Recent Articles

Josh Ginter:

Begin gives a sense of delight greater than any other to-do app I’ve tried.

Ken Rockwell on the Fujifilm X-T1:

The Fuji X-T1 is a real camera, made of metal, not plastic, for real photographers.

The X-T1 has shutter and aperture dials. Nikon and Canon don't any more.

The X-T1 has a real exposure compensation dial. LEICA and Nikon don't any more.

The X-T1 has a real ISO dial. LEICA, Canon and Nikon don't any more.

Overall, a glowing review from Rockwell.

Matthew Guay:

Ulysses III was everything a web or print writer needed in one Markdown-powered app. You could write, easily keep up with all of your texts, and export in any format, all in one app. It’s a one-stop-shop for all your writing needs, and a beautiful one at that.

Great review, and agreed on all accounts.

Looks fantastic, (still) works better than Google.

Good take on iPad sales by Christopher Mims:

The mathematics here aren’t complicated: If iPads last a long time, and Apple is still selling a respectable 15 million to 20 million per quarter, most of them to people who have never owned one in the first place, the rate at which Apple sells iPads can stall even as iPads continue to take over the world—or at least the US and other rich markets.

I also like his argument for a tablet specific OS. With OS X being for PCs and iOS being for phones — the iPad would likely do better with its own variant of iOS/OS X that has been designed just for its larger screen size.

Sam Byford has an interview with Fujifilm about the awesome X-T1 and I loved this bit:

“Our X design is classic and authentic,” says Imai. “I could have chosen an ergonomic style but our X design is completely different. It’s flat and straight and based on ‘good-old-days’ camera style.” In particular, Fujifilm’s own Fujica ST901 from 1974 served as inspiration for Imai. “Late ’70s to ’80s SLRs were very cool to me,” he recalls. “The ST901 was very small with a very characteristic finder, so this was very close to the X-T1 concept. Very simple, not so ergonomic — this was the basic inspiration.”

The whole thing is a great read and shows a lot about why I love their cameras.

Love David Sparks’ TextExpander trick, which he notes:

It is a great way to remind everyone of the meeting and what we intend to accomplish. It also makes me look scary-organized.

I just set one up for myself, very cool.

Watts Martin:

In the long run, broadcast notification services only survive if they do become like email services. App.net isn’t making enough money to sustain a full-time business, but so far Twitter isn’t either. They both believe the value is in the infrastructure, and they’re both wrong. The value comes from making the infrastructure free.

Riccardo Mori on the annoying negative App.net comments from many bloggers:

Brief aside: $36 per year is not a fortune. They keep insisting how paying for apps and services is the right thing to do. What’s the harm in giving $36 as a donation to support the cause, even if they’re not active App.net users? Or why not switch to a monthly subscription, try to get involved again, see what happens?

Mori has some really good points in his post.

Khoi Vinh:

But I still get a good deal of satisfaction out of supporting the Mozilla Foundation and its good works. And more than that, I like using a browser that is not owned by one of the major tech companies; that’s an independence that is becoming rare and may one day become a luxury.

I haven’t used Firefox regularly in over 6 years. It feels too slow to me where Safari and Chrome seem snappy. I do have fond memories of Firefox from my college course. I remember walking into the classroom and seeing the switch to Firefox campaign URL scrawled across the whiteboard. It seemed like such a great anti-IE movement back then. I loved it.

Matt Taylor on the new minimum wage plan in Seattle, which hikes it to $15/hr over the course of something like 7 years:

Seattle has the capacity to upset the status quo, boost the quality of life for workers, and make a lot of economists and political elites look stupid in the process.

Grinning

Manton Reece:

We can’t rewind the clock to when Twitter was a tiny company that cared more about developers than advertisers, so I won’t be back.

Justin Williams:

People may write off ADN as a failed experiment and maybe it technically is, but it was always a risky proposition. They always were going against the grain and seemed like a longshot to succeed. We need more people to take risks like that.

Great advice from Matt on working from home well. I don’t work from home any longer, but a lot of his advice applies to people that work unsupervised in any way.

Jill Lepore’s troubling summation:

Leisure may be over, but that’s only because when your office is a cloud it follows you everywhere. The arrangement that began in the nineteenth-century factory and lived on through the twentieth-century office may end soon; if so, the two-century-long separation of home and work will turn out to have been a historical anomaly. Work will no longer be a place, and home no longer an escape.

That’s what worries me the most, and if you own your own business you know exactly how bad it really is.

Dalton Caldwell and Bryan Berg:

The bad news is that the renewal rate was not high enough for us to have sufficient budget for full-time employees. After carefully considering a few different options, we are making the difficult decision to no longer employ any salaried employees, including founders. Dalton and Bryan will continue to be responsible for the operation of App.net, but no longer as employees. Additionally, as part of our efforts to ensure App.net is generating positive cash flow, we are winding down the Developer Incentive Program. We will be reaching out to developers currently enrolled in the program with more information.

As you expected right? ((Everyone likes to say something is doomed, but only admit when they are right and not when they are wrong. You notice that?))

I had hoped it would turn out different for App.net, but for me the writing was on the wall just six months after App.net was launched. At that point all the “popular” kids from Twitter were more or less fully back on Twitter and not engaging on App.net.

Sure, it wasn’t their job to stay on App.net and you can argue it was App.net’s job to keep them there, but I think a lot of people ‘backed’ App.net on the assumption that it is where some, or all, of the people pushing it were going to go. When those people didn’t stay, the others had little reason to stay themselves.

It’s a nasty cycle and it’s hard to break: giving big users reasons to stay so that you can keep the rest of the users.

I greatly enjoy App.net, but what I’ve gotten the most from it is the knowledge that I really don’t care about these types of social networks — in that I really don’t get satisfaction out of using them — and so now I know I just really don’t need them. I won’t be leaving, but this certainly isn’t that shocking of news.

This is huge for iOS users. You can now install Hoefler & Co. fonts directly for use on your iOS device. It’s as easy as tapping a link on their website, which installs a profile in settings and viola your fonts are there. I just added a few and it works smoothly and Pages/Numbers/etc recognize the change immediately.

I say this is huge not because iOS fonts are shitty, but because I use Ideal Sans for all my documents and now I can finally edit them on my iPad without having to substitute the font — that’s what is huge.