I have a love/hate relationship with the Mac OS X Dock. I’m sure I’m not alone. The Dock has been around since the very first OS X version, and continues to be both marginally functional and frustratingly useless. I keep mine empty of non-running apps, but use it often for opening documents via drag-and-drop. It’s also nice for badge notifications and remains the only way to (easily) view what’s in Trash. So, like I said, love/hate.
I’ve flirted with just about every Dock arrangement there is: right, left, bottom (even top). I’ve pinned it to the start and end for every side. I’ve used it with auto-hide enabled and not. For the most part, I’ve enjoyed it on the right and pinned to the end (so, bottom-right), and shown all the time. Lately, though, I’ve found myself enabling auto-hide so the Dock stays tucked away, out of view. The one thing that bothers me about this setup is the animation speed when it appears and hides. Well, with a little terminal command, my problem was solved. And now, I shall share with you.
To speed up the Dock show/hide animation, use this command in terminal:
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0.5;killall Dock
You can set the timing to anything you want, even zero to disable the animation completely; default is 1. I tried 0.25 and felt it was almost too fast and didn’t feel right. Your mileage may vary.
(Original credit: Marius Butuc.)
In what I consider a necessary evil, I’ve re-joined LinkedIn to, you know, network. It’s not really my choice, but I have to live with it.
Part of living with it is figuring out how to lessen the pain of dealing with all the email they send. They’re notorious for it. I’ve done what I can in my profile settings, but unfortunately LinkedIn doesn’t provide a toggle for receiving notifications of new connections. That means I’m getting a new email for every single new connection that is made.
There are three ways to deal with this:
Delete your LinkedIn account. I’ve already taken this approach once, but it comes with the cost of not being able to, you know, network.
Set up some sort of client-side filter system. This doesn’t work for me since the iPhone Mail app doesn’t have filters. (Neither does Sparrow at this point, by the way.)
Use another email address as your primary email. This is actually so smart, I’m not sure why I hadn’t already used it across all my various profiles.
The idea that you use a custom email alias (e.g. “linkedin@domain.com”) and a single email account/inbox that’s not your primary address. Think of it like an email junk drawer. The requirements, obviously, are that you have control of your own domain, and that you can easily create email aliases.
The way I have mine set up is similar to my spam-free email setup. I have an email account called ‘spam’, and I’m pointing linkedin@* to that account. That way I can still access the account when/if I need (for confirmations, password resets, etc.), but don’t get the obnoxious notifications or newsletters.
The only caveat is that friends and family won’t be able to find my profile using my email address when they sign up or look for contacts. And, obviously, I’m not really unsubscribed. But now I won’t have my inbox flooded with LinkedIn Connection notifications either.
“Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs”: a direct op-ed piece in the NY Times from Greg Smith, a former Sachs executive, who feels the company culture has eroded.
The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for. […]
These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?” It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave. […]
I hope this can be a wake-up call to the board of directors. Make the client the focal point of your business again. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm.
More of this kind of conviction on Wall Street, please.
Federico Viticci is killing it lately. His latest piece compares iOS text editors with the fury of a thousand suns.
Panic co-founder Steven Frank recently republished his request for a ‘dream notes app’. I think he originally wrote it before the onslaught of new, Markdown-supporting iOS notes apps. But because he re-posted it, I assume he still feels it applies. I found it interesting his tone was similar to mine in ‘Plain text in a field’ – jaded and frustrated.
Let me start off this post by ensuring you that I have, in fact, tried the notes app you use and love and think is the best and want to recommend to me. I’ve tried them all. A few I can recite, from memory: Byword, Elements, iA Writer, Quick Note, Note, Simplenote, Notational Velocity, nvAlt, Nottingham, Apple Mail, Write Room, VoodooPad, Notesy, Evernote, PlainText, OneNote, DEVONthink…
Maybe I’m being too ambitious, thinking I can have a simple text editor combo (desktop and mobile app) that is just the right amount of simplicity without sacrificing function. Maybe I’m naive to think that Apple’s Notes app on iOS is almost perfect, but would be better if it supported some form of simple organization scheme. Maybe I’m stupid to suggest that a desktop app feel like it was made for the Mac, but not weighed down with feature-bloat and mostly useless functionality.
Maybe not.
Here’s what, in my mind, would make for the perfect desktop and mobile combination note taking apps.
Desktop
On the desktop it doesn’t take much. Notational Velocity is almost there, but drives me nuts with it’s strange (to the Mac) experience conventions. One example is with the creation of a new note – why in the world can’t I create a new note with ⌘-N? Those kinds of oddities or omissions are deal-breakers for me.
