Ron’s Submission to the Insanely Great Tees & The Bureau of Communication Present These Very Official Keynote Predictions Contest.

Thanks to Johno, the nerd at iLT, I was pointed to The Linotype 2008 Calendar. (Pretty cool, but it’s still not the Helvetica calendar.)

10 Ways to get the most out of Quick Look –

My favorite may be #5 on Dave’s list: Examining files in the trash. Halelujia, Amen!

Jeffrey Zeldman, Self-Publishing is the New Blogging –

You don’t need distribution, you’ve got PayPal. You don’t need stores: there’s only two left, and nobody buys books there, anyway. You don’t need traditional marketing. Didn’t we already prove that?

Crikey. I just started rolling around the idea for my first book.

A great article today from Austin and Luis at MacTHEME: “The World of Candybar“.

It’s a combination review of CandyBar and interview with Cabel Sasser from Panic and Gadeon Maheux from Icon Factory:

MacThemes: Additionally, what’s your favorite new bit of “eye candy” ?

Ged: Simply switching from one collection to another. The Core Animation cross-fade never gets old. I find myself just mousing around inside the program to see one icon fade into the other. It’s like watching a cheap version of those CGI “morphs”. Doing an “Arrange by…” and watching how the collection animates is neat too. For something fun, try arranging your entire icon library in different ways and sit back and watch the show.

[…]

MacThemes: I’ve long believed Panic applications prove the theory that Mac applications are better-designed (from a UI perspective) than Windows apps; what drives you to develop for the Mac only?

Cabel: It’s not even something we question or think about — it was just a no brainer. The innovation, the elegance, the lack of focus testing, the general feeling that people care about the end product, it makes us want to keep doing what we do. It’s a feedback loop of inspiration.

It’s almost impossible to feel passion about Windows as a platform. Probably like many of your readers, when I use software or applications, my brain can’t help but subconsciously notice an infinite stream of little things that are weird or out of place or questionably designed that I want to fix. When I try to use Windows, this internal alarm is literally constantly firing. Every window, every dialog, every workflow, my brain trips up on 1 or 5 or 15 things that are hard to comprehend. I can barely even use Vista without wanting to wrap it up, glaze it with a delicious marinade, cook it in an oven, garnish it with a sprig of mint, and toss it out the god-forsaken window.

(And as a general warning, once you tune your brain to the UI channel, you become hopeless. I had to stop the clerk at Border’s the other day to let me take a closer look at their internal book lookup application — it had some of the best/worst icons I’ve ever seen, like an “Add New” button that was a small crane lifting a shipping container and an even-worse rendition of the always-terrible “Filter” icon that involved a tiny coffee maker.)

Plus, I seem to be a fan of long interviews and reviews lately.

Jonathan’s site, Monday By Noon is a great idea. I always thought posting once a week on Mondays would be a runaway concept.

Jonathan writes on web design once a week and publishes his article every Monday before noon so you can have something to read during your lunch break. Jonathan introduced himself to me a few weeks ago, and I’ve been rummaging through his archives ever since.

My guess is that many of you would like what Jonathan is writing so I wanted to point out his site. And to save you some time he conveniently posted some 2007 highlights.

Putting nerdy stuff on my Christmas list has always been a bit embarrassing.

I’m the only computer nerd in the family, and I could just imagine the look on my mom’s face if I were to ask for more RAM for my Mac Pro. But JM has put together a very well-thought-out Geek Gift Guide. If you’ve got a nerd in the family that isn’t asking for anything nerdy you could do them a huge favor and get them something from here.

Today, my Grandfather turns 99.

He’s Italian, goes out to breakfast every morning at the local cafe, paints every afternoon, loves Harry Potter and still tells the best jokes.

I just called him on his cell phone to find out he rented a tuxedo for the day. Happy Birthday, Grandpa.

In September I wrote an article, “Content Please“. I think it’s relevant to the current discussion going around about the emotionless links and “re-blogs” of tumble blogs.

I think people are afraid to show emotion or passion through their site in fear of not sounding intelligent or sophisticated. But what draws people into what you have to say is the passion.

The Little Red Writing Book – “20 Powerful Principles of Structure, Style and Readability”

I picked this book up on a whim at Barnes & Noble last Christmas when searching for a Secret Santa gift.

It’s got short chapters. It’s very clear, informative and fun to read and has a fantastic layout and type-setting. And that’s all on top of the excellent writing and style resources.

I’ve had several conversations with other bloggers lately regarding writing and style. So I pulled my copy off the shelf yesterday and started reading it again. If you want to write better, I highly recommend this book.

An ice storm that’s hitting the midwest is leaving hundreds of thousands without power.

In Oklahoma 500,000 are without power, and the power company expects it to be a week to 10 days before everyone gets their lights back on.

The power went out at my neighborhood in Kansas City this morning at 5:00 AM. When the rain freezes onto the power lines the weight of the ice causes the lines to break and we watched about a dozen transformers blow all across the neighborhood. It looked like bombs going off.

“Macs Sell Themselves”

Greg Reinacker, founder of NewsGator, recently got himself his first Mac, and he explains why.

If you’re a Mac user, the 2nd half of his article will surely put a smile on your face. Here’s one of my favorite lines:

Suddenly I started seeing Macs everywhere – conferences, coffee shops, you name it. I’d ask people about them – and every person I can remember said they loved it. I’d turn on my Vaio, and wait a couple of minutes for Vista to boot, and all the while admire their fancy Macbook Pro awaking nearly instantly from sleep (because I’ve rarely seen anyone actually turn off their Mac).

Anxiety – Lightweight To-do Management

Leopard only, and wow. It is lightweight in deed.

For what it’s built to do it looks like it does it perfectly. Add a to-do item in Anxiety and it puts it in your Mail and iCal to-dos as well. Perhaps not the ideal application for the heavy GTDer but probably a god-send for the average, “I need help keeping track of my things to do”er.

And it’s free. Hello.

After not posting for the past several months, Jon-Michael is back and shares his new vision for writing with this article here.

There are too many good lines to quote. You ought to just read the article yourself and hopefully glean something from JM’s own resolve. It’s guys like this that make the web a better place. And you might as well add his feed to your list. You’ll be glad you did.