“What Kind of Designer Hires Out the Creation of His Own Brand?”

The fabulous rebranding of Squared Eye.

(Via Phil)

The New Yorker Interviews Dave Cullen

Dave is the author of Columbine, which is due out next week. His interview with Lila Byock from The New Yorker is excellent, but is especially worthwhile if you are, or ever have been, a Colorado resident.

Convertbot

Tabpots’ second iPhone app. Holy gorgeous.

“Goodbye, Colorado”

“After 149 years and 311 days, the Rocky Mountain News published its final edition on February 27, 2009.”

The Rocky was a fantastic newspaper. It covered stories better than The Post did, had a personality not many big-city newspapers have, and the comics section was top shelf.

Be sure to check out the “Goodbye, Colorado” permalink which has the text and a picture of the front page of the Rocky’s final issue. I love that the design is directly from the very first issue and the article’s byline is simply, “The Rocky”.

Mobaganda

It’s a lot like Evite, except that it is more simple, easy, clean, fun, and awesome and is less obnoxious and sucky.

See also, “How is this any better than Evite?” on their Help page.

“The Best Choice for All Your Front End Developer Needs”

Sweet mutherfuton mercy.

Mandy Brown on Writing, Reading and Advertising on the Web

Wasn’t there a promise that we could generate money and meaning, not merely the former?

My guess is that most of the writers whom I habitually read would chose to generate meaning over money if forced to chose. I certainly would.

William Faulkner once said:

Really the writer doesn’t want success. […] He knows he has a short span of life, and that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall — Kilroy was here — that somebody a hunderd, or a thousand years later will see.

Mandy is right that advertisers will continue to invent new tricks to make money and distract the reader. Fortunately, there are also people who will continue to write with mustard and keep the reading experience on the web in tact.

(Via DF)

A Year Ago Today: My Review of the Then New MacBook Pro

Hard to believe I’ve owned this machine for over a year already. It still runs great, and is now the last of a dying breed…

Generating HTML footnotes with AppleScript and MarsEdit

A lazy Saturday afternoon seems like a great time to clean out some old Safari bookmarks. In the process I re-stumbled across this trick by Shimone Samuel that uses AppleScript, pre-formatted Markup and placeholders to create footnotes in MarsEdit. (It sounds more complicated that it is.)

I have always used my own pre-formatted markup in MarsEdit to create footnotes but let’s face it, footnotes can be a pain to format and insert. Shimone’s AppleScript addition makes the whole process a bit easier.

If you publish via MarsEdit and use footnotes in your writing, you may want to give this a try.

Safari 4 UI breakdown

Sebastiaan hits the nail on the head that this is not just a faster browser with some noticeable interface changes. Yes, the major features are obvious, but there are many subtle touches surrounding those features which make it a whole new ‘experience’.

I am the most sad about the loss of the address bar’s blue progress indicator. That was one of the first UI features I noticed about OS X on my friends iBook over 5 years ago, and is the missing feature that throws me off the most in Safari 4.

And what’s my favorite new feature? CMD+OPT+F (UPDATE: Apparently this feature is old school. Something that would have been nice to know earlier. Next thing you know, I’ll find out that this same feature works in Mail too… Doh!)

Two Years On Mars

Congratulations Daniel, for turning MarsEdit into such a fantastic app.

From the Archives Regarding Media Temple –

What defines the worth and integrity of a hosting provider is not the bad experiences, but rather how the company treats their customer and responds to the situation during those times.

Seems relevant considering the negative chatter Media Temple has been getting lately.