Month: October 2014

iPad at a Crossroads

And that may be the best summarization of the way that Apple seems to think about software on these devices: they believe apps should be optimized where really they should be reimagined.

iPad at a Crossroads.

The End of Apps as We Know Them

In a world where notifications are full experiences in and of themselves, the screen of app icons makes less and less sense. Apps as destinations makes less and less sense.

The End of Apps as We Know Them.

Detroit State of Mind. A story about the realities of buying, and renovating, a home in Detroit.

Muir: Yosemite Icons. The second version of Sebastiaan de With’s replacement icons for OS X Yosemite. The Rdio, Twitter, and Slack replacements are my favorites. They’re such a big improvement that I’m using them even though they break some things.

Cycling the Highlands. Jeff Veen details his 8-day trip through the northern parts of Scotland. Despite all the rain he cycled through it sounds like a wonderful trip.

The software I use

While answering some “What do you use for…” questions the other night Daniel suggested I write up a recap of what tools I use. He wrote something similar a few days back and it was interesting to read through.

During the day I’m helping organize and lead our various support teams at Automattic so the bulk of my time is spent writing, talking with people, and helping out with projects that come up. All of that requires pretty simple and lightweight tools.

My day-to-day communication all happens through two tools. Much of it happens through various P2s which we have setup for every team, major project, and area of interest within the company. If you’re not familiar with P2s Matt wrote a bit about how we use them. Or, go pick up a copy of Scott’s book. All of our chat then happens through Slack, which we use for both 1-1 and group text chats. There are stats built-in so I know I’ve sent just over 35,000 messages since we started using it about 5 months ago.

The upside to P2 as a core tool for me is that I’m in control of how I follow and receive updates. I follow about 50 internal sites and use email to keep up with posts and comments. Everything is routed in to 3 separate folders that group posts and comments by relative priority. For all this email I use Mail.app. It’s the only mail client that’s ever felt “right” to me. I can’t stand Gmail on the web and get distracted by having email in my browser.

Safari is my primary browser. I had used Firefox for ages but with the release of Yosemite I’ve gone back to Safari. It’s really clean and performance-wise I don’t notice any difference. Plus, the only browser extension I rely upon is 1Password.

Like Daniel I’m a huge fan of Bartender. It keeps things so much more sane up in the menu bar. Up there I have a few things running:

I use Things to keep everything organized. For the last 6 months or so I was using Omnifocus. Along with the Yosemite upgrade I took a chance to re-evaluate my tools and decided Things just fit better for my usage. I’ve used it ever since the initial beta tests and have always found it fits my mental model of tasks pretty naturally.

Outside of tasks I use the native Calendar.app to stay scheduled. iCloud syncs everything over to my phone. For notes I use Simplenote for some things and FoldingText for others.

When I do need to code I use Coda. Any coding is just for personal projects and I find using Coda means I have just one tool to remember. It’s not for everyone but it works wonderfully for me.

Divvy is always running in the background, helping me keep windows organized and arranged. There’s something pleasing about having windows set to a grid.

I make sure to do some direct customer support once a week, too. I usually set aside one afternoon for that. It’s always done with our live chat team, which uses Olark. They’re good folks and the web-based chat client is pretty slick.

In terms of hardware I’m using a mid-2014 MacBook Pro, with the retina display of course. Spec-wise it’s got 16 GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD. Performance-wise it’s more than I need most of the time, but I like using machines for quite a while. My last machine, an 11″ MacBook Air, lasted 3.5 years. I went with the 13″ model because the weight is pretty darn minimal. It’s the only screen I use, too. I stopped using my Cinema Display after upgrading to this laptop. The biggest benefit here is that my home setup is identical to my travel setup in every way. Consistency is nice.

This all makes me think I should do a mobile-specific version of this post, too. Perhaps later.

Gluten-free pizza

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A while back we discovered that Bob’s Red Mill makes a gluten-free pizza crust. It’s amazingly delicious. Even has some thickness to it.

On Keeping a Logbook. A post from 2010 where Austin Kleon writes about “keeping a simple list of who/what/where” for each and every day. Reminds me a bit of the Bullet Journal idea.

Enjoying fall

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Enjoying a surprisingly sunny and warm October day here.

Jonathan Ive on products you can’t use

If you eat something that tastes awful, you assume the food’s bad. But when you use a product that you can’t use, you don’t assume it’s the product you assume it’s you.

Jonathan Ive – Vanity Fair conversation with Graydon Carter.