Seedling is a curated gallery of online content, meant to help you find new sites that you should be reading.
Wondering what sites others are reading? Know about a little-known blog (perhaps your own) that you’d like to share with the world? Want to find a new site to read, and a new author to connect with? You’ll love Seedling.
Simplenote is a note-taking app that runs on your iPod touch and iPad. It’s free and syncs your notes over the air. I use Simplenote all the time and wrote more about it here.
1Password is a fantastic tool for keeping any and all top-secret info available on my iPhone or iPad, and it syncs over the air via Dropbox.
Pastebot is a fantastic clipboard manager for your iPod touch. And it will pair with your Mac to make a dead-simple way for transfering text and images back and forth between the two. I wrote more about Pastebot here.
Twitter is the free and “official” twitter app for your iPhone and iPad. It also happens to be iOS’s best-of-breed Twitter app.
Reeder is a top-notch app for reading your RSS feeds. It syncs with your Google Reader account and has a clever and delightful GUI.
NetNewsWire is also a top-notch app for reading your RSS feeds. It also syncs with your Google Reader account. I absolutely adore NNW for my Mac, and the iPad version is fantastic as well.
ESV Study Bible + is my favorite Bible app for my iPhone and iPad. The free version is great as well, but this version comes with more content for studying, audio of the Bible, and a significantly better UX for taking notes within the app itself.
Instapaper is the best way to read the Internet. If you’re not already using Instapaper then you can sign up for free online, then buy the pro app (though there is a free version) and all the articles you elect to read later will show up in your Instapaper app.
Canned is an iPhone app that lets you pre-write the text messages you send often, and even pre-assign them to the individuals or groups of people whom you often send that text message to.
And if you didn’t actually get an iPad for Christmas but you got some cash and now you’re in the market, you may want to check out my iPad Buyer’s Guide.
A Blanc family tradition.
Many thanks to Seedling for sponsoring the RSS Feed this week. Seedling is a brand new site full of recommended websites worth reading. It’s user contributed, yet each listed site is hand chosen by a small team of curators. I was excited to see that some of my favorite sites are already listed, and I’ve discovered some sites that I’d never heard of before.
Explore Seedling to discover some new fireside reading for your holiday break. And while you’re at it, submit all of your favorite sites for the rest of us to discover.
Jürgen Schweizer’s first post in what he says will be a series of articles regarding Culture Code’s yet-to-be-released cloud sync solution for Things:
Driven by ambitions that were almost too high, it has taken us much longer than we expected. On a path lined with unanticipated obstacles and letdowns, it felt at times as if we would never get there – but we kept believing that we would be able to create a fine solution; a foundation for many cool things to come.
In his blog post, Jürgen doesn’t announce cloud sync but states that it is now just a few months away. The post seems to come as a response to all the chatter from frustrated users, letting them know that cloud syncing in Things has been a long time in the making because building a cloud sync solution is hard.
Cultured Code has been promising a cloud sync solution for quite a while. But lately they have been getting some bad press from frustrated users. And the frustration is understandable. Things is a well-built app, and its large user base has paid a lot of money for the software and has become familiar with it.
But those same folks who use Things also use apps that have learned to sync data over the cloud. Therefore many of those who use Things are at a crossroads: (a) keep using the software despite its pain points; or (b) find something new that answers those pain points.
Choice A is tough because for some people the pain point of over-the-air sync is getting increasingly more painful. But B is tough too, because it means buying and learning new software.
For me? Well, a few months ago I opted for the latter and switched to OmniFocus.
Marco Arment regarding the lack of polish in certain areas of Android OS:
Attention to detail, like most facets of truly good design, can’t be (and never is) added later. It’s an entire development philosophy, methodology, and culture.
In the 4-hour drive back to Denver from Vail yesterday my cousin and I were talking about this. Not related to Android OS specifically, but to design and development work in general.
My cousin is a programmer for an IT consulting company. He does web development for clients that hire his company. He calls consulting work The Art of the 85 Percent. Meaning, many companies which hire a 3rd-party to build their website or web app only care about getting it 85% completed. They want it good enough to ship in the least amount of time possible for the least amount of money possible.
Which means, most web apps and sites ship at only 85% finished and never see improvements again.
Once an app or a site is 85% completed then it’s usually good enough to be launched. Even though it still has bugs, typos, misalignments, and inconsistencies, it’s good enough.
For a lot of people and companies good enough is good enough.
Taking a project from being good enough to being polished will take more than twice the time, twice the energy, and twice the money. And that second half is the harder half because, compared to the first stage, progress seems slower and less noticeable yet the time and energy spent is the same.
Many companies see that as a waste. Why spend more time and energy to fine-tune a product that’s already good enough? If attention to detail is not a part of your company’s culture, then good enough will always be good enough.
John Gruber on poorly designed web page titles:
An awful lot of websites use patterns for page titles that are ugly, hard-to-scan, and/or just plain stupid.
Would the 11-inch MacBook Air hold up as a primary computer for a full-time designer? Cameron Moll gave it a shot for 24 hours.
What a well-written, intelligent article by Bruce Schneier. He touches on the past and future state of IT security, internet companies’ business models, consumers versus customers, and more. It is a great overview on how things have changed over the past ten years and where they’re going in the next decade:
IT security in 2020 will be less about protecting you from traditional bad guys, and more about protecting corporate business models from you.
Bruce’s essay raises a lot of questions for me. If many of the future’s security issues will be centered around protecting consumer’s time and attention just as much as they are about protecting people’s data, then how will it effect those of us with online products? (Big and small?) What are some steps we can take in the right direction now so as to have a scalable and viable business model in the days to come when our reader’s attention is at an even greater premium than it already is?
Seedling is a curated gallery of online content, meant to help you find new sites that you should be reading.
Wondering what sites others are reading? Know about a little-known blog (perhaps your own) that you’d like to share with the world? Want to find a new site to read, and a new author to connect with? You’ll love Seedling.
Another quality piece by Ian Broome. This one’s fun:
There are many writing stereotypes and the majority are what people turn to when they want to feel like a writer. Because being a writer is cool, you know? People are impressed by writers. Everyone wants to be one. […] So yeah, this list is for writers-who-are-probably-not-writers-really. But I know that doesn’t apply to you, right? You’re a real writer. You write all the time.
Some great advice from Ian Broome on being a top-notch copywriter. But I’d say Ian’s advice is relevant for all writers, not just copywriters:
The key for every copywriter, whatever the subject matter, is to find the clearest, most appropriate way to speak to their audience. That means neither hamming up nor dumbing down, but simply finding the best way possible to transfer a message.
A short video profile of Nicholas Felton on Slate V. It’s hard to believe he only spends 10 minutes or less each day logging data for those Annual Reports. (Via Dave Pell.)
Many, many thanks to Agile Web Solutions for sponsoring the RSS feed this week to promote their app, 1Password. I use 1Password just about every day I use my computer.
I would imagine that most here are familiar with it as being a password manager. It will save your login credentials for various websites and then log you in automatically next time. It will also generate strong passwords for you on the fly. Yet it is also a vault for all sorts of important info, such as bank accounts, license plate numbers, social security numbers, etc.
When on my Mac I mostly use 1Password to log me in or save new passwords and logins for the websites I visit. But on my iPhone and iPad it makes a fantastic tool for keeping any and all top-secret info available yet secure on my mobile device. It runs on the Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Windows and syncs over the air via Dropbox.