The perfect desktop notes app would:
- Be a single window
- Contain a listing of notes in a sidebar (I don’t want to have to use an open dialog or the Finder to open a note)
- Have search
- Be completely useable with only the keyboard
- Be light weight and quick, and feel native
Mountain Lion’s Notes app looks promising, but is limited by lack of organizational functionality. Same goes for the iOS version(s).
iOS
The perfect mobile notes app should be similarly focussed. Simplenote is near pitch-perfect here. It’s just plain text in a field. It has a simple organizational schema (via tags), is quick and light weight, and has search. It’s most glaring problem, for me, is its lack of desktop counterpart.
So, my ideal mobile notes app would:
- Be just like Simplenote, but have a desktop counterpart (and an icon that hints at its function, not its brand)
(As an aside, can someone tell me why it’s so hard for an iOS app to support moving of notes/files from one location on Dropbox to another?)
The combination
When it comes down to it, it’s the combination of desktop plus mobile that I can’t seem to find. I actually don’t mind Evernote on the Mac (even though it’s overkill for what I want), but don’t like its iOS version(s). I like Simplenote on my iPhone, but there’s no version for Mac (and the iPad version is sort of ho-hum). I’m stuck in this no-man’s land of apps that get passable grades on one platform but flunk the other.
For me, a notes app combo must:
- Be just plain text
- Not require a title for a note
- Have a simple organizational scheme (folders or tags, either one works)
- Sync (without fail)
That’s it. That’s all it takes to win me as a customer. If you want to charge me $19.99 for each app, that’s fine. If you want to charge me $45 per year, that’s fine, too. As long as you deliver on those items I listed above, you can have my money.
Andy Baio, on Yahoo’s recent lawsuit against Facebook:
In their complaint, Yahoo alleges that Facebook’s News Feed violates “Dynamic page generator,” a patent filed in 1997 by their former CTO related to the launch of My Yahoo, one of the first personalized websites. Every web application, from Twitter to Pinterest, could be said to violate this patent. This is chaos.
Chaos indeed. (Via Daring Fireball.)
Sparrow, the email app I use on the Mac, is now available for iPhone. If it’s anything like the desktop version I’ll likely be switching from the built-in Mail app. Sparrow made me love email again.
All kinds of fun and amazing things can be done through the use of mod_rewrite on Apache. One such thing is the stripping (or ignoring) of file extensions in URLs. In other words, making domain.com/file.html accessible via domain.com/file. The reason to do this is strictly for aesthetics or readability. Still, there’s definitely value in human readable (and sharable) URLs, right?
Here’s how to tell Apache to ignore certain file extensions. Drop this little snippet in your .htaccess file, and change the extension(s) to whatever you want:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html
Make sure your Apache config is allowing mod_rewrite and directory-level overrides.
iOS UI Patterns is an inexhaustible collection of categorized screenshots of various iOS apps. Very useful for designers looking for inspiration and common conventions for an otherwise new UI paradigm.
I’ve been running the AdBlock extension in Chrome for about a week after discovering it significantly increases the speed of browsing. Unfortunately, it also blocks ads I want to see, such as the ones I run on Geek & Mild.
Thankfully, there’s a way to manually add filters to AdBlock, including ones that can exempt domains or websites. I added this line and got Fusion ads to re-appear:
@@$domain=~fusionads.net
Hypothetically, you could also use this format for, say, ads from the BuySellAds.com network.
Good Dad, Good Entrepreneur, Good Husband. I appreciate this kind of honesty from a fellow entrepreneur and father, and will take it as a good reminder. My relationship with my wife and family should be getting better and better, not the opposite.
The new Rdio has just launched and is so, so good.
Since I discovered Rdio almost two years ago I haven’t turned back. In other words, I rarely use iTunes anymore, and purchase media from the iTunes Store even rarer. Whereas I would previously spend around $20 per month on a limited amount of music and media, I now spend just $9.99 per month for unlimited access to Rdio’s entire catalogue, anywhere I am with the Rdio apps for iPhone and iPad.
Amidst all the stories coming out of SXSW this year, one stood out to me:
this “homeless hotspot” story.
It’s interesting in that it’s a study in how to reconcile marketing and
philanthropy, but also because it illustrates how technology can impact
sociology.
When we founded Sky Balloon we endeavored to do one thing: make iOS (or, at the time, iPhone) software that we wanted. Because of that, after we successfully shipped our first iPhone app, Rhema, we decided to tackle something a bit more ambitious.
It was May or June of 2010 (I can’t remember exactly) and we were loving our brand new iPads … except for the web browser, Safari. While advancements had been made in terms of its speed, we felt it still lacked in features and experience implementation – or UI. So we had the brilliant idea to make a new browser for the iPad.
