Author: Colin Devroe

Recently the IconFactory guys, the same guys that brought you Twitterrific for the Mac and iPhone, Frenzic (another great game), RampChamp (another great game), and many other well-made things, found a bug in iTunes that potentially cost them loads of dough. To help out, here is a link to their new game for the iPhone

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This last week was probably my worst ‘food week’ on the diet in a very long time (besides our cruise, vacations don’t count on my diet). I started off the week right by going on a hike but I didn’t get too much exercise after that. Which would have been ok if it weren’t for

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NaNoDrawMo – Day one: Discovery. Ted Arnold, a farmer from New England, notices what appears to be an egg just outside of his barn. Cautiously he approaches the object wondering where it may have come from. As he stares at it for a few minutes from about 10 feet away he remembers a distant memory

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I’m loving this book. Too bad it doesn’t help me with my cats!

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Jason Fried recently wrote a tip for speakers that start off their presentations at conferences or any type of public speaking by saying "Sorry, I didn’t have time to prepare better" or something along those lines. His tip? Don’t say that. Jason is right. You shouldn’t say that. It makes people begin to wonder why

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[viddler id-120f30a5 h-280 w-420] Random 60: How do you get motivated? In today’s random 60 I ask where you find your inspiration but after viewing the video I realize what I really meant was how do you get motivated? After you’ve been working for a while on a particular thing and you notice your productivity

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I’m a big fan of Webkit. Although I had been a die hard fan of Safari for a while I’m now using Google Chrome as my primary browser. The great thing about Chrome is that it too uses the Webkit rendering engine. I’ll catalog my reasons for using Chrome in another post. The next version

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Todd Troxell, our "Super System Admin" at Viddler whom we also call The Todd, recently wrote a script for destroying bad queries while we were receiving an incredible amount of bad requests the other day. I called it a whack a mole script and told him he should blog about it… he called it "how

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Mary Ann waits patiently for me to take her to work.

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[viddler id-3d73076 h-280 w-420] Random 60: What is your favorite music genre? Special guest Jeff Johns, a friend and fellow Viddler team member, has a particular taste in music so I put him on the spot to name his favorite music genre. My favorite music genre would have to be Rock. What is your favorite

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I know we’re 1/3 of the way through Fall but for those of you that haven’t yet visited the site in a little while – come take a look at the Fall refresh.

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Good API design is essential to an API being used. The design of an API can be extremely daunting when you are just starting out with a new service so here are a few tips that can help you along the way to build a good, usable API. Use your own API. The very best

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I recently finished reading Prey by Michael Crichton. I’m a big Crichton fan for nearly no other reason than because my first book that I ever read, on my own without the nagging of any teachers or parents, was Jurassic Park. That and he knows how to write a book that makes you want to

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[viddler id-ab61be33 h-280 w-420] Random 60: TXT or call? Which would you prefer? Do you like getting text messages or would you rather someone give you a call and have a conversation about what they want? Are you like me and you’d like phone calls from family and friends for conversation but would rather a

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Guardian has a list of species that we’ve either lost or may lose in this decade alone. Sad. Via Jason Kottke.

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Thanks to Ethan Beard, who is as I type hosting Facebook’s Developer Garage, for including the Viddler logo in his slide about applications on Facebook.

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I’m thinking of participating in NaNoDrawMo an art initiative that takes place through the month of November. The inspiration comes from Steven Frank (whom I interviewed a few months ago) and he was inspired by NaNoWriMo the month-long annual writing initiative that happens every November. It seems like a big challenge. 50 works of art

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[viddler id-d2a0e47 h-280 w-420] Random 60: I love leftovers. One of my favorite foods is leftovers. Pretty much anything that is leftover from the night before will do – but certain foods stand out. Some, in fact, seem to be even better the next day than they are on the first day. Soups, Mac &

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The way Kyle talks about Git is much the same as I talk about cookies. Sort of makes me want to grab a tall glass of milk and dive into Git. Here is his perfect Git workflow for a one person project.

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[viddler id-b6549b4a h-278 w-420] Something new from Viddler today. Something we’ve been working on for quite a while. Viddler Analytics is a new feature that makes it easy to understand complex video statistics. Looking forward to seeing how our customer base reacts to this one.

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My friend Raymond and I took a quick hike to shoot photos on the top of Elk Mtn. A great way to kick off this next stage of The Diet.

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My friend Raymond and I hiked to the top of Elk Mountain this evening, trying to take advantage one of the last nice days for this fall, and took some photos of various things. Here are some of mine.

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It is hard to believe that The Diet is about 3 and a 1/2 years old. It was over three years ago that so many of us decided to get healthy, lose some of our extra weight, and try to help one another stay motivated to do it. It still surprises me to look back

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The much talked about tag in the HTML5 spec is, obviously, of interest to me. I mean, I work at Viddler after all. However, even if I didn’t – I’d still tell all of you – especially those of you that are Web developers – to take a look at Mark Pilgrim‘s amazingly awesome chapter

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I joined Twitter in November 2006. Since then I’ve written about Twitter quite a bit and I’ve tweeted over 13,000 times. Wow. That must mean this thing is going to stick with me. So, if you feel like it (and aren’t already) – consider following me on Twitter. Inspired by Justin Blanton’s eloquent plea.

