With the release of Editorial 1.1, we get an iPhone version. I use Editorial for posting links and quotes to this site when on iOS, so this update is very welcome. However I was stumped on how to move my workflows to the iPhone. Turns out there is a workflow for doing that (but you need Dropbox, so I had to sign up for a free account again). Works well.
Also there is a workflow that does the same thing for Snippets.
Thanks to Chase McCoy.
I store a lot of stuff in Truecrypt volumes so this is particularly troubling. Cory Doctorow:
The response to the Truecrypt news is mostly frank bafflement. The software is licensed under an obscure “open source” license that makes it unclear whether third parties can support the now (apparently) orphaned codebase.
No one really knows how secure the software was, but a security audit had recently been funded and was getting set to start. Then, boom, the software developers kill the software and claim: “Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues.”
Ominous to say the least.
For now I guess I will use OS X encrypted images. Man, what a bummer.
I added a great comment from a reader, so be sure to check out the updated bit at the end of the post. (Update made on May 28, 2014 at 1544 PT.)
Emily Parkhurst:
So, what should Microsoft buy to help it along? Spotify? Pandora? I suspect RealNetworks could be acquired on the cheap.
Uhhh, I, umm, hmmm…
I know RealNetworks is still around, you see their logo in Seattle on their headquarters, but I actually don’t know what they do anymore.
(Looks it up.)
Ok, I’m back, it looks like they have four main products:
Buying Spotify, Pandora, or RDIO, I guess would make sense as a competitive move, but RealNetworks? That’s just silly talk.
No matter what, Microsoft would be idiotic to buy any company to ‘compete’, instead they should focus on trying to compete with the crap they already are trying to ‘compete’ with: Surface, Skype, Windows, Office, or anything else…
Brian X Chen:
The Beats brand will remain separate from Apple’s, and Apple will offer both Beats’s streaming music service and premium headphones.
That’s the only thing I was wondering about. From the sound of the article Beats will remain it’s own brand, but very much will be a part of Apple instead of “independent from”. Also interesting is that Iovine and Dr. Dre don’t get a seat near Cook in the ranking, as they both report to Cue.
There will likely be even more words spilled about this, but I think this was one of those “it’s only a matter of time” situations. The Apple brand is, and likely always will be, one thing in consumer minds. To that end the only way for Apple to keep growing is to have sub brands.
Amy Kraft:
Some researchers speculate that during novel situations, time feels slower because the brain pays more attention. To assess this, in 2004, Dartmouth College neuroscientist Peter Tse performed a computer-based experiment in which a repetitive image flashed on the screen followed by a unique one. All of the images were shown for the same duration of time, but participants mistakenly believed that the unique image appeared on the screen for longer. Neuroscientists refer to this as the “oddball effect,” which occurs when the brain pays less attention to the mundane and more attention to novel stimuli.
Interesting, although it does nothing to explain why my kids always wake up before 7am no matter what time they go to bed. ((I don’t need to sleep past 7am, but I’d sure appreciate the option of sleeping in.))
Robert McGinley Myers writing for The Sweet Setup, about the Dispatch 2.0 update:
There are a number of other smaller new features added to the app, and my favorite is that if you take action on an email, such as sending it to Evernote, you get a little check mark next to it to let you know that an action has been taken.
He’s got a better rundown than Beautiful Pixels. Really fantastic update.
So happy about this update. This is hands down the best email client out there — Mac or iOS. I'm linking to the Beautiful Pixels write up because they have updated screenshots and the official site doesn't (at time of writing) If you don't have it, go buy it.
Ken Rockwell on Amazon's rather controversial new patent related to photography:
Amazon was just granted US patent 8,676,045 for a very clever and particular way to arrange a raised Plexiglas platform, lights and backdrop to give instant in-camera images with a 100% white background and a slight reflection below the subject, all with no postprocessing (like Photoshop) needed to make the platform blend into the background.
Clever, and it's funny to see how many other sites reported this wrong.
Fantastic new iOS photo editor which can correct for distortions. Must have for photos of things with straight lines where you care about keep those lines straight.
