself culturally and emotionally bankrupt. In recent…
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git turns 10
Linus Torvalds, creator of git: You can actually see how it all took shape in the git source code repository, except for the very first day or so. It took about a day to get to be “self-hosting“ so that I could start committing things into git using git itself, so the first day or…
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You don’t need a watch to be distraction free
In March 2013 I turned off all notifications on my phone, tablet, and computer. In May of that year I went one step further and closed most applications that would keep me distracted and only opened them when I wanted to. To this day the only notifications I get on my devices are for SMS…
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Bird nests
We have a number of bird nests throughout our 3 acre property. Some I’ve seen, most I haven’t laid eyes on yet. Last year we had a Woodcock (weird bird alert) nest under our spruce trees in the backyard. See blurry photo. Each morning we have turkeys roosting throughout the forest. I love it. Here are…
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Blanton tries Twitter blogging
Justin Blanton decides to muddy the waters on the definition of the word blogging even more by using textshots on Twitter to “blog”: With the advent of “textshots”—screenshots of text linked within tweets (and viewed inline on many Twitter clients)—I’ve decided to try something new with Twitter: “blogging”. Blanton is a blogging veteran so we’ll allow…
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“Myself” v1.0.3
This is a pretty cool use of Code Pen.
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100words by Jeremy Keith
I’m loving this series of posts by Jeremy Keith tagged 100words.
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April 1, 2015
Spring, they say.
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What about SnapChat?
You already read my thoughts on the Meerkat vs. Periscope debate. It is still way too early to tell. Let’s see what the next 12 months give us. Gary Vaynerchuk… a friend and business partner of mine, and investor in Meerkat, wrote on LinkedIn: I do it for my brand over my investments. So my…
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What is Dawn doing?
Earlier this month I was aglow with anticipation as Dawn reached orbit around Ceres. At Coalwork we even had it marked on the public calendar thinking it’d be a historic event. I expected a live stream. There was none. I expected a live audio stream. There was none. There wasn’t so much as a blog…
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The next generation of live video streaming
Kaboom! That is the sound of the live video streaming market over the last few weeks. Why? Why has it “suddenly” exploded with interest when live video streaming, even the one-to-many applications like we’re seeing with Meerkat and Periscope, has been around for years? I’m not sure there is a single answer. I believe it is…
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You need your own site
Charlotte Jackson, experimenting on her own site: I‘ve been super excited to see what all the fuss is about, so I have added flexbox to the simple header on this website. This also gave me a nice introduction to how it all works. If you do anything at all on the web and you do…
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Personal blogs
Bijan Sabet, on his personal blog: My favorite blogs are the simple ones. The ones that are honest, direct and authentic. The ones that allow for self expression and vulnerability. There sure seems to be a lot of chatter about blogging lately. We are seeing the format, medium, style, definition, layout, and tools all change…
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Good Old-Fashioned Marketing
Joe Cieplinski, on his blog, writing about the press surrounding the launch of Fantastical 2 for Mac — which I recommend you grab a copy of: It’s brilliant. And it obviously works. But only because it’s genuine. And only because he’s willing to put in that time. That incredible amount of time. Not coding. Not…
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Filters for iPhone by Mike Rundle
I worked with Mike Rundle for a few years on 9rules and a few client projects. One of the best designers I ever worked with as he bridged the gap between design and engineering really, really well. Today he released Filters, an app for iPhone that boasts 800+ photo filters for $0.99. The app is…
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Lando’s deal
So Facebook may be talking to news outlets about (and this is how the tech press has explained it) “hosting” their content on Facebook. I’ll wait until I see exactly what this might be before I cast any judgement but I think John Gruber may be on the right track: I can see why these news…
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Instagrams from a weekend at Seneca Lake
I took a few photos at Seneca Lake this weekend and posted a few of them on Instagram. I also put them into an album on Flickr.
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Matt Gemmell “On blogs”
I’m still meditating on Gemmell’s piece On blogs a few days after reading it. Instead of a blog, let your site be a site. Or a journal. An online anthology. Your collected works. Your essays, to date. Your body of writing. A blog is a non-thing; it’s the refusal to categorise what you produce, and…
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Software engineers should write
Shubhro Saha: Software engineers should write because it promotes many of the same skills required in programming. A core skill in both disciplines is an ability to think clearly. The best software engineers are great writers because their prose is as logical and elegant as their code. Saha is right. But I’ll extend his premise…
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Step Out of the Echo Chamber
Shawn Blanc, again, in a piece about stepping out of your echo chamber: When we look to the echo chamber as our sole source of inspiration, it’s like looking to a bag of chips for our sole source of nourishment. The constant barrage of our timelines and inboxes — those “little updates” — are like…
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Surreal Houses by Matthias Jung
Real photographs put into real photographs to create Surreal Houses. /via David Kick on Twitter.
