This beautiful sans is Adobe’s first open source typeface. It’s influenced on some classy faces you’ve probably heard of before: News Gothic and Franklin Gothic.
You can grab the typeface and its source files here. And it’s available on Google Web Fonts, WebInk, and Typekit.
This is great news. In 5 years I can’t remember a single time I’ve used the YouTube app other when I get redirected to it from a link somewhere else. Apple dropping it from iOS 6 means there’ll be one less system app in my folder of apps that I can’t delete.
Update: Several clever folks have pointed out what I never realized: by disabling the YouTube app in Settings → General → Restrictions, the app icon will be removed and any links to YouTube you come across in Safari or Twitter or email will send you to the YouTube site in Safari.
My thanks to Igloo Software for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. They’re giving away a Das Keyboard this month, which is awesome. It’s the keyboard I use every day. In fact, I’m using it right now to type this very sentence.
Are you suffering from control issues? Version mismanagement? Rage against PowerPoint templates?
Igloo can help.
When you collaborate inside a digital workplace, all kinds of great things happen. All of your content is stored in one place – conversations about documents are with them. Versions are in one spot – kind of like Time Machine for your shared corporate documents. And built-in audit trails let you know if someone even looks sideways at your brand guidelines.
And because activity streams let you see what everyone is working on, you can spot those rogue PowerPoint templates and fix them before they hit the client.
Control issues can be solved for just $99 per month for up to 25 users. It’s even better when you scale to the enterprise.
So what are you waiting for? Sign up for a free 30-day trial (or just enter the contest).
Well this is frustrating:
If one edits a document, then chooses Save As, then BOTH the edited original document and the copy are saved, thus not only saving a new copy, but silently saving the original with the same changes, thus overwriting the original.
Assuming this is Mountain Lion’s intentional behavior rather than a bug, then how bonkers is this?
So far as I can tell the only real difference between Save As and Duplicate is that the former gives you a dialog box to choose a new name as well as a new location. Whereas choosing to Duplicate a file means only renaming it, and once you do it’s automatically saved in the same location as the original.
Seth Godin regarding the income conundrum facing Twitter (and other free services where the user is the product and the advertiser is the customer):
Free is a great idea, until free leads to a conflict between those contributing attention and those contributing cash.
Seth proposes a paid subscription that gets you an ad-free experience along with some pro-level features (like, hey why not, 160 characters). I am sure Twitter has put this option on the table, but who knows if they would ever roll it out. I think I would be willing to pay a few bucks per month to keep using my favorite 3rd-party client and to not see ads in my timeline (as I’m sure many of you reading this would be willing to do as well). But I’m afraid the more-likely scenario is that Twitter will do what it wants and we’ll have no option but to deal with it or leave.
Wired Science has a rundown of all the different places (both online and physical) that you can watch the landing of the Curiosity rover and what the timeline for the landing and the broadcasts are.
If you’re planning to stay up and watch it live from the comfort of your living room, the Curiosity Cam live feed from NASA JPL looks to be the best spot.
From the Fortune archives, this piece was originally published in July 1955:
There are in the U.S. approximately 30,000 executives, with incomes of $50,000 or more. These men sit on the top-most rungs of the business ladder either as managers or as owners of their own businesses. Obviously there is no “average” executive among them (they are all singular men). But their lives do have certain common characteristics, and there is visible a kind of composite way of executive life.
The successful American executive, for example, gets up early—about 7:00 A.M.—eats a large breakfast, and rushes to his office by train or auto. It is not unusual for him, after spending from 9:00 A.M. until 6:00 P.M. in his office, to hurry home, eat dinner, and crawl into bed with a briefcase full of homework. He is constantly pressed for time, and a great deal of the time he spends in his office is extraneous to his business. He gets himself involved in all kinds of community work, either because he wants to or because he figures he has to for the sake of public relations.
This is an excellent review of the Nexus 7 by Fraser Speirs. What especially stood out to me in Speirs’ article is how much he compared the Nexus 7 against the iPhone rather than the iPad:
After living with the Nexus 7 for about 10 days now, I’m not even thinking about it in the same bracket as the iPad. I’m thinking about it in the same bracket as my iPhone.
But ultimately, Speirs concludes that he sees no advantage to a device that sits in-between an iPhone and an iPad:
I just find the Nexus 7 a weird mix. […] Not as portable as a smartphone yet nowhere near as powerful as an iPad.
Many reviewers have said that the Nexus 7 made them want Apple to build a 7″ iPad. I disagree. The Nexus 7 has made me want a slightly bigger iPhone. I can get all of the software functionality I get from the Nexus 7 – and more – on my iPhone. If we are going to trade off functionality for portability, let’s go all the way and make the thing really portable.
So, though it’s getting far out on a limb to take a device built by a competitor and use it as a comparison against a hypothetical, rumored, still-as-of-yet-non-existent device, but… If Apple does make an iPad mini, perhaps “a big iPod touch” (what people dubbed the original iPad) will turn out to be a pretty fair description of it.
