Geek & Mild by Sean Sperte

I haven’t used it yet, but the FontFont Subsetter, for optimizing web fonts, looks like a great tool.

30-Mar 2012

Saw this ad last night on TV and literally applauded after it was over.

26-Mar 2012

David Chartier hopes Apple gets ‘back to the basics’ with iOS 6. I’ve jailbroken my phone to get some of these features and fixes. For instance, FolderEnhancer makes folders on iOS actually useable for me.

26-Mar 2012

Here’s a great list of improvements in Photoshop CS6. The vector pixel snapping alone is worth the cost of upgrading (which hasn’t been announced yet, by the way).

26-Mar 2012

This is why we can’t have nice things.

26-Mar 2012

Why AirPlay just wrecked your responsive media strategy. Craig Villamor:

We can no longer presume that the content accessed through mobile devices will also be viewed on them.

The problem: media served to mobile devices is typically of less-quality, so when those devices then “beam” the media to larger screens via AirPlay, it looks like crap.

21-Mar 2012

Here’s a good counter-point to the argument I made about navigation labels not always needing to follow convention. While I found myself nodding as I read, I also realized I had (again) bought into the premise, that:

if users cannot find the information they are looking for, chances are they will abandon their track, never to return.

Seems like a reasonable assumption, and it might be anecdotally true. But I believe users have become extremely resilient to varying interfaces, labels, and navigation. Just look at Chris Pirillo’s dad trying to use Windows 8. Most UX professionals (myself included) would have guessed he would give up trying to get back to the “tiles” interface after 30 seconds. Instead, he kept clicking around for three minutes.

Don’t misunderstand me, though. I’m not saying we should throw out good practices. Our job is to make the experience less frustrating, not more. I just don’t think we should blindly follow convention, automatically apply UX solutions without first clearly identifying the goals and problems. As Wilson Miner so eloquently charged: we have the opportunity to build the new digital world. Let’s not default in doing so.

21-Mar 2012

Manningbronco

This just blows my mind.

20-Mar 2012

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.)

19-Mar 2012

How to unsubscribe from LinkedIn email

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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.)

  3. 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.

19-Mar 2012

True push for Sparrow for iPhone. The rub: gotta jailbreak.

Update: here’s another method for enabling push in Sparrow, specifically designed for it.

17-Mar 2012

“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.

17-Mar 2012

Federico Viticci is killing it lately. His latest piece compares iOS text editors with the fury of a thousand suns.

16-Mar 2012

See you at Circles Conference 2012.

16-Mar 2012

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.

16-Mar 2012

Plain text in a field

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:

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:

(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:

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.

15-Mar 2012

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.)

15-Mar 2012

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.

14-Mar 2012

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.

14-Mar 2012