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What is the definition of blog?
Ben Thompson, in a posted entitled Blogging’s Bright Future which I saved in Unmark for over a month… says sites like TechCrunch added to the confusion over the word blog: A big problem with this entire discussion is that there really isn’t a widely agreed-upon definition of what a blog is, thanks in part to…
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Procrastination
Shawn Blanc on Procrastination: Surely the most common reason to procrastinate is a lack of motivation. If we were motivated (or, instead of “motivated”, use the word “excited”) to accomplish a task, then we’d be doing it. I procrastinate as bad as anyone. Great read. He’s also writing a guide.
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Chuck Wendig is writing a Star Wars novel
Chuck Wendig is writing a Star Wars novel. He writes: I cannot feel my legs, and I have been drunkenly pirouetting wildly around the house for months, making lightsaber sounds and forcing my four-year-old on a steady regimen of Star Warsy goodness. I am geeking out hardcore over here. We live in interesting times. Where…
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My photos from Designal Tap 1
I just published a small album of photos on Flickr from Designal Tap 1 which Kyle Ruane hosted at Coalwork last week. Be sure to read Kyle’s recap of the event. At the end of the ‘long’ evening I threw out a discussion topic that has been whirling around my head for a while. It was…
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Wanted: A JS library that converts real language date strings to dates
I’m doing a bit of support for Barley today and a customer is having an issue sorting some dates in JavaScript. They’d like to compare a few dates on the page and return the date nearest today’s date. The issue I’m seeing (and I’m no JavaScript guru or anything) is that the dates they are…
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Matt Gemmell goes long on Windows Phone
Matt Gammell goes long on Windows Phone: This isn’t a review, or even a comparison. You can think of it as a sort of traveller’s guide for iPhone users, who find themselves in the land of Windows Phone. It’s also about the platform itself, rather than any specific handset. This is an excellent and incredibly…
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Ferengi
Mandy Brown, on her blog, on the origin of blogs and how platforms for writing have to find a way to solve the “where will the money come from” problem. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that our core discomfort with Medium—with most of online publishing—is we can’t quite see how the money…
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In This Skin
Artist Natalie McComas was recently inducted into VSCO’s Artist Initiative to take photos of people with rare skin defects: When Natalie first met Patience Hodgson (of the Australian indie-rock band, The Grates), who later became the inaugural subject of her “In This Skin” project, she saw Patience’s port-wine birthmark as something really beautiful. “Her perspective…
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Thoughts on Apple’s Spring Forward Event
I’m going to follow MacSparky’s lead here and provide a laundry list of thoughts now that what happened yesterday has sunk in a little. While reading this keep the following things in mind; I own a 2012-era 13” MBPr, an iPhone 6, and an iPad Air 2. I love all of these devices and the…
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Automattic wins DMCA case
Ernesto Van Der Sar of TorrentFreak: The case is mostly a symbolic win, but an important one. It should serve as a clear signal to other copyright holders that false DMCA takedown requests are not always left unpunished. DMCA takedown notices are an enormous amount of work for any company offering a service that allows the…
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myword.io adds inline editing
Dave Winer, creator of the open-source myword.io: Last Monday I decided to spend three days taking myword.io to the next step. To add an editor that publishes stories to their own static pages. I have a very good back-end, written in Node.js, that‘s all set up to do this. I started with the MacWrite demo…
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Trying iOS, Android, and Windows
Fred Wilson: I plan to go back to iOS when the next iPhone ships, and then back to Android six months after that. In this way, I can stay current on both operating systems and ecosystems which I think is useful in my business. I wish I could do this again. For a time I…
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An Einstein Cross
Or, gravitational lensing. It is when a distant object in space has so much gravity that it bends light around it allowing for us to observe what is behind the object. Blackholes, quasars and galaxies being the primary sources of gravitational lensing. Sometimes this effect helps us to see distant objects even clearer because it…
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Breaking
New Mac and iOS “app” that adds RSS feeds directly to your Today tab. Not for me. I prefer Feedly. But I’ll help link to anything that uses RSS without people knowing they are using RSS. Long live RSS!
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Crayon Sculptures by Hoang Tran
Superb sculptures in crayon by Hoang Tran. Ackbar is fantastic. /via iGNANT.
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Dawn reaches Ceres
Today NASA’s Dawn Mission reaches dwarf planet Ceres.