A helpful list.
It sounds like the funding they took on was a very considered move and that they have what’s best in mind for building a stable and sustainable company.
I’ve been using Backblaze (in combination with Arq) for over a year. I never notice when Backblaze is running, their plans are very reasonably priced, and it’s great to know that all my data is routinely backed to an off site data center.
Check out photo number 3. The parachute they built for the rover landing. It weighs 100 pounds but can handle up to 65,000 pounds of force. They’re testing it inside the world’s largest wind tunnel. The chute doesn’t look all that impressive until you see the how little the guy is standing underneath it.
From the top of the atmosphere to the surface of Mars is 7-minute journey. Yet it takes 14 minutes for the signal from Mars to reach Earth. So by the time NASA gets word that Curiosity has reached Mars atmosphere, the rover will have been waiting (or destroyed) for 7 minutes already. Which means the whole process of landing on Mars is completely automated (as if it weren’t complex enough!).
On episode 72 of The B&B Podcast Ben and I talked about the new Digg, Cultured Code’s impending release of their Cloud Sync service, the balance of shipping half-finished products early versus taking longer to ship products that are finished, why not being on Facebook may mean you’re a suspicious citizen, and how real-life priorities intersect with your to-do list.
When my Great Uncle Howard passed away, they found a shoebox in his closet that was full of journals. They were those thick, index-card-sized, 5-year diaries that allot just a few lines of space per day. He had 8 of them, and they were all filled with what the weather had been that day. 40 years worth of Uncle Howard’s daily local weather report.
I’m not as regimented or peculiar as my Great Uncle Howard was, but I have been keeping a personal journal for the past 20 years.
My journals have always been logged with pen and paper. I very much enjoy the time when I leave my standard-issue Apple nerd gadgets in the other room and sit down with the analog to write about what’s currently on my mind.
In a way, perhaps I am more regimented than my Great Uncle Howard was. Through Twitter, Instagram, Path, Stamped, email, and other such apps, my days are meticulously logged with over-filtered pictures of the sandwich I ordered for lunch and tweets about the friends I’m out to coffee with. But how many of my tweets or Instagram photos are worth revisiting 40 years from now? Some of them, but surely not all of them.
And this is where I see the difference between the deeply personal issues that I write about in my Moleskine and the memories that I log on my iPhone and iPad. The former have great value to me now as it’s a way to help me process the current season in life, and the latter have great value to me in the future as they are a way to look back on memories and significant events.
For a few months I tried to use Path as a way to capture the little memories. Path is a beautiful and fun app that makes it easy to check in at places, snap photos, shoot videos, and write notes. But as a “journal” Path has a few shortcomings. For one, what gets logged in Path stays in Path (Is this an app that will be around in 20 years? I doubt it. How then will I get my data?). Secondly, the app is iPhone-only. And lastly, Path is a social network and not a personal journal — something that in and of itself causes hesitation when considering posting a personal memory.
Then there is Day One: a Mac and iOS journaling app. Day One shipped in March 2011 as a Mac and iPhone dynamic duo, and a few months later the iPad version was added to the line up.
I bought the iPhone and Mac apps when Day One first shipped. In part because I’m a sucker for a good looking app. And, to be sure, Day One is extremely well-designed. The color scheme, typography, and the overall design are all clean. No detail is left wanting, no pixel out of place.
Additionally, Day One supports Markdown, it works with TextExpander on iOS, it syncs via Dropbox or iCloud, it has a passcode lock, and it will export all your entries as plain text.
For a classy journalling app that works on all your devices, I don’t think you can do better than Day One.
But despite its ubiquity and style, Day One never stuck for me because it only allowed text entries.
A text-only digital journal is too much like a replacement to my Moleskine. And I don’t want to replace my analog journal, I want a compliment to it. And if it’s going to be digital, I want all the benefits that digital provides. And so the text-only limitation was something that kept me from using Day One on a regular basis.
That is, until about two months ago when I was fortunate enough to get early access to the current version of Day One.
Day One now supports adding images to entries. Also your current location and the current weather (Uncle Howard would be proud) are automatically added to your entry’s metadata. These seemingly small changes make Day One an order of magnitude more appealing to me.
Over the past few months I have been using Day One regularly and enjoying it. Many of my entries have been nothing more than a photo and perhaps a quick descriptive sentence. That, combined with the automatic location and weather logging, and I’m creating worthwhile journal entries with very little effort on my part.
Day One has nearly all the advantages that Path had for me, but with none of the disadvantages. I can use my Mac, iPhone, or iPad to log pictures, notes, and locations. I can know what the weather was like that day, I can know where I was when I wrote that entry, I can export my entire journal as a Plain Text file that will be readable 20 years from now, and I don’t have any friend requests to wade through.1
As a long-time Mac nerd, something I appreciate about Day One is that it’s both simple and geeky. It’s easy and fun to use, it sports a clean design, and yet it has a lot of under-the-hood horsepower that you can use to do a lot of nerdy stuff with.
