Author: Colin Devroe

Last night I quipped, on Twitter (I know, I know):  Office for Mac 2016 Preview. AKA Toolbars McGee. The screenshots of this Office for Mac 2016 preview that have been floating around are laughable. But David Sparks (MacSparky) brings me back to Earth: I think complaining about the menus in office and the massive number…

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Looks like a pretty stellar group of women coming out of Twitter to form an investment group called #Angels. Excellent reasoning too: Technology is no longer an industry category. As has been well-chronicled, it has become a foundation to every business, ranging from healthcare to transportation to finance to education and beyond. Every company will…

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On Kyle’s suggestion I’m using a private Flickr Group for Eliza and I to share our entire photo collection with one another. (related) Pretty simple. This is all we need to do: Upload every photo we’ve ever taken with the Mac uploadr

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Luke James Taylor has made an Apple Watch “container” in CSS that can be used to create mock ups for how things will look on the Apple Watch. Nice.

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Justin Jackson: As creators, there’s a temptation to seek out our heroes and ask them how they achieved their success. We think if we follow their instructions, we’ll be able to reproduce their winning magic. But it doesn’t work that way. Tips, tricks, advice… these should all be used to help you mold your own…

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It is settled. I’m going with Flickr. (related) Why? Flickr has been around for a decade. It is owned by a public company that hasn’t shown signs it wants to kill Flickr (on the contrary they’ve given people more space than ever). And, I believe Flickr may just be too big to fail at this…

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I am going all-in on Flickr. However, I haven’t logged into Flickr in, oh, forever? If you’re in the same boat you may want to check out which applications you’ve given access to read/write to your Flickr account. You can do so right here. Also, I recommend doing the same for Twitter here and Facebook…

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Another instant classic from Frank Chimero where in he describes the essence of designing for the web: an edgeless surface of unknown proportions comprised of small, individual, and variable elements from multiple vantages assembled into a readable whole that documents a moment Fascinating read and I’m sure it was even better as a presentation in…

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Matt Cutts does 30 day challenges. He’s famous for it. And I’ve done small things before like #travelfeet, 30 days of blogging, and other things. Similar to things I’ve tried to do in the past, for the rest of March — not quite 30 days left in it but who cares — I’ll be posting only to…

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New music podcast from Jon Hicks. The first episode is ready for your earlobes: This first edition of Troika is about ambient music. Not the bleepy,beaty, dancy kind, but the more soothing ‘neo-classical’ or drone style of Ambient. Music for watching the stars (amongst other things). Music for watching the stars. Or, perhaps reading a…

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Scrapple 1, Scrapple 2, Scrapple 3, Scrapple 4. Writing Space Bits isn’t easy but incredibly rewarding for me personally. I’d love to write more. This has been an incredibly cold February. With March right around the corner I know the cold weather is about to break and I’m sort of thinking that Spring is going to…

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My boy Kyle Ruane, who cofounded Plain and Coalwork with me, is putting together his own reoccurring design critique meetup for people in and near Scranton, PA. Designal Tap is an informal meetup of local designers, sharing what we‘re working on. A lot of people in the area work on small teams or by themselves,…

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Recently I read Charlotte Spencer’s blog post about being a new developer. The entire post is worth a read but this bit jumped out at me: As a new developer, I don’t care what you are programming in, I just want to know what you’re building. A programming language is just a programming language to…

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I wrote a Spacebit about the Fomalhaut system: Imagine a bulbous ball of ice, rock, and metal that stretches at least 6 miles across moving at 85,000 miles an hour smashing into another bulbous ball of ice, rock and metal traveling at similar speeds. It would create an explosion that, if it were to happen…

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The Verge: For the month of February, Bill Gates will be guest-editing The Verge. Over the course of four weeks, Gates will be guiding us as we explore how technology will transform the lives of those in the developing world through advancements in banking, healthcare, farming, and education technology. Bill Gates and his work the…

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Scrapple 3. A shorter scrapple post today. Not sure why but perhaps I’m too busy to be thinking of little nuggets of scrapple lately. I find myself using the default Twitter clients. Partly because they’ve put a chokehold on what developers are able to do with their APIs. You win Twitter. For now. Things work…

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Marco Arment: If we want it to get better, we need to start pushing back against the trend, modernizing blogs, and building what we want to come next. If you’ve read my blog for any length of time you know that I agree with him. And I also don’t pretend to know the answers. Here…

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Last week I warned that we’d be hearing more about how Flipboard pulled off their new web app and how some would agree and disagree with how they went about it. Well, my boy Faruk Ateş weighed in:  Flipboard is a product focused heavily around text-based content, which is why it’s so deeply regretting that…