Actually, I should say, I had the idea, because I had no idea what it took to build software, and I figured we could do it. You know, with our three-man team that only met for a few hours per week. And because, after all, we were only going to be building a great “frame” around a UIWebView. And Apple already did the hard part by building the renderer. And, how hard could it be? Right?
It turns out that building a browser is curse-word hard, even if you don’t have to worry about the rendering of web pages. At the time, though, we didn’t know this. Well, maybe the other two thirds of our little company did. But they were brave enough to follow me and my naivety into battle anyway, despite their better judgment, and armed only with Xcode and some mockups I had whipped up.
The idea was that we’d create a browser that we would want to use, market to all our internet buddies, hopefully get featured on Daring Fireball or Macworld or MacBreak Weekly or TUAW or some other hugely populated website full of enthusiasts, be spotlighted by Apple as an example of innovation on the iPad (despite competing toe-to-toe with Safari), and make millions. Then we’d keep making apps and stuff. From our yachts.
Come to think of it, I’m not sure we actually had a plan. We just knew we wanted a better browser – one with the features I’m about to outline – and I had imagined one up.
We called it Breeze. Like, “this browser is such a breeze to use” or “wow, browsing with this app is so easy” or “honey, come look at these chumps who made a web browser like Safari and are trying to be cool naming it a one-word, nondescript noun”. The tagline was, “Browse more awesomely on iPad.”
I’m so embarrassed.
Oh, but the features. Check out these features.
First, we’d rid the toolbar of the two distinct input fields – only one omnibox-inspired location bar, capable of both search and URL input.
Next – and this seemed so obvious to us we were sure Apple would steal it for Safari – a history popover when you tap-and-hold the back button. This, as expected, was added to Safari later. We’re still uncertain how Apple hacked into our Dropbox accounts, but they somehow got their hands on the idea. (I think the guys suspect I was responsible, since I have some friends at Apple. But whatever.)
Of course, our UI was going to be cleaner and more refined, since, you know, I’m so much better a graphic designer than those hacks at Apple, Inc. So the polished UI was also to be a feature listed on the App Store description.
Now we come to the good stuff. Our tabs really were something to behol–oh, crap. I forgot, Apple added our tabs to Safari recently. Anyway, this is what they looked like:
Those were coded up, by the way. That’s not a Photoshop mockup. And you have to remember, back then Safari’s tabs weren’t tabs at all. They were a 3x3 grid view of web pages that often needed to be reloaded once switched to.
We only had three tabs shown in the view, but the tab bar was horizontally scrollable to allow for unlimited tabs. We also didn’t show the tab bar until there were two tabs. Gruber would (have) be(en) proud.
For our spotlight feature we were going to include, get this, a “reading mode”. Months prior I had discovered a bookmarklet for Safari on the Mac called Readability, that, when activated, would isolate just the text (and any relevant images) on a web page. We thought this was wonderful, and needed to be on the iPad.
Apparently, Apple thought it needed to be on the Mac too, because only a few weeks after we began development, Safari for Mac shipped with “Reader Mode”, powered by the Readability script.
Although we knew Safari for iPad would likely get Reader Mode, we thought we could either (1) get there first, or (2) do ours better. We designed a couple of really great themes for Breeze’s Reading Mode, and decided that, even if Apple beat us to the punch, our themes might be enough to hedge out a healthy and loyal user base.
Incidentally, I even got in touch with the company behind Readability (now a stand alone product and service), Arc90, and asked if they’d be willing to take a look at Breeze once we were ready to show. Rich Ziade’s reply was enthusiastic, and he agreed. (In hindsight, I’m pretty sure he was humoring me. Roles reversed, I would have.)
Then there were all the features we knew we couldn’t include in Breeze 1.0, but knew we wanted:
- Ad blocking
- Sharing modules (for social sites)
- Extensions
- Built-in child-protection and accountability
- User profiles
- Keyword URL support (m = gmail.com)
- Find on page
- Gestures
There were more, but I’m too embarrassed to share. (Okay, one was “Bing support”. There, happy?)
The sad part is that we really did get a lot of it built. In fact, by the time Apple finally shipped Safari with proper tabs we were readying a private beta.
Safari’s slow-but-steady evolution, coupled with the third-party browser market (which had continued to expand to include great apps like iCab and Grazing), made Breeze’s success harder and harder to imagine. We also realized that not shipping after about 14 months of development meant we’d bitten off more than we could chew. And by then the delusions of grandeur that said we could be featured by Apple, or even John Gruber & Co., had worn off.
We made the hard decision to abandon the project, at what we estimate was 75% in.
We learned a lot, though. Not just about iOS development, but also ourselves, the business of software, and about what we might be capable of if we didn’t have just a few hours per week.
(Also: I can’t wait ‘til you see what we’re working on now.)
© 2012 Sean Sperte, please don't steal. More info.
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