I’m very pleased to share version 2.5 of Social with you. Brought to you by our good friends at MailChimp (see their blog post), Social is a…
Fellow Colorado web geeks, I made you a t-shirt. The code that comprises the white stripe is a full, working HTML page with canvas code that draws…
It’s been very interesting to me to see how some folks are re-evaluating their work/life balance in the wake of reading Isaacson’s Steve…
It’s baseball season again, and in downtown Denver that means traffic and bad cell phone connections. We can’t do much about the latter, but be sure to use GameTonight for warning about potential traffic concerns. GameTonight is a single-serving site that answers “is there a game tonight?” and tracks the major sports teams in 1516…
I started the following post back in August of 2011; Sean’s comment on my previous post prompted me to dig it up. Now that I’m back to using a laptop full time, I’m right back to the old hassle of having my windows scatter all over the place when I connect and disconnect an external…
I’ve generally loved the move from multiple machines to a single laptop (that I plug in to an external monitor when I’m at my desk). A minor hassle that I have to deal with a few times a day is resizing windows that have been “adjusted” when I unplugged from my monitor. For example, my…
There was a pretty good tempest in a teacup regarding Readability over the last few weeks. While I’m sure I didn’t exhaust the available material, I did read the articles I linked above as well as a few others. I link to these because they were written by folks I’ve known well by reputation/production (and…
Quite simply, Paper is the best app I’ve seen in a long time.1 It just turned my iPad from a device I leave at home for email, browsing and playing games to a business tool I want to have with me all the time. Over the last six months I’ve been using paper sketches more…
I’ve been excited to try Sparrow on my iPhone since I saw it announced last year. I haven’t been a fan of the desktop app as I’m so hopelessly dependent on MsgFiler with Mail.app to support my email workflow, but I was hoping that Sparrow on the iPhone would be an improvement over the included…
Turns out if you don’t have Pages installed, a .pages file will open up pretty nicely in Preview. Handy!
I’m a fan of iMessages the same way I was a fan of BlackBerry messenger when I was on that platform. Who doesn’t like free text messaging (without having to run a separate IM app on your phone)? The iCloud integration promised to deliver what I had predicted, but I’d never gotten iMessage delivery to…
For the last few months just about every time I do anything on my iPhone that uses Location Services, I’ve had that icon come on and stay on. I couldn’t get it to go away unless I turned off Location Services entirely; and even then it would come right back as soon as I re-enabled…
I saw this the other day when I loaded up the store – looks like a classic “CSS not loaded” view to me. Quitting and re-launching returned things to normal. I found this interesting because I remembered that iTunes didn’t use Webkit; however that seems to have changed.
If you’re a PathFinder user, this small bash function may be useful to you: pf () { open -a “Path Finder.app” $1; } It’s the equivalent to the open command that will open a Finder window to the current location in the terminal, but this will open that location in PathFinder instead. Enjoy.
Apple’s culture is one of making choices before products get to consumers. You get X or Y, not a choice between X and Y. That’s what makes the existence of iChat (text and video chat) at the same time as iMessages (text chat) and FaceTime (video chat) so… odd. When Apple launched iChat, it was…
One of the things I love about Google Voice is the way I can receive and send text messages from my phone, iPad and laptop. To borrow from “the best camera is the one that’s with you”, the best device for messaging is the one you’re currently using. It’s blindingly obvious that this sort of…
Many people, myself included, blast Android for UI inconsistency; but it’s a problem in iOS too. Here we have two screenshots from the built-in iOS settings screens. In this one, you see a Back button and a Save button in the toolbar. Clicking Save will apply changes, while clicking Back will act as a Cancel…
After migrating from MobileMe to iCloud, I ran into a nasty situation where iSync/MobileMe sync thought I had data conflicts but I couldn’t resolve them. The way the Conflict Resolver dialog appears and acts is a nightmare. When it appears, it hangs for a good 30 seconds, spiking the CPU and not allowing itself to…
If you used to choose the Sleep option with TAB key after hitting the POWER button on your Mac, Lion may have your muscle memory befuddled. Never fear, there is a better way: just hit the “s” key after the POWER button, and that Sleep button will get selected without the TAB key two-step. Additional…
I’ve been using Safari as my primary browser as a trial on my Lion machine. The number one thing I can’t get over is the lack of favicons in tabs. When I get 5+ tabs open, picking the right tab is a total crapshoot. Especially since Safari introduced opening tabs adjacent to the current tab…
Public service announcement: the nightly builds for Chromium seem to have a new home, the new location is here. That is all.
If you’re looking for an iPhone app that gives you the ability to annotate and draw circles and arrows on screenshots the way the excellent Skitch app for the Mac does, I recommend trying Sketches 2. It’s not quite as good as Skitch, but definitely the best of the ones I’ve tried for iOS. Thanks…
Wondering what you can add to your iOS app to really annoy your users? Here’s a good way. Push out an update to your paid app that forces your customers to click through a splash screen advertising some new version of your app that won’t be available for 5 months! Force your users to click…
I’ve been wanting to do more with the favorites feature on Twitter for a long time. I’m not a big fan of retweets, and have always preferred to favorite things I like rather than rebroadcast them indiscriminately. Stellar.io has taken on the job of exposing this great content and making it follow-able, and it is…
MsgFiler, Adam’s essential app for Mail.app users is now available in the app store. Do yourself a favor, go buy it now, then come back to read the rest of this. I’m a huge fan of MsgFiler and have been using it since 2006. I honestly can’t imagine using Mail without it. It allows you…
I received a note from someone interesting in doing more with my iTunes Stats script. As a response, I committed the latest code to GitHub – forks are welcome.
The primary purpose of an icon is to visually represent data to a user. Typically, this data will have a meaning such as “this needs attention” or “click here when you want to save”. Since the icon is supposed to represent a single thing, it’s rare to see something like this in a shipping product.…
I have to do basic arithmetic on a fairly regular basis. My tool of choice for the last few years has been LeanCalc. It does the job well for the most part, but it doesn’t ignore non 0-9 characters, I would commonly use it to calculate a percentage of a dollar value. I’d paste in…