For example:
In a day and age where an app like this could have easily justified a heavy-handed skeuomorphic design, Day One keeps it clean. Normally I would say here that Day One is very Mac-like, but Mac design has been getting more and more skeuomorphic these days. (Sigh.)
Though Day One has been updated across the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, it’s the iOS version that I think shines the brightest. In part because of the iOS app’s ability to include location and weather data to your entries (more on that in a bit). And also because I find the iPhone version to be the best version of the 3-device suite. (Similar to how I find OmniFocus on iPad to be the best version of its 3-device suite.)
When you open up the new Day One on your iPhone, its main menu screen (or the sidebar on the iPad) which used to feature just a “+” icon, now features a camera icon as well.
This encourages you to consider that creating a new journal entry using a photo is just as legitimate as a text entry. And, as I mentioned above, it is this feature that turned Day One around for me and I’ve been using it ever since.
But it’s not just that you can slap a photo into a journal entry. Day One is very smart when it comes to adding photos. Say you snapped a picture yesterday when you were out to lunch with some friends. If you use that picture to create a new journal entry then Day One will ask you if you want to use the date and geolocation data from the photo (even the past weather for that time and place is added to the entry). Thanks to this cleverness, it’s as if you created the journal entry when you were out to lunch rather than the next day.
Moreover, If you have Camera+ installed on your iPhone, then Day One takes advantage of its API so you can edit your photo and add cool effects and stuff.
If being able to add photos is Day One’s killer new feature, the icing on the cake is the automatic adding of location and weather data to your journal entries. For example, in a previous version of Day One, if I wanted to make a note about how Macworld throws a classy WWDC get together, it would have been text only, and I probably would have just skipped it.
But now, that same entry can include a snapshot of the party, a quick caption, a map showing where the party was, and the info about what the weather was like.
All this is added with little or no effort, and it makes the entry far more valuable. (Note that when creating a new journal entry on the Mac version, automatic location and weather data are not yet supported.)
Previous versions of Day One offered broad-stroke typography options — you could chose between Serif, Sans, or Monospaced. The new version gives a more granular choice of typefaces (though it still doesn’t open up the whole font library that you have on your Mac).
And on the Mac Day One now includes Avenir, a typeface that ships with Mountain Lion and will ship with iOS 6.
Speaking of typography, Day One has long supported Markdown. In the latest update to the iOS app there is now a Markdown formatting bar that rests at the bottom of the text entry box.
Adding a custom row to the on-screen keyboard isn’t new, and many fine apps have their own take on it. Compare and contrast to the custom keyboards of Byword, iA Writer, Scratch, and Writing Kit.
But the Markdown formatting bar in Day One isn’t just for quick access to common Markdown syntax. Swipe the bar left or right (a feature which several of the aforementioned apps also support) and you’ll get options for adjusting the metadata of your entry: You can change the date and time, add a photo, share the entry via Email or Twitter, delete the entry, open a new entry altogether, launch into “full screen writing mode,” and more.
Basically everything you need for that journal entry is a swipe and a tap away.
If you want to be regimented about your Day One entries (as opposed to writing whenever the mood strikes you), Day One can remind you to punch in.
These reminders can be as often as every 15 minutes or as infrequently as once per week. If, like my pal Chris Bowler, you use Day One as your daily work log or the place for your end-of-day brain dump then setting a daily reminder just a few minutes before the work day is done could prove helpful.
And hey, if you’re not ready (or if you’re still not in the mood to type something), then you can snooze the entry or just skip it altogether.
The iPhone and the Mac versions both have a nice Full-screen mode. (For whatever reason, the iPad does not.)
The iPhone version removes the system status bar, the top navigation bar, and the Markdown formatting buttons. Presenting you with as much screen real estate for your words as possible.
The Mac version doesn’t need to take up the entire screen (especially if you’ve got a large external monitor), so its custom full-screen view sports a dark textured background with subdued controls on the left-side and a focus on the writing space.
* * *
As a writer, I believe journaling on a regular basis is critical. It’s writing that will never be judged. It’s writing that doesn’t require an editor. It’s the only place where I am completely free to write for my truly ideal reader: a future me. I have my own inside jokes, my own running story arc, my own shorthand. I love the freedom to write whatever I want, however I want, with no need to make it tidy or clear or concise. And I have no doubt that it makes me a better professional writer.
As a new dad, my latest hobby is the incessant documentation of every cute thing Noah does.
Over the years, most of the major, monumental milestones of life were documented in my Moleskine. But not all. And that’s why I’m glad to have an app that let’s me easily and joyfully add a snapshot or a quick note about an important or memorable event. These are the things my family and I will look back on 20 and 30 years from now with great fondness.
You can get Day One for $10 on the Mac App Store and $5 on the iTunes App Store.
