App wishes
I saw that Bijan Sabet wrote a short post enumerating a few things he’d like to see in some of the applications that he uses. I thought that was cool so I’m…
Blog
Posts, notes, and things worth sharing.
Longer thoughts, quick observations, photographs, and links. All in one place, newest first.
Thirty five down
I’m now on day 35 of my 60-day break from social media. I wanted to write a post on the 7th, since that would have been a calendar month since the start,…
Mike Vial is on a tear
I don’t know Mike Vial. I found his site through the /now page movement. Have you seen my /now page? A few months ago I linked to his blog and shortly thereafter…
Continuum is great
In Gruber’s link to The Verge’s review of the Lumia 950XL and the Continuum feature (the feature that allows mobile apps to run like desktop apps when the phone is connected to…
iCab
Looking for a browser on iOS with a ton of features? Try iCab. Gabe Weatherhead has a great post on iCab. Great apps like this, which are updated far more often than…
Is the Apple Watch a flop?
Fred Wilson going over his predictions from last year: The Apple Watch was a flop. This is the one I took the most heat on. So I feel a bit vindicated on…
The Apple Watch is the original iPhone
I really liked this comparison by Michael D. Shear for the New York Times and I think it is spot on. My wife has an Apple Watch. I’d call her a “light…
Three weeks into the social break
Today is day 21 or about one-third of the way through my most recent break from social media. This morning I read my post from the end of the first week and…
Duck Duck Grow
In June of 2014 I mentioned that my search engine of choice, DuckDuckGo, was being added as a search option to my then browser of choice Safari. At the time DDG was…
The first week of the social break
“Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.” # Today marks the first week of my social break. This has been a complete break from Twitter, RSS, Instagram, Facebook,…
Another social break
In mid-2014 I took a two week break from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. In October 2014 I took a 30-day social break and wrote about why I was doing it when I…
How to be like Steve Ballmer
David Barnes for Packt Publishing on Medium: It’s easy to mock Ballmer. You see videos. The Windows TV ad. The “developers developers developers”. What a loser. What a goofball. But that’s the…
Every app needs a remote kill switch
Kyle Slattery on the 3e8 journal on why every mobile app should have a way to “kill” it remotely: The tricky thing about setting up your kill switch is you need to…
The Library of Discount Stores
Me, on our company blog at Plain: Every site is different but as a whole they make up the general feeling of the Internet. Like a neighborhood of homes with well manicured…
The VTech breach
VTech: Our customer database contains user profile information including name, email address, password, secret question and answer for password retrieval, IP address, mailing address and download history. In addition the database also…
An interview with James Gurney
I had the privilege of interviewing James Gurney, creator of the illustrated book series Dinotopia, over on my other “blog” The Watercolor Gallery. Gurney also runs a daily blog called The Gurney Journey….
A recap from the future
Back in October Kyle Ruane (Plain & Coalwork co-founder) put together an opening for Great Scott! A Back to the Future art show that he held in our space at Coalwork. He…
Ben Brooks on exposure vs. money
Ben Brooks on his own stinkin’ blog: In short: never give your writing away for free. Even if you don’t make money on your site at the moment, don’t give your writing…
Simplenote’s moment
The running theme the last few weeks is how many people, including myself, are leaving Evernote behind for either Apple’s Notes or Simplenote. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the people that are leaving…
Kerri Krueger says farewell to Evernote
Kerri Krueger on her blog: What was once fast and simple suddenly…wasn’t. Evernote’s beautifully slim and functional former self disappeared into a bloated garbage fire that rendered it all but unusable. Yesterday…
A new start for Ignite
Brady Forrest on Medium: The goal was to have a night where geeks could share their ideas. We gave the speakers just 5 minutes on stage with 20 slides that auto-advance every…
Firefox for iOS
Firefox for iOS just hit the App Store and will work on iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Why would you use Firefox for iOS? Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac: You might want to…
Horace Dediu and the iPad Pro
Horace Dediu of Asymco “reviews” the iPad Pro in this video by going through the evolution of the “desktop computer” as Apple has posited it over the last 5 or 6 years. Horace attempts…
uMake
Speaking of very different use cases for the iPad Pro … how about as a 3D sketch tool? uMake makes a pretty compelling use case I think. Obviously this sort of thing…
Windows 10 update
Terry Myerson: Today, we reach our next milestone as the first major update to Windows 10 is now available* for PCs and tablets. With this update, there are improvements in all aspects…
Gruber’s iPad Pro review
You can see why I believe Apple is going to regret not making OS X available on iPads by reading some of the points in John Gruber’s iPad Pro review: First, when…
Microsoft Surface Book vs. Surface Pro 4
Lee Morris of Fstoppers sits down with the Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 side-by-side in this video review. He also has a short write-up on their site when they compared the…
git from the inside out
Mary Rose Cook: The essay focuses on the graph structure that underpins Git and the way the properties of this graph dictate Git’s behavior. Looking at fundamentals, you build your mental model…
Pen vs. Computer
Mike Vial on his blog about using a pen or using a computer to write a song: They may be right, but I’ve tried abandoning my computer many times to no avail;…
Split-Screen on El Capitan
Josh Ginter: It’s taken a little while, but OS X El Capitan’s split-screen multitasking (see also, iOS 9 for iPad) has become one of my favourite features of Apple’s latest desktop OS….