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It has been far too long since I made any suggestions to all of you. Suggestions, here on First Initial, Last Name are what I consider recommended reading/viewing. Of course, all of the links I put here are worthy of your attention I’m just trying to draw more than the usual attention to these specific

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Thanks to Scott Meade for taking really good notes from my How to Measure Success presentation from LessConf in Jacksonville, Florida. Consider this a teaser for the forthcoming video. Photo credit: Mr Noded.

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If you’re going to do a demonstration of Windows 7, the latest version of Microsoft’s – most popular in the world – operating system, you might as well do it on an iMac. [viddler id-b32b9577 h-278 w-420] Via Viddler.

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WPAPI.org, the brain-child of Dean Robinson (who has been [mentioned a few times here on First Initial, Last Name](https://cdevroe.com/?s=dean robinson)), is an easy to use stats API for plugins and themes hosted on WordPress.org. Simple idea, perfectly executed.

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Tweetie on Mac But, you just got done saying how much you loved Tweetie 2 for iPhone. You want more? Well, yes I do. I am now using both Tweetie on my Mac and on my iPhone. On the day I bought Tweetie for iPhone I immediately began to wish that the two of them

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My friend Jon Christopher has just launched a new site for himself. He’s run the Monday By Noon site and brand for years yet he never had a place all his own on the Web. It is so very important for a designer/developer, freelance or otherwise, to have their own site. Personal branding is a

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From the guy that invented bagless vacuums and the insanely powerful airblades to dry your hands in bathrooms comes this; a bladeless fan. Using what looks to be the same principles that the Wright brothers used to discover flight, this fan wraps are around a "wing" which then collects the air around it and pulls

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Taken on October 14, 2004. Five years ago today: Again, I’m late on this one. For a fair stretch of time I was camping every single year in Chenango Valley State Park with family and friends. This particular year, I remember, it was rather cold a few of the nights. I was sleeping alone in

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Taken on October 15, 2004. Five years ago today: Well, not really. I haven’t been keeping up with my "five years ago today posts" and so this one is a bit late. Switching to the Macintosh was a fairly long process for me due to the work I was doing at the time. My having

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[ad#Adsense: Horiz 468] This is via a ton of people on Tumblr but ultimately Garrett Murray. He says it is perfect and I think it is super fantasticly perfectly awesome. So, there.

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[viddler id-d3739ab9 h-357 w-420] Part reason to play with 15 second videos again, part quick way to document that my office is clean at the moment, here is a 15 second video tour of my cleaned up office!

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(Video removed) This is my blog and I can post as many ‘hey my cat is cute and is sleeping’ videos that I want to, b’okay?

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I don’t buy a lot of iPhone applications. My reasons are that I don’t have a lot of extra money for such things and that many times I end up getting rid of an application a few weeks after installing it. In other words; why buy applications that I will not end up using long

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Do you like peanut butter? Then I highly recommend you try out Crazy Richard’s Peanut Butter. Creamy, chunky, the choice is yours but I will say that it is the best peanut butter I’ve ever had. Ingredients: Peanuts. I love that. Find it at your local grocer. Then come back and thank me.

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My friend Dan Rubin hasn’t written on his site in 13 months. However, the other day he came out of hiding and compared his less-than-frequent updates to the way he approaches washing the dishes. I’m linking to his most recent post for no other reason than to say welcome back Dan. Oh, his site is

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After going outside it appears there are, and this isn’t an actual head count just a best guess, hundreds of thousands of lady bugs swarming around our apartment building alone. Due to other friends reporting the same in their area I’m calling it a plague.

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[viddler id-cec0aceb h-280 w-420] Welcome to Random 60 season 2! Sorta. Today we have a special guest, Kyle Slattery, who is a friend and fellow Viddler team member. Today’s topic, haircuts. I just got my haircut and I usually just tell the lady at the hair place to cut as much off as she’d like

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[ad#Adsense: Horiz 468] When Eliza and I were hunting for good photos and videos of what the rooms looked like aboard the Carnival Miracle for our vacation we really couldn’t find what we were looking for. Sure, there were some photos but many of them weren’t very good. The ones that were good didn’t really

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So I’m an old fart. It is something that I’m beginning to come to grips with and so should all of you. That being said, I’m beginning to get annoyed with the way some people choose to use and misuse hashtags. I’m well aware that this is a free country, that Twitter is a free

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In late August I opened iChat, as I typically do, only to see that no one was online. Having quite a few people in my buddy list this makes for a strange occurrence. I rarely see an empty buddy list. A few hours go by and I check it again, still – no one. After

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Instapaper, a read-later service by Tumblr‘s Marco Arment, has been popping up in front of me for months. I’ve seen two of my friends, Justin and Jonathan, rave about it. So I thought it was time I gave it a spin. This morning I’ve installed the bookmarklet from the site, installed the free version of

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