Longer-form posts and essays.

Dandy Sunset

You’re Using Instagram Wrong

Jeffrey Kalmikoff on Medium: I effectively stopped looking at my Instagram feed, but did continue to use it to take, filter, and post photos (to Facebook). Early this year, in an effort to reduce overall social media noise from all accounts, I decided to unfollow everyone on Instagram and start over. As you may, or may not know,…

Thoughts on the WWDC keynote

Jim Dalrymple, of The Loop: There are a few things that struck me during the WWDC keynote presentation this morning. The first, and perhaps most important, is how much fun the Apple executives were having on stage. I’m not talking about the normal smiles and jokes, I mean they genuinely looked like they were having a good time….

The best WWDC Keynote ever

Yesterday’s WWDC Keynote was, in my opinion, the best WWDC Keynote ever. In fact, it was their best presentation since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch it right here. Craig Federighi: I’ll tell you, you just have not had chili by the campfire until you’ve eaten it with…

The 3 biggest takeaways from WWDC keynote

Ted Landau: Make no mistake: this was a historic keynote. It’s hard to overstate what Apple did today. If you’ve ever written and released any amount of software in your life it is pretty easy to see how much work went into what Apple announced yesterday. I don’t know for sure, but I’d be willing to bet it…

Living up to your (business) ideals

My friend Geoff DiMasi, of the great P’unk Ave, on A List Apart: We always cared about our work and had good relationships with our clients before, but intentionally pursuing projects that align with our business values has brought a higher level of investment and internal motivation from all members of our team. We have become true partners…

How not to install OS X Yosemite

Dan Eden lets us know how not to install OS X Yosemite: The moral of the story; don‘t install 10.10 just yet. And if you do, make sure you‘re not an impatient idiot like me. I was this close to installing Yosemite this morning. I backed up my work Macbook to a Time Capsule, downloaded Yosemite, and almost…

DuckDuckGo Safari

Huge news for DuckDuckGo. Safari in Yosemite will now have DDG as an option for a search engine. Remember Fred Wilson’s graph from a few days ago? You can expect that spike to continue. /via Daring Fireball.

I say, it’s OK to use HTML

Jonas Downey, of Basecamp, on Signal vs. Noise: It would surely be easier to do that with 8 simple, straightforward HTML files than with some custom WordPress installation that’s several versions out of date. So what if I have to repeat the navigation markup 8 separate times? It’s not that hard. We used to do it for much…

More thoughts on the future of WordPress themes

Chris Lema, on how things have changed in the WordPress theme industry: Today people treat themes like IKEA furniture – easily replaced and never intended to last for years or decades. He makes some excellent points. In case you missed it, Lema’s piece is in response to this.

Google’s New Self-Driving Car

Google recently introduced a new self-driving car at Code Conference. This was slightly different than their previous self-driving cars in that they manufactured the entire car as well as the system that drives it. Liz Gannes, at Re/Code: The car — which was conceived and designed by Google, unlike the ones it previously modified — lacks many of…

The State of the WordPress Theme Industry

David Perel, of Obox Themes and SalesGenius, on The State of the WordPress Theme Industry: These days there is very little to choose from between theme companies. Themes look the same, have very similar features and all offer decent support. If you look at the industry’s biggest market — business themes — you will be hard-pressed to know who built what. This…

Kayaking with my nephew

Last Friday I was able to take my nephew out in my Oru Kayak for an hour or so. It was a blast.

Marco Arment on Good Portable Headphones That Aren’t Beats

Marco Arment: I haven’t tried every headphone on the market — far from it (much to my chagrin). But among those I’ve tried, there are some clear winners, and a handful of models I haven’t tried seem worth consideration since they’ve gotten so much acclaim. He mentions more models in his blog post than I’ve ever owned in…

App Constellations

Fred Wilson on the growing trend of companies producing more than one mobile application, each that expose different sets of features from the same service: I have been calling this trend App Constellations. Facebook now has a collection of mobile apps that share a single login and have app to app linking built in. Google has a collection…

Seventeen People

Jon White: Unironically yapping about my love for this in 2014 is tricky, because my love for the series it belonged to has become so uncomfortably, uh, asterisk-laden lately. Back in those halcyon early-00’s days, I loved The West Wing. We all did! And now that it’s streaming to boot, freeing me from fiddling with those box-set envelope-sleeves,…

Litely

Cole Rise, whom I mentioned in What I saw this week #7, and Sam Soffes have collaborated on a great app called Litely. Litely is an app for editing photos using Rise’s Litely photo presets. I’ve been using it for a bit and I’m really digging some of the interactions and, obviously, the presets are great. If you’re…

Take time to focus on long term goals

In Caddy Shack II Randy Quaid’s character is famous for saying “Don‘t hit it long … No, no, wait. Don‘t hit it short … Wait, hit it long but let it go short” So, which should you focus on? The long term or the short term? The somewhat obvious answer is that it is good to learn to…

Make unread counts optional. Or, Brent Simmons ruined me and I’m OK with that.

There’s some conversation about whether or not applications such as Twitter, email, or RSS clients should have unread counts on their icons. I seem to think yes, but perhaps Brent Simmons ruined me years ago. When he built NetNewsWire he never intended for people to think they had to keep up with every post from thousands of different…

Let’s start talking again

For the past several years the trend has been swaying away from open, real, face-to-face communication — especially in tech culture. No meetings, remote work, less email, more chat. Over the last few months our team has been working hard to create a coworking community in Scranton, PA. We’ve been reaching out to freelancers, creative people who work…

How we use Unmark

You may have read how I use Unmark, but here also is how Chris does, how Tim does, and how Kyle does.

Yes, it is more work to subscribe than to follow, but that is OK with me

Fred Wilson, in A Founder’s Notebook, describing how “hard” it is to subscribe to a blog that isn’t on Tumblr but is on the open internet. My only complaint is that its not on Tumblr, where it would be an instant and easy follow. It takes more work to follow a blog when its on the open Internet…

You should go to meetups

Last night I joined Kyle Ruane, Michael O’Boyle, and Bruno Galvao and drove two-and-a-half hours to Brooklyn — simply to attend a small tech meetup. If you’ve been subscribed to my blog for any amount of time you’ve probably seen that I go to a lot of meetups, even some that are 12 hours away, and I’ve had…

Systematic #89

I was very happy to be a guest on Systematic #89. Brett Terpstra and I discussed building things behind closed doors and in the open (which I’ve recently covered a little on our company blog), about our favorite services shutting down, about watercolor painting, kayaking, and our three picks of the week. For those wondering, here is my…