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Enrique Dans, in a bit on Medium about Feedly, on RSS: I simply cannot understand why RSS readers are not used by everybody. I think that any user, from the professional to the casual, can benefit from having a series of information sources, pages, and alerts set up in an orderly manner in a feeds…

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Julie Zhou, on Medium, lists out her manager’s manifesto: 5) Figure out which people rely on you and how you can help them be self-sufficient. You may feel important having a monopoly on salmon provisions, but if the whole village learns how to fish, it‘ll free you up to do something else. Like figuring out…

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Michael Johnston for the Flipboard Engineering blog: Most modern mobile devices have hardware-accelerated canvas, so why couldn’t we take advantage of this? HTML5 games certainly do. But could we really develop an application user interface in canvas? Expect to read a lot about this over the next several months as the pros and cons are…

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Jason Snell is on a roll this week blogging about Photos for OS X. This latest post answers people’s questions. I recommend looking through them if you’re interested in how this is going to play out.

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This scrapple thing is catching on. Fellow Coalworker Joe Casabona just published his first edition of scrapple. I liked his last bit: I’ve been using Unmark for bookmarks lately. You should give it a try. I really dig it. Thanks for that Joe. I hope to see more bloggers pick up the scrapple baton. It…

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My friend Gary Vaynerchuk, on Medium: I’m just going to come out and say it: hashtags are not ownable. Period. He’s right. Anyone at any time can post anything they’d like to your hashtag. So, simply be mindful of that if you try to use hashtags as part of your marketing campaigns.

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So, Apple may be looking into building a car. With approaching 200 billion in cash, and yesterday CEO Tim Cook saying that their biggest asset is innovation, and that they plan to continue to invest very heavily into R&D, I would say you can bet that Apple is “looking into” a wide variety of possibilities. Some…

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Snell, of Six Colors, writing for TidBITS on the feature in Photos for OS X Beta that allows you to store your original photos and videos in iCloud and only keeping smaller versions locally on your Macintosh to save space: It remains to be seen exactly how Photos determines whether you have enough space, and…

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Uber, today: Good news! Uber is launching in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area at 5:00pm today! For an area that seems to be the last to get anything new this is a welcome change. And the company founder’s antics aside, this will end up being a good thing for the area.

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On the heels of Paperholm comes BRUTAL LONDON by Zupa Grafika.

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My boy Stammy wrote a really nice, in-depth blog post on how he and his team at Twitter designed the new Twitter Video feature. Absolutely a must-read: It irks me when designers talk about making specs and handing them over to engineering. The process of “making specs“ implies that there is no conversation with your…

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The last two scrapples were on Tuesday; you can find them here and here. I’m finally getting the hang of Evernote. The key, for me at least, is managing multiple notebooks. It’d be nice if I could password protect a notebook. A way to have a notebook be a bit extra secure. Holding the original…

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Om Malik did a short email interview with Charles Young of Paperholm; which I linked to just a day or so ago.

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Helena Price on Medium: What if we made more active decisions about how we spent our Internet time? If we weren’t bogged down maintaining our inboxes and social networks, who would we set out to meet or get to know better? If we weren’t so busy clicking links or browsing photos in our feeds, what…

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What an incredible photo mosaic of Comet C/2014Q2 Lovejoy! I also recommend doing some further research on Lovejoy himself and the other comets he discovered. /via Coudal Partners’ Fresh Signals.

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Charles Young, no relation to the West Wing’s own Charlie Young I presume, is building a paper city one daily model at a time.

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I’ve reached my capacity on Picturelife.* I want to rent more space but I’m hesitant because every other company that has attempted what Picturelife is doing has failed or been acquired and scuttled. Some of the other options I’ve looked at is Dropbox, Box, Amazon, and Flickr.  Both Dropbox and Box have options for unlimited space (or,…

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For good reason! Bill Gates shows us an amazing machine that turns feces into drinkable water. And that is not all. The by-products of this process, in addition to the water, are power and ash that can be used. Here’s Bill: I watched the piles of feces go up the conveyer belt and drop into…

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Reddit continues to be the best place to find public interviews with interesting people. Elon Musk did an AMA yesterday — fascinating stuff. Here is part of his answer to how he has managed to learn so much so quickly. One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic…

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Marco Arment had a rough day. He published a thoughtful, yet quick, post about Apple’s software quality. Most of us that follow and use Apple products nodded our heads in agreement as we read his post and moved onto the next one in our feed readers. Everyone who knows anything about Apple software knows that…

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You can put this app in the “I’ll likely never, ever use it” category but man does this look very well done. /via Mark Christian/Mike Davidson on Twitter.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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