Speaking of Chris Bowler, he’s in the middle of a membership drive on his site. I’ve been friends with Chris for so many years, and reading his site(s) for even longer. He’s an excellent and thoughtful writer.
Membership to his site is just $2/month and it gets you on the list for his Saturday email newsletter. Sign up before next Wednesday and you’re in the drawing to win something awesome, the least of which is a copy of Delight is in the Details.
Chris Bowler has written an excellent overview of some of the more popular task-management apps, such as Things, OmniFocus, Asana, and TeuxDeux. He wraps it up with why he’s back to using OmniFocus after leaving a while ago to try all the other options:
Here I am today, back to OmniFocus as my tool of choice. It’s ease of use on the desktop are top notch. And if it’s overkill for my needs, it’s designed well enough that the features I don’t need do not get in the way. And the improvements in the desktop version make it an even better choice.
OmniFocus certainly has the reputation as being the 900-pound gorilla among the Checkmark Icon Posse. It’s a well deserved reputation — OmniFocus is, by design, a cornucopia of features, functions, options, and more. But Chris is right about OmniFocus, in that it’s designed in such a way that it’s not overbearing or demanding if you don’t want to dive deep into all the features it has available.
But if you’re on the fence, this is a good year to be in the market for to-do list software. Not only is OmniFocus making some major updates, but the other two big players in this space — Things and Wunderlist — have also announced that they are working on the next big update to their software as well. I’ve been loving the beta of OmniFocus 2 for Mac, but I’ll also admit that I’m holding my breath for what Cultured Code has in store.
Here on shawnblanc.net, I use SSL encryption on a few pages related to the membership sign-up and checkout process. Unfortunately, the OpenSSL libraries in use by this site were affected by the Heartbleed bug. If anyone targeted my server to exploit the vulnerability, it would only have affected members.
This is to let you know that my site’s vulnerability to the Heartbleed Bug has been patched.
My hosting provider (Media Temple) proactively updated my server’s OpenSSL libraries on Tuesday night, April 8th. Once I confirmed my site was no longer vulnerable, I had my SSL certificate re-generated.
Additionally, as a precaution for all members, I’ve logged everyone out from the site and changed the salt hashes that WordPress uses. All members will have to log back in to access the Membership section.
When you do log back in, please change your password. This can be done from the “Your Profile” page.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ping me on Twitter or email me.
Thanks,
— Shawn
Mike Isaac at Recode:
Apple said Thursday that its mobile, desktop and Web services weren’t affected by a major flaw in a widely used set of Web security software that could have affected hundreds of thousands of websites.
Good news.
Mashable has put together a list of several of the more popular sites that were affected by the Heartbleed bug, and highlighting which ones have been updated and thus you ought to change your password to. If you’ve got accounts with any of these services — Dropbox, Facebook, Gmail, to name a few — you should change your password straight away.
Alice Lee shares a behind-the-scenes look at the wonderful branding and hand-drawn artwork of Dropbox’s new Carousel app. And speaking of, Carousel’s in-app onboarding experience is one of the best I’ve ever seen.
Charlie Burt has a great interview with Gregory Kolsto, the owner of Oddly Correct, one of KC’s best local roasters and fussy coffee shops:
My mission in life, I think, is to make people feel something. I’m more interested in staff being kind and engaging with people coming through the door than being psyched about coffee. I mean, it has to be both, but because coffee has a tendency to be pretentious on the surface — like you almost expect it to be “hipsters” doing some weird thing with coffee — well, if you can engage people with kindness and information and art beyond that, I think its a beautiful thing. It’s totally disarming to both the weird art world and the weird coffee world. I feel like we have a fun opportunity to engage people where they’re at.
Kevin Kelly:
Here is what I learned from 40 years of traveling: […] it is far better to have more time than money.
Andrew Kim wrote an excellent review of Braun’s beautiful, 51-year-old “Phonosuper”:
This is it, the SK55 is my all time favorite product and there’s nothing in the world more important for me to share on this website than this. The Braun SK55, or the SK4 to be more specific, is in my opinion, the most important product in Braun’s history and therefore the most important product to the design of electronics today.
Now, take my comparison here with a grain of salt because I’m not actually on Facebook, but the new Twitter profile page design sure looks a bit Facebook-y to me. But who says that’s a bad thing?
For example, the new design has been rolled out on the U.S. Department of the Interiror’s Twitter page, and it looks absolutely fantastic.
The profile page design sure has changed from what it was 5 years ago.
See also: “Most People”
Justin Williams, a skilled and long-time iOS developer, and now the man behind Glassboard, went to Build last week:
Build allowed me three days to immerse myself in technologies that I know almost nothing about. I came away impressed with it too. For all its past faults, the New Microsoft is doing things that are on the cutting edge of technology.
Justin’s overview of Build is pretty encouraging. For me, being someone who is almost exclusively immersed in iOS and OS X stuff, I love to hear about what’s awesome on other platforms and technologies.
Moreover, it’s encouraging because cloud sync has become so vital for our multi-device lifestyles. And from what little I’ve heard from guys like Justin and Brent Simmons, Windows Azure is a pretty good cloud syncing platform to build on for those who need something more robust than iCloud but who can’t or don’t want to roll their own server.
Seth Godin:
Search is what we call the action of knowing what you want and questing until you ultimately find it. […] Discovery, on the other hand, is what happens when the universe (or an organization, or a friend) helps you encounter something you didn’t even know you were looking for.
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My thanks to Scanbot for sponsoring the RSS feed this week.