Dylan Matthews pulls no punches here:
It's worth remembering that the inconvenience and injustice of the TSA's activities exists for literally no reason. If the agency's privacy violations and annoying carry-on regulations were merely the price we paid for reducing the incidence of terrorist attacks, that'd be one thing. But, as security expert Bruce Schneier likes to note, there's no evidence that the TSA has ever prevented a terrorist attack, and there's some research suggesting it could serve to increase non-airborne terrorist attacks. Airline security is, so far as we can tell, totally useless.
I broke my rule today of not backing anything on KickStarter in order to pre-order this book from Dave Powell. He's one of my favorite photographers right now and the thought going into this book is likely to make it very special. Only a few days left to back it. (His site is worth following too.)
So I tweaked it, the result of which is a script that grabs the selected task in OmniFocus and creates a Mail.app message based off the data.
The URLs for downloading the script are now repaired, and I doubled checked it still works in OmniFocus 2. I haven’t used it in ages, but if you work with people that use OmniFocus, then this is as close to ‘collaboration’ as you can get with OmniFocus.
Matthew Ingram on why big companies are dangerous:
Google, Facebook and Amazon have shown us again this week why the combination of a quasi-monopoly, vested interests and an inscrutable algorithm can be a dangerous thing for internet users, since it allows them to influence what we see, know and buy
Good post.
Derek Thompson, refuting the aforelinked New Yorker article:
There is little evidence that America, as a country, is working more. Many of us—perhaps most of us—enjoy downtime that would look luxurious to a mid-century time-traveler.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
A second theory that Schulte considers is that “the overwhelm” is a function not so much of how many things Americans have to do but of how much time they spend thinking about how many things they have to do. A doctor who’s running through the list of groceries she needs to pick up on the way home is not actually any busier than one who’s concentrating on the task at hand, but she may feel more beleaguered. Conversely, a lawyer playing with his kids is technically at leisure, but if all the while he’s checking his phone for texts from the office he may feel that he hasn’t had any time off. Schulte terms this the “mental tape-loop phenomenon,” and she argues that it’s sapping our precious energies, so that we can’t even “decide what to think about, worrying about home stuff at work and work stuff at home.”
Jason Kotkke on Amazon’s latest bullshit:
No question about it: this sucks on Amazon’s part and demonstrates the degree to which the company’s top priority isn’t customer service. Better customer service in this case would be to offer these books for sale.
David Sparks on what I think is the most powerful, and underutilized feature of OmniFocus:
Conversely, I rarely use due dates on tasks unless they truly are something with a deadline. Arbitrarily assigning due dates to tasks means that you’re going to be getting lots of alarms for missing due dates on tasks that really aren’t overdue. Eventually you’ll start ignoring the alarms entirely and then you’ll miss a deadline on something that is important. Use your due dates sparingly and make them count.
Start dates, or defer dates as they are now called, are so powerful. Get yourself into the habit of thinking about time spans instead of due dates. Yes, paying your pills needs to be done by the 5th, but it could also be done anytime between the 1st and the 5th. So defer it to the 1st, and make it due the 5th. Then you can see it and maybe act on the action before it becomes urgent.
I am forever grateful to Mr. Sparks for showing me the light on that one.
From Mark Wilson’s interview with Mark Kawano, former Apple designer, has this nugget:
You see companies that have poached Apple designers, and they come up with sexy interfaces or something interesting, but it doesn’t necessarily move the needle for their business or their product. That’s because all the designer did was work on an interface piece, but to have a really well-designed product in the way Steve would say, this ‘holistic’ thing, is everything. It’s not just the interface piece. It’s designing the right business model into it. Designing the right marketing and the copy, and the way to distribute it. All of those pieces are critical.
It’s all too often overlooked that design is more than just the way something looks. Designing a good product is to design a product that is well thought out and consistent through all parts of the product. The business model, the name, the looks, the colors, the target market, etc — every piece matters.
Neat use of Keyboard Maestro, alas I cannot try it as it requires you to use the OmniSync Server (if I am reading it right) — and I am far too paranoid to do that.